Listmania

 

The lists of "Best Of" crime fiction novels (and fiction in general) have been trickling in over the past few weeks, and instead of noting each and every one, I decided to wait, compile a summary of sorts, and calculate which titles were included most often. The winning vote-getters are listed at the bottom (no peeking). So here goes:

Amazon liked Tana French's novel The Likeness enough to give it the #6 spot on its listing of Top 100 Books which includes all fiction and nonfiction for 2008.

Barnes and Noble broke down their listing into categories, including two crime fiction titles in the Best Fiction Debut listing and one in Historicals. They also featured a Best Stories on the Edge section chock full of thrillers and topped by A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré.

Booklist gave The Ancient Rain by Domenic Stansberry the top nod in its Ten Best list, but also offered Best New Installment in Long-Running Series Awards (with The 47th Samurai by Stephen Hunter on top), and Best Crime Novel Debut Awards with Calumet City by Charlie Newton coming out the winner. You can also check out their Top Crime Fiction Audiobooks listing here.

The Christian Science Monitor's listing is for fiction in general, but they do see their way clear to include five crime fiction titles by Atkinson, Bayard, LeCarre, Lehane, and Rankin. 

Stephen King compiled a best list for Entertainment Weekly and included When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson, Heartsick and Sweetheart by Chelsea Cain and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Oline Cogdill picked 16 books for her crime fiction bests the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, as well as four standout debuts.

January Magazine's listing was so big, they had to split it into two parts, here and here, although in actuality it was more due to the fact that the list included detailed some nice reviews and summaries instead of just the usual bullet points. The only puzzle is why such a vaunted list of 40 authors only includes two women...

The Kansas City Star's best of crime fiction list includes ten works, in alphabetical order, starting with Saturday’s Child, by Ray Banks.

The Library Journal has a primary listing covering all categories and includes Dennis Lehand and Stieg Larsson. Their genre-specific list roams outside the box and includes a few titles not found elsewhere, such as Assassins at Ospreys by R.T. Raichev.

Sarah Weinman roamed even farther outside the box, including two "standout novels don't even qualify as crime fiction exactly, although each revolves around the ramifications of criminal acts."

NPR was succinct. Five Best. Read 'em here.

Writing for the New York Times, Marilyn Stasio was thrilled to see that thrillers about frothing-at-the-mouth serial killers appear to be in decline.

Publishers Weekly had a general fiction list which included three crime fiction novels and a separate listing for mysteries.

Salon's book awards were slim, but they did manage to give nods to novels by Tana French, Susan Choi, and Rivka Galchen.

The San Fran Chronicle chose 50 fiction and poetry books but only found two crime fiction novels they liked, apparently.

The list of best mysteries compiled by Seattle Times columnist Adam Woog includes bests and runners-up, with a few titles not found on other lists.

UK's Sunday Times had a refreshing European viewpoint, including the "Scandinavian discovery of the year," Matti Joensuu's To Steal her Love.

The crime fiction standouts for USA Book News had separate lists for Mystery/Suspense and Thriller/Adventure, with Blood Harvest by Brant Randall winning the top award in the former category and Stealing Trinity by Ward Larsen wining the latter.

The Village Voice had an eclectic list of anything-goes (Creepy Earth Mothers! Portuguese drag queens!) but included Exit Music by Ian Rankin and Lush Life by Richard Price.

The Washington Post weighed in with its Baker's Dozen list of 13 top mysteries and thrillers, a nice listing (politically correct, perhaps?) of male/female,  domestic/international, traditional/thriller novels.

The novels listed as "best" most frequently held few surprises. In order:

1. Stieg Larsson – The girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2. Kate Atkinson – When Will There Be good News 
3. Tana French – The Likeness 
4. John le Carre – A Most Wanted Man 
4. Michael Connelly – The Brass Verdict 
4. Tom Rob Smith – Child 44 
5. Chelsea Cain  - Sweetheart 
5. Dennis Lehane – The Given Day 
5. Ian Rankin – Exit Music 
6. Thomas H. Cook – Master of the Delta 
6. John Harvey – Cold in Hand 
6. Donna Leon – The Girl of His Dreams 
6. Richard Price - Lush Life 
6. Don Winslow – Dawn Patrol 

Other titles receiving more than one mention were:

• Sandi Ault – Wild Inferno 
• Louis Bayard – The Black Tower 
• Lawrence Block – Hit and Run 
• James Lee Burke – Swan Peak 
• Lee Child – Nothing to Lose 
• Harlan Coben – Hold Tight 
• Robert Ferrigno – Sins of the Assassin 
• Alan Furst – The Spies of Warsaw 
• John Grisham – The Appeal
• P.D. James – The Private Patient 
• T. Jefferson Parker – LA Outlaws 
• George Pelecanos – The Turnaround 
• James Sallis – Salt River 
• Alexander McCall Smith – The Miracle at Speedy Motors 
• Inger Ash Wolfe – The Calling 
• Dave Zeltserman – Small Crimes

(And in case you missed it, the Crime Fiction Dossier blog also asked various authors and critics to list their favorite reads from the past year. Lots of fun reading.)

