Hard boiled wonderland.

Read a few good literary crime novels lately. Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn and Karin Fossum’s Black Seconds. These are not particularly graphic but they are not particularly genteel either. Both function as real novels for any concerned about genre slumming. And just to get that out of the way, all fiction is genre fiction as far as I’m concerned -some of it just hasn’t been (mis)labeled yet.

I was once part of a discussion called You Write Like a Girl in which we talked about whether men and women mystery writers differed in how they wrote about crime. Though no clear consensus arose, it was clear that were a few women who were easily matching the darkest of the men with evil imaginings of their own (almost any of Mo Hayder’s novels are prime examples, and more recently, Portland’s Chelsea Cain’s Heartsick which features a rather nasty female serial killer).

But the aforementioned are the other sort and fine books they are. In this time of ever escalating grisliness in this genre, its refreshing to see someone like Peter Robinson manage to make an enthralling narrative with not more than a single murder. (I do think though that if you take on the task of creating another serial killer, you cannot help but enter the Hannibal competition. This whole conceit is rather interesting when you compare the fiction with real serial killers who as a lot tend toward the shallow end of the gene pool -see Elliott Leyton’s fine book Hunting Humans which distinguishes itself from the many exploitative competitors.)

But I do like rough and tough noir tales when it comes to crime fiction. Fossum is one of my top five mystery writers I would say but my first enchantments are more along the lines of the three James: Crumley, Ellroy and Lee Burke. And of course, the horrifyingly talented Raymond Chandler. He’s worth a reread every few years.

I started this as a quick note but it looks like I’ll have to sit down and organize something a little tighter and more comprehensive: great moments in noir or something like that. Till then