July is Crime Month here at Booktopia — a month-long celebration of crime fiction and edge-of-your-seat thrillers, as well as the readers who devour them. Today, crime fiction legend Val McDermid is on the blog to share some of the books on her shelves that she loves the most. Read on …
The Murder at the Vicarage
by Agatha Christie
This was my gateway drug into a life of crime. I read it first when I was 9 years old and I was captivated. It’s the first Miss Marple novel and she remains my favourite of Christie’s sleuths. The vicar comes home to discover the murdered body of his universally loathed churchwarden, and they’re off … I love the masterly organisation of the plotting, which we’ve come to expect from Christie, but what I still treasure is the sly sense of humour that surfaces throughout.
Buy it here
On Beulah Height
by Reginald Hill
Dalziel and Pascoe are probably my favourite detective duo – coarse, vulgar, shrewd and instinctive Andy Dalziel and liberal, well-read, compassionate and intelligent Peter Pascoe balance each other beautifully. On Beulah Height is the most tender and emotionally testing novel in Hill’s excellent series, an elegy to the power of love and family, with the underlying theme music of Mahler’s Songs about the Death of Children. And a denouement that plays exasperatingly fair with the reader.
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The Stranger Diaries
by Elly Griffiths
Elly Griffiths is best known for her series featuring forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway, but this is very different. English teacher Clare Cassidy’s best friend has been murdered; next to her body is a line from a Gothic novelist Clare teaches, and the crime scene is identical to the fictional one. It’s the start of a chilling psychological thriller where the tension ratchets up to a dramatic finale. A major plus point is that it introduces another complex and delightful character in queer cop Harbinder Kaur, who utterly charmed me.
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Indemnity Only
by Sara Paretsky
The first outing for Chicago private eye VI Warshawski, this was a game changer for me. VI Warshawski was one of a handful of investigators who changed the crime genre – a woman with a brain and a sense of humour, a no-shit who did her own heavy lifting, inhabiting a novel whose plotlines were absolutely rooted in the time and place Paretsky was writing about. VI Warshawski is still out there on the mean streets, fighting the good fight, constantly moving with the times.
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Bad Debts
by Peter Temple
Peter Temple’s novels are right up there on the high watermark of what the modern crime novel can achieve. I’ve read them all at least twice, and I know I’ll read them again. He’s a writer whose brilliant and economical prose style demands attention; his sense of place is vivid and vibrant; his characters are complicated, his protagonists possessed of an often-idiosyncratic integrity. Start at the beginning with the first Jack Irish novel and take it from there.
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A Dark Matter
by Doug Johnstone
It had me at the first line: ‘Her Dad took much longer to burn than she expected.’ No, not the disposal of a murder victim, but the garden funeral pyre of undertaker and private eye Jim Skelf. The intertwined businesses are taken over by the three generations of women who survive him – his widow Dorothy, his daughter Jenny and his granddaughter Hannah. The triple-stranded plot wraps around itself as neat as a DNA helix, and the Skelfs are gloriously individual, complicated and bracingly unsentimental.
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Val Val Val
1979
Allie Burns: Book 1
1979. It is the winter of discontent, and reporter Allie Burns is chasing her first big scoop. There are few women in the newsroom and she needs something explosive for the boys' club to take her seriously.
Soon Allie and fellow journalist Danny Sullivan are exposing the criminal underbelly of respectable Scotland. They risk making powerful enemies - and Allie won't stop there. When she discovers a home-grown terrorist threat, Allie comes up with a plan to infiltrate the group and make her name. But she's a woman in a man's world . . . and putting a foot wrong could be fatal...
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