Ian Rankin and Lee Child is what the missus reads she has loads of them so I can only assume they must be good.

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

It was described by James Ellroy as “the greatest suspense novel ever written”

Ellroy wrote the first of the Lloyd Hopkins books then read Red Dragon, he went on to write two more books as he said that Red Dragon was so far a head of anything else ever written in the genre that it made his book look like shit and he had to write two more in an attempt to do himself justice.

`Tis very good indeed.

Glad I posted this thread now, some really good recommendations thanks all. I’m going to give Killing Floor by Lee Child a go first as his books have come up more than most.

On a side note, just finished Sniper One by Sgt Dan Mills if anyone fancies a really good modern war non-fiction read http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0141029013/ref=asc_df_01410290136853249?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&tag=googlecouk06-21&linkCode=asn&creative=22206&creativeASIN=0141029013

We should start a book swap on here!?

Sherlock’s definitely worth it. I got the complete set on amazon for bugger all (I think they’re all free now though on download) which is great… but 1300 pages long so it’s a sod to read when in the bath/dropping the kids off at the pool.

I’ve read a couple of Reginald Hill – Dalziel and Pascoe – and was very impressed.

Can’t really go wrong with the Lee Child/Reacher books
Pulp fiction at its very best

Another great STW book thread…….my NY resolution only to read fiction in 2012 is going swimmingly. Have settled on great crime fiction as the sweet spot between fine literature and cant-put-downability.

Raymond Chandler – The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep – Think Humphrey Bogarde.
James Ellroy – Read the LA detective novels, it’s basically like watching an extended “LA Confidential”, one of my favourite movies. Just finished The Black Dahlia, now onto The Big Nowhere.
Elmore Leonard – They are all brilliant, no-one paints funny/sleazy Americana like him. Get Shorty a good start point, as is Killshot. Gangsters, cops, low-lifes.

For true crime you must MUST read David Simon, Homicide. He camped out with the Baltimore Police Department Homicide Detectives for a year, wrote this incredible piece of reportage, then went and made The Wire. Tremendous book, I’ve read it twice in a year.

Not crime as such but if you want someting with humour give Chris Brookmyre a go. Easy reading with a great sense of humour, but it helps if you understand west of Scotland prejudices and language. A good place to start is The Sacred Art of Stealing about Dadaist bank robbers.

I was about to say Brookmyre too. A bunch of them sort-of follow on from each other; A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away is the first in a loose series that includes Sacred Art… – I’d advise reading that one first.

If you fancy something with a slight supernatural bent, Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels are ace.

If you like Elmore Leonard, you should read George V Higgins, who he credits as his biggest influence – it’s where the dialogue comes from. “Friends of Eddie Coyle” is a good start and generally most highly regarded.

If you like true crime, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is well worth a pop.

Stunning book by a very interesting character.

If you like Elmore Leonard, you should read George V Higgins, who he credits as his biggest influence – it’s where the dialogue comes from. “Friends of Eddie Coyle” is a good start and generally most highly regarded.

mefty, as a long time EL fan I have to be pedantic and point out this this is not quite right as Higgins first book Eddie Coyle wasn’t published till 1970 and Leonard has been writing awesome dialogue since 1950. Leonard did rate Eddie Coyle highly though.

Jo Nesbo . Make sure you read them in the correct order though as they all sort of link together.

Just finishing off The Redeemer having read all the previous from The Redbreast(first 2 weren’t available on Kindle) and can’t wait to start on The Snowman.

Relentless by Simon Kernick, you won’t be able to put it down.

As you seem to like gritty London-type stuff (Whitechapel and Luther you mentioned), try Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd. I thought it was excellent and have since read loads of his other books – very diverse themes, but OT will float your boat I hope.

Elmore Leonard’s forward to the Friends of Eddie Coyle, I agree they overlapped but Higgins’s ability to do dialogue heavily influenced Leonard as he says himself.

Introduction
In the winter of 1972 my agent at the time, H. N. Swanson in Hollywood, called to ask if I’d read a recently published novel called THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE. I told him I hadn’t heard of it and he said, “This is your kind of stuff, kiddo, run out and get it before you write another word.” Swanie was a legend in the movie business having represented F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. I did what I was told, bought the book, opened to the first page and read: “Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.”
I finished the book in one sitting and felt as if I’d been set free. So this is how you do it.
The reviews were all raves. Joe McGinnes in THE NEW YORK TIMES said that George Higgins has “given us the most penetrating glimpse yet into what seems the real world of crime – a world of stale beer smells . . . and pale unnourished little men who do what they have to do to get along.”
Walter Clemons in NEWSWEEK said EDDIE COYLE “isn’t a thriller (though it is – stunningly – that) so much as a highly specialized novel of manners.”
The review in THE NEW YORKER nailed it in the opening paragraph by listing these friends of Coyle – the man himself described as “a small fish in the Boston underworld” – the bank robbers Jimmy Scalisi and Artie Valantropo; the gun dealer Jackie Brown; Dillon the bartender, a character to keep your eye on; and a dealing T-man, Dave Foley. They’re the book. They reveal themselves not only by what they do, but also by the way they speak, their sounds establishing the attitude or style of the writing.
To me it was a revelation.
I was already writing in scenes, trying to move my plots with dialogue while keeping the voices relatively flat, understated. What I learned from George Higgins was to relax, not be so rigid in trying to make the prose sound like writing, to be more aware of rhythms of coarse speech and the use of obscenities. Most of all, George Higgins showed me how to get into scenes without wasting time, without setting up the scene, where the characters are and what they look like. In other words, hook the reader right away. I also realized that criminals can appear to be ordinary people and have some of the same concerns as the rest of us.
George Higgins learned all this on his own. He majored in English at Boston College, which was my major at the University of Detroit, another Jesuit school. Higgins went on to Stanford, he said “to learn how to write fiction,” which he found out “can’t be taught, but I didn’t know that then.” I left school to write Chevrolet ads and also failed to learn anything about writing. Higgins joined the Associated Press as a rewrite man, a step in the right direction referred to as “like toilet training.” He returned to Boston College for a law degree, got a jog as an assistant U.S. Attorney and loved it, meeting a parade of characters he would soon be using in his novels.

