Let’s start with a phrase I hate and promise never to appear in this column again: “transcending genre,” which is so often applied to crime novels. The implication is that crime fiction, as a category, is begging for reinvention and reinterpretation, for quality prose where it didn’t exist before, for some author to come along and save it from its worst instincts.
Nonsense. The genre does not need to be saved. Clever, sharp and endlessly inventive, it is salvation for readers in need of entertainment and escape.
Reading a lot, always my goal, has introduced me to a great set of mysteries this year. These are the ones that stood out.
When I reviewed Eli Cranor’s DON’T KNOW TOO back in March I called it “one of the best debuts of 2022”, and my opinion hasn’t changed. The raw ferocity of Cranor’s prose dovetails perfectly with the novel’s investigation of a high school football team, their anguished coach, and the city’s constant desire to win at all costs. “Don’t Know Tough” is unmistakably noir in the rural Southern tradition: stark and gritty, a cauldron of terrible choices and even more terrible outcomes. I can’t imagine how Cranor will top it.
A number of robbery and con-man novels published this year grappled with greater socioeconomic and racial injustice. The best and most entertaining of these was Grace D. Li’s debut, PORTRAIT OF A THIEF, juxtaposing thrilling international antiquities heists with a layered examination of what it is like to be displaced, overlooked and underrated.
Best Standalones
REALLY SIMPLE, by Marie Rutkoski, is a thoughtful, character-driven mystery centered around a strip club and the women who dance there. It never falls into stereotype. “It makes her impatient, the way people think a stripper must be some crazy whore, like no good woman ever took her clothes off for practical reasons,” one dancer thinks. With multiple perspective changes between detectives, dancers, family members and clubbers, it’s a challenging story, but one that masterfully flips standard crime figures.
Absence and loss permeate Tyrell Johnson’s THE LOST KINGS in a way that surprised and moved me several times over the course of the novel. The anguish Jeannie King feels at the abrupt disappearance of her father and twin brother affects every aspect of her life – and so the prospect of discovering the truth threatens to destroy her very being. I loved how the twists felt psychologically true, a reflection of the way buried trauma always resurfaces, wreaks havoc, and then punctures the wounds.
It’s been so long since Chuck Hogan wrote a standalone novel GANGLAND came out, I put aside everything I was doing and started reading, and I didn’t stop until I finished. This 1970s novel, which is now my favorite of Hogan’s, revolves around Chicago mobsters like Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana (whose murder remains unsolved). It is a masterful portrait of faithfully forged and broken.
Two novels into her career, Wanda M. Morris has established herself as one of the crime genre’s greatest risk takers. EVERYWHERE YOU RUN throws the reader into 1964 Mississippi, when the civil rights movement was in full swing. Marigold and Violet Richards are sisters who are initially stuck in their assigned roles of Good Girl and Bad Girl, but then each make a series of choices that test their mettle and put them in more danger than they ever thought possible.
Best in a series
I was extremely impressed with Robyn Gigl’s debut, ‘By Way of Sorrow’, which introduced lawyer Erin McCabe, but Gigl’s second performance, THE SURVIVOR’S DEBT, is even better. A groundbreaking series – Erin is trans, one of the few in crime fiction – is now about to become a definitive one. Gigl is especially gifted at writing razor-sharp, compulsively readable courtroom scenes, something that sinks many legal thriller authors.
Nothing delighted me more than the arrival of a new Vera Kelly mystery by Rosalie Knecht. Alas, there will be no more, but VERA KELLY LOST AND FOUND close the trilogy on the highest possible level. It opens in 1971, two years after Stonewall. When her friend Max disappears, Vera puts her private detective skills to work and uncovers all sorts of secrets and tragedies. I’m still haunted by one line: ‘We had gotten into the habit of mystery and now we didn’t know how to drop it.
I’ve been rhapsodic about Stephen Spotswood’s Pentecostal and Parker mysteries for a few years now; they push all my reading pleasure buttons. SECRETS TYPED IN BLOOD, the third book in this 1940s private detective series is even smarter, spicier and more surprising than the first two.
Best overall
I’ve read Danya Kukafka’s NOTES ON AN EXECUTION not long before it came out in January. Even then I knew it would be one of my favorites, but it’s my pick for best mystery of the year because, simply put, I think about it every day. By bringing to the fore the voices of the women revolving around a killer, Kukafka flips the script on serial killer thrillers – a script in dire need of permanent rethinking.
Another one: best in genre non-fiction
Crime fiction is blessed with Martin Edwards. He is a novelist; he edits anthologies; and he oversees the British Library’s range of republished crime classics. Few others could be persuaded to write a cradle-to-grave (so to speak) compendium of the genre that would pay homage to Julian Symons’ essential “Bloody Murder” (1972) and this would replace, but Edwards has indeed done so with THE LIFE OF CRIME. It should be part of any discerning mystery reader’s library.
