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And the best crime author of all time is.....

Browsing aimlessly, as you do, I came across a 2015 readers poll held by WH SMITH to find the best crime writer of all time - it was an interesting list with Brit author, Peter James winning the top spot for best crime writer EVER.

WH SMITH wrote in their blog -

After reading your recommendations for some fantastic detectives, underrated crime books and books that would work well on the big screen, we had an inkling that there were a few fans of certain authors in our midst. As the crime & thriller period of #WHSBookmarks started to draw to an end, we decided to take it to the vote and cruelly ask you to narrow down all your favourite authors to choose just one to be the best crime/thriller author of all time. The nominations came pouring in, including a huge mix of authors, from the classics who are considered the godfathers/mothers of their sub-genre to modern bestsellers to little-heard-of names that have made a big impact on you. In the end though, our winner won the crown by a landslide, leaving us in no doubt as to who you think is worthy of the title of The Best Crime/Thriller Author of all Time.



I do like Peter James myself, but is he the best ever? I suppose it's all subjective but the list is interesting with some surprises - household names like  P D James and Thomas Harris only poll at 19 and 18 respectively. And Ruth Rendell should most certainly be higher than 13 -  Conan Doyle comes in at 21 while the poet of crime, Raymond Chandler is a miserable  47. Still lists like this are perfect for debate -  below is the full list from 1 to 99 and here 's the  LINK to the original article.


AND THE FULL LIST READS:

1. Peter James

2. James Patterson

3. Val McDermid

4. Ian Rankin

5. Agatha Christie

6. Martina Cole

7. Sheila Quigley

8. R. C. Bridgestock

9. Karin Slaughter

10. Tess Gerritsen

11. Mark Billingham

12. Patricia Cornwell

13. Ruth Rendell

14. Karen Rose

15. Chris Carter

16. Lee Child

17. Simon Kernick

18. P. D. James

19. Thomas Harris

20. Stuart MacBride

21. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

22. Matt Johnson

23. John Connolly

24. Dennis Lehane

25. Dan Brown

26. Henning Mankell

27. Jo Nesbo

28. Peter May

29. Harlan Coben

30. Gillian Flynn

31. Dick Francis

32. John Grisham

33. Sarah Hilary

34. Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling

35. Mandasue Heller

36. Linwood Barclay

37. Kimberley Chambers

38. N. J. Cooper

39. Michael Connelly

40. Nicci French

41. Faye Kellerman

42. Jeffery Deaver

43. Kathy Reichs

44. Jonathan Kellerman

45. Colin Bateman

46. Ed McBain

47. Raymond Chandler

48. Reginald Hill

49. Sophie Hannah

50. Alan Bradley

51. Tana French

52. Patricia Highsmith

53. Simon Toyne

54. Michael Robotham

55. Dean Koontz

56. Mo Hayder

57. Louise Penny

58. Edna Buchanan

59. Dorothy L. Sayers

60. Brian Freeman

61. James Rollins

62. J. D. Robb

63. S. J. Watson

64. Stieg Larsson

65. Lindsey Davis

66. Elizabeth George

67. C. J. Sansom

68. Chris Brookmyre

69. Karen Long

70. Michael J. Malone

71. Lisa Gardner

72. Leigh Russell

73. Tom Rob Smith

74. Tim Weaver

75. Karin Fossum

76. Chaz Brenchley

77. Helen Giltrow

78. Jim Kelly

79. David Hosp

80. Andrea Camilleri

81. Sam Millar

82. Edgar Wallace

83. John Le Carre

84. Stephen King

85. Ellis Peters

86. Ann Cleeves

87. Peter Robinson

88. Bill Todd

89. Ed James

90. James Sallis

91. Sara Paretsky

92. Josephine Tey

93. Margarey Allingham

94. Martin Cruz Smith

95. Jeff Abbott

96. Lee Weeks

97. John Harvey

98. James Lee Burke

99. Edgar Allan Poe

Looking Good Dead - Peter James book review.

Looking Good Dead is the second in Peter James' Roy Grace series and after enjoying the first book, Dead Simple I jumped straight into this novel. The plot this time around is high concept - snuff movies. It all kicks off when Tom Bryce finds someone had left a CD on the train and when he later puts it into his own computer he finds himself watching a brutal murder. Shortly afterwards some virus hidden amongst the coding of the snuff movie wipes Tom's hard drive clean but not before warning him against going to the police. However Tom is persuaded by his wife to report the movie and when he does all hell breaks loose - this culminates in Tom and his wife being kidnapped in order to be the lead actors in a forthcoming snuff movie.

The author uses the same TICKING CLOCK device to create tension in this novel as he used so memorably in the previous book in the series. In the earlier novel a character was buried alive in a coffin and the suspense was driven by the fact that he had to be found before he died. And this time around the author  has two characters kidnapped - the clock is ticking for these characters with the reader aware that they are soon to be killed as part of a snuff movie. Will the police find them in time? It's all very effective and marks this book out as a crime thriller rather than a traditional whodunnit. The reader know what is happening all along, but the police of course are clueless and simply blunder around while the story plays itself out.