Still, getting published was tough. Along the way from Stanford to EDDIE COYLE, Higgins wrote as many as ten books that he either discarded or were rejected by publishers – perhaps for the same reason my first novel with a contemporary setting, THE BIG BOUNCE, was rejected by publishers and film producers eighty-four times in all, editors calling the book a “downer,” void of sympathetic characters – the same ones I’m writing about thirty years later. Higgin’s agent at the time of EDDIE COYLE read the manuscript, told him it was unsalable and dropped him. Let this be an inspiration to beginning writers discouraged by one rejection after another. If you believe you know what you’re doing, you have to give publishers time to catch up and catch on.
In the beginning, both Higgins and I had to put up with labels applied to our work, critics calling us the second coming of Raymond Chandler. At the time we first met, at the Harbourfront Reading in Toronto, George and I agreed that neither of us had come out of the Hammett-Chandler school of crime writing. My take on THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, for example – which I’ve listed a number of times as the best crime novel ever written – makes THE MALTESE FALCON read like Nancy Drew. Our method in telling stories has always been grounded in authenticity based on background data, the way it is as well as the way such people speak. We also agreed that it’s best not to think too much about plot and begin to stew over where the story is going. Instead, rely on the characters to show you the way.
Five years after EDDIE COYLE, a NEW YORK TIMES review of one of my books said that I “often cannot resist a set piece – a lowbrow aria with a crazy kind of scatological poetry of its own – in the Higgins manner.” And that’s how you learn, by imitating.
Higgins has been called the Balzac of Boston while I’ve been labeled the Dickens of Detroit. We didn’t discuss it, so I’m not sure what George thought of his alliterative tag. What I wonder is who I’d be if I lived in Chicago.
George V. Higgins died on November 7, 1999, only days short of his sixtieth birthday. During the past twenty years or so his name and mine have appeared together in the press – often in the same sentence – some 178 times. I’m honored.

Second William Boyd , excellent book.

Also Donald Harstad and Harlan Coben.

Any book by JOHN GRISHAM,they are all great reads, and give british crime writer VAL McDERMID a try ,also THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE.this is a must see movie if you can dig it up

I agree with Nealy on relentless- it is a stonking book but you will read it in a weekend cus it is unputdownable.

Harlan Coben as well does some good stuff.

NICK you need a kindle with all these books lol 😀

Your not wrong foxski, not to mention the number of hours I will need to read them all. I’ve been v impressed with the response from everyone and now have plenty of literature to look at and choose from.

Still think a book swap would be good. Anyone want to swap Sniper One by Sgt Dan Mills for a Lee Child or Ian Rankin book?

I’ve just finished reading The Case of The Melted Fox on Amazon Kindle and highly recommend it. It’s a bit different – the main character (Jason Vann) is a walking talking Alsatian detective. That doesn’t mean it’s a book for the kids, though. An intriguing read by AJ Wolf, which is the first in The Chronicles of Jason Vann.

At seventy-something pages, it’s short, which is brilliant for when you just want a quick read. My interest was held throughout and I just had to get to the end.

Hope this helps 🙂

Peter Temple

I’ve just finished reading The Case of The Melted Fox

Out of interest, how long did it take you to write it?

Agree Sherlock Holmes for a look into another age, and cheap to buy or free to download.

To me the greatest detective fiction writer of all time is Raymond Chandler. If you haven’t tried you must Again, amazingly evocative of a past world – 1940’s Hollywood in the case of Chandler and I think these are the birth of what we now call pulp fiction (just my opinion – I know nowt…)

Sadly he didn’t write that much, so for a more modern substitute (albeit nowhere near as good) try Robert B Parker.

I will be trying a few from earlier posts myself. Thanks to all!

I highly recommend the Tempé Brennan books by Kathy Reiche, the books that spawned the Bones tv series; highly readable, and great characterisation. William Gibson’s recent trilogy, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, can reasonably be described as thrillers, and are a great read, and Neil Stephenson’s latest, Reamde, is very similar. I’m reading it now on my phone and iPad, depending on where I am, and I’m loving it, gaming, Islamist terrorists, Russian gangsters, MI6, feisty females… I really, really recommend this book.

Falconers books were good and right up your alley if you like Ryan and mcnabb.

For a great war story read but not fiction read Sniper one. I really enjoyed this and it had a gripping account of the British sniper division in Iraq during a siege on their base. Well worth the read IMO.

Any thing by Simon Kernick, as above Relentless is brilliant

Everything by James Crumley, the successor to Raymond Chandler if that’s possible.