Observations from the Balcony

Recently Tana French wrote a piece for The Guardian in which she listed her top 10 maverick mysteries. The problem though is that most of the books listed just aren’t very…well, mavericky. This isn’t a comment on their quality but, since the premise is very clearly laid out in the title of the article, they just don’t live up.

Laura Lippman once wrote “There are experiments within crime fiction, but they tend to be experiments within the form; we still color inside the lines, but our skies might be red, our grass blue. More calibrations than experiments, playing with small changes and readers’ expectations to push and pull the form a little” and I think that French’s list was made in that spirit.

But what about the ones who throw away the whole damn coloring book? Sometimes the advance scouts are so far ahead that they can barely be seen (if at all) by the group at large.

So, putting aside my disdain for the word maverick, I humbly offer up my own rogue’s gallery of originals.

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Will Christopher Baer

Kiss Me Judas, Penny Dreadful

Brutal, visceral and unflinching, if there is such a thing as transgressive crime fiction then this is it. Phineas Poe is an ex-IAD police-officer freshly released from a mental institution who has rough sex with a one night stand then wakes up to find his kidney was taken. And thus starts a dark and stylish descent into the hazy netherworld to retrieve it. The language is blurred and hallucinogenic and there may not be a Paradiso to follow this Inferno. Not for the faint of heart.

Jay Russell

Brown Harvest, Celestial Dogs, Burning Bright, Greed & Stuff

Brown Harvest uses the framework of Red Harvest to take all of the child detective characters that we all knew and loved, grow them up and put them in a dark noir, hard-boiled story.

Mining a similar theme the other novels follow the exploits of washed-out-former-child-star-turned-PI Marty Burns. The books threaten at times to be over taken with a smart assed narrative voice but over come it.

David Corbett

The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime, The Blood of Paradise

Corbett has been quietly crafting some of the best novels of the new millennium. Human characters and tragic consequences. Corbett is one of the giants of tomorrow.

Brian Evenson

The Open Curtain, Last Days, The Brotherhood of Mutilation

Whether leaning more towards the Grand Guignol or well constructed descents into madness Evenson is intense, intense, intense.

Jeffrey Ford

The Shadow Year, The Girl in the Glass

Ford writes like a dream and may just be the most hidden in plain sight writer working today.

Elizabeth Hand

Generation Loss

Generation Loss is the rare book that defies easy genre categorization and therein lies part of it’s brilliance.

Joe Meno

The Boy Detective Fails, How the Hula Girl Sings

The Boy Detective Fails is similar to Brown Harvest in its treatment of a child detective all grown up but is more focused and less manic in it’s execution. One of the great novels of the new century. For a fresh and original take check out Joe Meno.

Steve Mosby

The 50/50 Killer

Mosby writes books that hurt your heart, get inside your head, make you think and stick with you long after.

Kem Nunn

Tapping the Source, Unassigned Territory, Pomona Queen, The Dogs of Winter, Tijuana Straits

Tapping the Source came out in 1984 why the hell is Nunn here? The answer is simply, because not a lot of people read his books. Nunn is a guy whose work will probably be discovered and declared as brilliant long after he’s around. Which is a shame given the quality of writing and story telling here.

Jack O’Connell

Box Nine, The Skin Palace, Wireless, Word Made Flesh, The Resurrectionist

O’Connell is one of the most original novelists writing today. His five novels combine ideas as disparate as language theory and designer drugs into remarkable stories.

James Sallis

The Lew Griffin books, The John Turner books

But, but, but. No buts. Sallis is brilliant and his work isn’t read by nearly as many people as they should be. How about such such subtly intrusive ideas like Lew Griffin is the one who may actually be writing the books and John Turner is dying, if not already dead, for the duration and the three novels are nothing more then a confused fever dream. Layers upon layers there is a lot to dig through here. No one is better at mining the strata of a characters voice then Sallis.

Peter Moore Smith

Raveling, Los Angeles

Smith writes dense, readable (and dare I say literary) novels that revel in their evocative use of language to weave contagiously imagined worlds.

Rupert Thomson

The Insult, Death of a Murderer

His best books are odd and strange with a dream like quality. It’s a mix that quite frankly doesn’t always work but when he’s on, he’s on.

Conrad Williams

Game

Game is a horror novella, I’ll say that up front. But it clearly is a noir concept filtered through horror sensibilities. The result is a different kind of dark tale.

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So who are your mavericks?

Edit: I added Kem Nunn’s latest novel which I clipped by accident when transferring the post.