Whom have you read for the first time in 2010?

Here are the authors whose work I've read for the first time this year. (Hat tips to Jeff Pierce at the Rap Sheet and Brian Lindenmuth.) Whom have you read for the first time in 2010?

• Yishai Sarid

• Roger Smith

• Meshack Masondo

• Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

• Olen Steinhauer

• Mike Hodges

• Ted Lewis

• Geoff McGeachin

• William McIlvanney

• Donna Moore

• Max Allan Collins

• Nicolas Bouvier

• Alix Bosco

• Vanda Symon

• Surender Mohan Pathak

• John McAllister

• Sam Millar

• Caryl Férey

• James McClure

• Tonino Benacquista

• Michael Moorcock

• Ed Brubaker

• Greg Rucka

• Colin Bateman

• Neil Cross

• Maurice Gee

• Lindy Kelly

• Stuart Neville

• Kevin McCarthy

• Alan Glynn

• Michael Stanley

• Lisa Brackmann

• James R. Benn

• Jassy Mackenzie

• Cara Black

• Christopher G. Moore

• Don Winslow

• Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

From a whisper to a meme

Just when I thought memes had gone the way of non-Blu-Ray discs, here comes a new one that is easy, fun and almost painless: Brian Lindenmuth, of the you-should-read-it Observations from the Balcony blog, tagged me with one that asks readers to:

1) List the authors that were new to you this year, regardless of year of publication.
2) Bold-face the ones that were debuts (first novel, published in 2008).
3) Impose these conditions on others.

I like that. It's simple, and it brings back memories of some of the year's exciting crime-fiction discoveries. I'm not sure which were published in 2008, but here's the list of authors I've read for the first time this year:

Matt Rees
Giles Blunt
Steve Hockensmith
Jasper Fforde
Michael Pearce
Arthur Morrison
Michael Gilbert
Scott Phillips
Duane Swierczynski
Christa Faust
Vicki Hendricks
Leighton Gage
Timothy Hallinan
Sandra Ruttan
Robert Bloch
Mehmet Murat Somer
Megan Abbott
Brian McGilloway
Frank Gruber
Ian Sansom
J.F. Englert
Howard Engel
John McFetridge
Adrian McKinty
E.W. Hornung
Garbhan Downey
Flann O'Brien
Linda L. Richards
Henry Chang
John Lawton
Jason Aaron
Alan Moore
Deon Meyer
Amara Lakhous
Carlo Emilio Gadda
Jacques Chessex

I'll tag Whose role is it anyway?, Linda L. Richards, Past Continuous, Crime Scraps, and the polyblogal seanag, all of whose blogs you ought to read. If you're not on that list, feel free to reply anyway and let me know which authors you have read for the first time this year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

How much list could the Booklist list if the Booklist could list books?

Quite a lot of list, actually. Bill Ott's list of 2008's best crime novels includes his ten best of the year plus six best crime-fiction debuts plus five best new installments in long-running series. That last item especially should earn Ott an award for creative list-making.

What really makes his lists stand out, though, is that he states his criteria at the outset. This seems like an obvious thing to do, but most list-compilers never do it. That failure, more than anything else, accounts for the endless ear bending, bandwidth consuming and time wasting that follow the publication of most top 10, 50 or 100 lists.

Ott's predisposition is for the darker regions of crime fiction. At the same time, he is not dogmatic, nor is he condescending about other kinds of crime.

"(L)et’s face this issue squarely," he writes. "As crime fiction continues to attract more and more writers of a distinctly literary bent who want to use the genre to build multifaceted characters and to explore sensitive social issues and address questions of profound moral ambiguity, it is almost inevitable that darker worldviews and less formulaic plots will come to dominate `best' lists. ... But don’t get us wrong: sometimes a good cozy hits the spot just perfectly. Just not this year on this list."

That's a thoughtful assessment, and it lets the reader know exactly where Ott stands. One can't ask more than that, which is why Bill Ott's tops my list of best lists.

What about you, readers? What's your favorite list, preferably but not necessarily of crime fiction? And what makes a good list? Novelty of conception? Of content? Agreement with your preferences? Careful thought on the list maker's part?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

A German best-of list

Internationale Krimis occasionally mentions the monthly top-ten list compiled by a panel of German, Swiss and Austrian crime-fiction critics. In a recent post, blogkeeper Bernd Kochanowski discussed the panel's best-of-the-best list, its choices for the ten best crime novels published in German in 2007.

The list includes the books known in English as This Night's Foul Work by Fred Vargas, The Broken Shore by Peter Temple, The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotto and The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin, plus novels by John Harvey and James Sallis.

It also includes books not yet known as anything in English because they appear not to have been translated: Die feine Nase der Lilli Steinbeck by Heinrich Steinfest, Feuertod by Astrid Paprotta, and Kalteis by Andrea Maria Schenkel, all written in German, and Der Grenzgänger by Matti Rönkä, translated from Finnish. I'm especially curious about Matti Rönkä, since so little Finnish crime fiction is available in English.

That's four novels originally published in English, three in German, and one each in French, Finnish and Italian. What does that tell you? Are German-language readers more commendably broad-minded than we are? Should they be up in arms that only three books original to their own language made the list?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Mysteries Around the World

That's the name of this directory from the Tulsa City-County Library. Click anywhere on the world map, and your computer takes you to a list of mystery stories set where you clicked. The lists include works both by writers from the countries they write about and from elsewhere. That last is not surprising in the case of the one book set in Antarctica.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

Road maps to crime

WhereDunnit offers handy maps to crime fiction set in continental Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Call up a map, click on a country, region or state, and you get a list of crime books set there. A link to a map of the world does not appear to be working. The site includes a list of crime novels set in Europe.

International Crime Fiction Reading Lists

The Waterboro Public Library in Maine offers links to a number of booklists on travel and place in mystery. It looks like a pretty good lists of lists. One of the lists includes a mystery set in Tibet, for example.