I enjoyed the previous book, see my review HERE and this second book in the series improves on that book with the central character of Detective Roy Grace now fully formed and becoming something of a tragic man - there's a sadness, a desperation about him.

 I'm certainly going to read more books in this series - Dead good, that was.

Dead Simple = dead good. Peter James book review.

Dead Simple (2005) is the first in the hugely popular DS Roy Grace series from Peter James - when I picked up this book earlier this week I was coming to the series fresh. I had read Peter James before, I even interviewed the author for Samhain Magazine but that was back in the day when the author was known for his horror/supernatural novels.

Dead Simple then is the author's first crime novel though he doesn't leave his supernatural roots behind entirely, and there is some malarkey in this novel involving a psychic who Roy Grace consults in order to locate dead bodies, missing persons and his car keys. His acceptance in the supernatural often gets him into trouble with his superiors, the judiciary and the media. To be brutally honest I did find this element of the story to be slightly ridiculous but that's a small gripe given how genuinely gripping this book is.

Dead Simple which has been adapted into a stage play, and is being mooted for possible TV adaptation, is structured more like a thriller than a standard crime novel. It doesn't take the whodunnit route since the reader is drip fed information throughout the story and is always one step ahead of the police. Though the author  manages at several key moments to twist the story in ways totally unexpected, which leaves the reader squirming in glorious anticipation of what happens next.

The plot goes: A  stag night prank of burying the groom in a coffin by his mates. If this seems a pretty extreme prank, (I mean what's wrong with stripping the groom naked and tying him to a lamppost in the town centre? Or shaving his bollocks and tattooing a smiley face on his manhood?) then it all makes sense when James explains the history that leads to this event. The macabre prank becomes plausible enough to stick with it.  However the first of many twists comes when  the perpetrators are killed in an horrific traffic accident  - this leaves our man trapped in the coffin. We soon learn that one person knows of the coffin prank but it seems he has a lot to gain by leaving the man there.  This is where the twists start but the plot does remain credible within the confines of the world here. And speaking of confines, some of the coffin scenes really are genuinely claustrophobic to read.

It's a page turner, folks and although it often strays dangerously close to B-movie shenanigans it does manage to keep itself on track for an excellent climax. If there was a problem with the story it was the author's decision to suddenly pull a key character out of nowhere towards the end of the book- a character who largely drives the book towards the breathtaking climax involving a car chase that could put Bullitt (a movie actually referenced by a film buff cop in the plot) to shame. The author is a skilled storyteller and skills learned when he was a scriptwriter serves him well in keeping the incredibly impressive pace of the narrative.

Peter James arrested for dealing in highly addictive fiction

The book did leave some questions hanging for me - Why don't the police ever check emails? At least five  of the characters would have sent or received emails containing the exact details of where the coffin was. Why don't the police make any real effort to work out where the coffin could be? Such as, maybe, an empty plot of land owned by the main characters, a plot of land that's right by one of the pubs they went to. These questions were racing through my mind but the plotting is so incredibly well done, the pacing so exciting, that the story hooked me entirely and I couldn't put the damn book down.

Of course a crime series such as this is largely dependent on creating an interesting main character - for it is this character who will carry the series from one book to another. So what of Roy Grace? Well Peter James gives as a cop who is not as dour as John Rebus, nor as earthy as Tom Thorne. There is a sadness surrounding Roy Grace, who comes across as a likeable and ordinary man who finds himself in extraordinary situations. The reader learns that his wife went missing some years back, no one knows what has happened to her and no doubt this element of Roy Grace's past will become important as the series progresses. The disappearance of his wife (their marriage is portrayed as having been idyllic) haunts the policeman and is largely responsible for his penchant to turn to psychics in order to help in solving crimes

I will be reading more in this series - in fact I'm going to start the second book,  Looking Good Dead, today - I will be interested in seeing where the character goes and if psychic malarkey continues throughout the series.

All in all Dead Simple was an excellent, tighly plotted crime thriller....I bloody enjoyed that. Dead good, it was.

Find Peter James HERE

The Perfect Murder by Peter James

The Perfect Murder is one of this years Quick Read titles - Quick Reads is a collaboration between bestselling writers, leading publishers, supermarkets, bookshops, libraries, government departments, the Arts Council, BBC RaW, World Book Day, National Book Tokens and more.

The books are slim - I guess between 20 and 30,000 words and are designed to be quick, no nonsense reads. A Perfect Murder is just that.

Victor Smiley is a cautious man, he plans each step of his day out in meticulous detail, nothing is done on the spur of the moment. For the last few years he has been planning on murdering his wife, Joan. And now he is ready to put his plan into action. But unknown to Victor his wife has also been planning to murder him and she, too, is ready to commit the perfect murder.


As expected the book moves along at a zipy pace - I read it cover to cover in a couple of hours. It's a twisty turning road to the final page and several times, when I thought I'd figured out how it would all end, the author pulled the rug out from under my feet. In some ways, the theme perhaps, the book reminded me of some of Ruth Rendell's darker non-Wexford stuff. It's more black comedy than anything else, with characters as real as the people next door. All in all A Perfect Murder is a perfect read.

Excellent - Peter James demonstrates that you don't need a billion, squillion, trillion, willion words to tell a good story. Well worth picking up.