My Favourite Crime Novels, Declan Burke

Bearing in mind that these are my favourite crime novels, which isn’t necessarily the same as a list of the best crime novels, here we go …

Declan Burke is the author of EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, THE BIG O and CRIME ALWAYS PAYS. He is the editor of  DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21ST CENTURY, and hosts an online resource dedicated to Irish crime writing called Crime Always Pays. He lives in Wicklow, Ireland, with his wife Aileen and baby girl Lily. He is not allowed to own a cat.

The Big Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Mystery

Author: Raymond Chandler

Comment: The Long Goodbye is probably a better novel, but The Big Sleep was the first Chandler I ever read, and the first couple of paragraphs made me feel like I was coming home to a home I’d never known before. Chandler’s plots don’t always stand up to close scrutiny, but on a line-by-line basis, he’s brilliant at combining tension, threat, black humour and a palpable sense of atmosphere.
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Pronto

Author: Elmore Leonard

Comment: As with Chandler, I could have picked virtually any of Elmore Leonard’s novels; again, as with Chandler, he combines a low-key intensity with a bleak sense of the absurd, wicked one-liners and beautifully etched characters. I’m picking Pronto for its Italian setting; it’s always nice when a good book gives you the impression that you’ve been on holiday.
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When Eight Bells Toll

Author: Alistair MacLean

Comment: I’m not normally a fan of thrillers, but when I read this at a young age it seemed to me a low-fi James Bond novel, and all the more enjoyable for it. In fact, it’s Bond laced with Chandlerisms, set in a superbly drawn Scottish landscape of islands, crags, inlets and castles, and combines the page-turning quality of the high-concept thriller with a grittily realistic spy tale reminiscent of Le Carré.
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LA Confidential

Author: James Ellroy

Comment: When I first picked up LA Confidential and read the prologue, my head nearly exploded. Six months later I tried again, and discovered that James Ellroy packs more plot and linguistic pyrotechnics into a single chapter than most writers manage in an entire career. A fabulously seedy portrayal of post-Chandler LA, and Bud White remains one of my favourite characters of all time.
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The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula

Author: Barry Gifford

Comment: Southern-fried noir, in which Sailor and Lula take off on a road-trip pursued by the good, the bad, the ugly and the Fates. The chief joy of reading Barry Gifford is his dialogue, which is just as well, as dialogue tends to account for about 90% of his novels. Most good writers very reasonably cite George Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle for his innovative use of dialogue; I just prefer Barry Gifford’s Southern twang.
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Dead I Well May Be

Author: Adrian McKinty

Comment: An amphetamine-fuelled Cormac McCarthy, basically. As Dead I Well May Be was one of those books that caused me to despair when I read it first, being a muscular, hard-boiled noir that wasn’t afraid to broach some Big Themes. A rough, tough, cerebral hero with a head of teak and the soul of a poisoned poet, Michael Forsythe is one of the great characters of modern crime fiction.
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Killer inside ME

Author: Jim Thompson

Comment: I loved The Killer Inside Me so much I lifted a quote as an epigraph for my first novel. Lou Ford is a wonderful creation, a softly-spoken gentleman with ice in his veins and a sociopath’s instinct for the weakness of others. The perverse intimacy of the first-person narration is the cherry on top, and the overall impact is that of a car crash: you know you should look away, but the Lou Ford in you keeps you glued to the page.
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The Ice Harvest

Author: Scott Phillips

Comment: Told over the course of one long Christmas Eve, this slim but jagged sliver of neo-noir offers low-life criminals grifting for one last slice of the pie while the world around them goes to hell in a handcart. Fatalistic to the nth degree, it’s as poignant as it is bleak, harshly funny and gut-sucking in its tension. That Scott Phillips doesn’t sell as well as James Patterson is one of the great crimes of modern publishing.
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Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Author: John McFetridge

Comment: An Elmore Leonard gift for dialogue and multi-character narrative draw you in, but McFetridge’s glitter with a hard-edged danger that is all too rare these days. The compelling plot centres on Toronto’s grow-house industry, but it’s McFetridge’s ostensibly ordinary characters who leap off the page. Rarely has the banal seemed so evil.
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Divorcing Jack

Author: Colin Bateman

Comment: A comedy-caper thriller set during the dark days of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, Divorcing Jack was brave enough to mock paramilitaries of all stripes and none, and funny enough for the barbs to skewer all pretensions to politically-motivated dignity. Above all others, Divorcing Jack was the book that finally convinced me I was entitled to tell the stories I wanted to tell, so if you’re looking for someone to blame, Colin Bateman is your man.
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