There you have it! Quite a bit of good fodder on the above lists with a total of 152 different books represented. As Publishers Weekly noted, "Regardless of your thinking on these current times, they are certainly anything but boring, and we feel the same about the books published this year."

Blue Skies Smiling at Me

 

Over the holidays, the hubster and I climbed into a little Cessna 172 putt-putt and flew approximately 1700 nautical miles to see both sets of 'rents who happen to live 900 miles apart. That's about 20 hours in the cramped cockpit. Not all that different from sitting down at a computer for 8 hours at a time, when you think about it. Plus, you get to avoid being strip-searched, having to remove your shoes, and standing in long lines at airports OR swerving to avoid large trucks and bad drivers on the Interstates.

It's an amazing way to travel.

There are a lot of interesting sights up there you can't get on the ground or even in commercial jets, since they fly at high altitudes. At around 7-9,000 feet, you can watch the sunset and see lights wink on in cities below, like groups of synchronous fireflies. You can see a rainbow wrapping around you in a 360-degree prismatic circle while watching trawlers off the coastline over the aquamarine waters which are sometimes clear enough to catch a glimpse of a submarine near the Florida/Georgia border. The eeriest sensation is flying at night in IMC (instrument meteorological conditions), in a cocoon of clouds that feels like you're enveloped in your own little universe, with only the occasional disembodied ATC voice over the radio to remind you that you're somewhere over the U.S. (well, that and the GPS, if you have one). It's almost like something out of the Twilight Zone.

It set me to thinking about mystery novels featuring pilots, and while there are a good number of stand-alone thrillers (this page lists a few), there aren't many series featuring pilots or aviation. Marcia Muller is probably the best known, with her protagonist and San Francisco-based private detective Sharon McCone, a general aviation pilot who marries another pilot with a shadowy past in an unnamed intelligence agency. In Both Ends of the Night, McCone helps her friend and former flight instructor, Matty, investigate the disappearance of her boyfriend. When Matty dies in a suspicious plane crash, McCone is convinced the boyfriend's disappearance is connected to her friend's death and will stop at nothing to solve the case. An excerpt from the first page reads, "Landing at Los Alegres Municipal Airport felt like coming home. I angled in on the forty-five toward mid-field, turned downwind, and pressed the button on my headset. 'Los Alegres traffic, Cessna four-four-two-five Whiskey, downwind for landing, two-niner.' The 150 I'd rented at Oakland was identical to the plane I'd trained in. Los Alegres was where I'd learned the ABC's of flying."

Muller once said in a New York Times interview that "Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons. Most of my friends called that a devotion to my work bordering on insanity. While roaring down a rapidly shrinking runway at 90 miles per hour in a contraption that resembled nothing so much as a matchbox with wings eventually became commonplace, my airborne experiences were such that I determined never to allow McCone to take up skydiving."

John J. Nance, an ABC aviation analyst, has written several aviation-related thrillers (Fire Flight, Blackout, Turbulence). Some feature pilots, some don't, but most use what Publishers Weekly called his "his successful formula of race-against-the-clock plotting and in-flight suspense."

Author Tom Casey, an American Airlines pilot, has written a couple of stand-alone suspense novels featuring different pilot protagonists. Human Error has pilot Hugo Price questioning whether his personal problems contributed to a fatal plane crash. In Strangers' Gate, pilot Jason Walker cashes out of his job as a dot-com executive shortly before his marriage goes up in flames, and finds himself in the middle of a drug money scheme. Norman Mailer said of the latter book, "I know of no other American novel where the protagonist is an accomplished pilot who can also write the story with his own fair share of winged prose."

Although not pilot-related, Lynne Heitman has a series of four books to date featuring former airline operations manager turned private investigator Alex Shanahan. Heitman herself was the  former American Airlines general manager at Logan Airport.

Not a long list, to be sure, but there are probably others. With gazillions of mystery series featuring all sorts of unusual protagonist occupations, I have to wonder why there aren't more pilots in the mix, especially with over 600,000 active certificated pilots in the U.S. alone. Perhaps my mother and brother--both entrenched aerophobes--may hold a clue.

Mystery Melange

 

The fourth and final issue of the first Femme Noir graphic novel miniseries, The Dark City Diaries, was released right before Christmas.

If you're in Tucson, Arizona, on January 10th, J.A. Jance will be appearing as part of the Oro Valley Public Library's 2009 Book Festival.

Canadian mystery writer Maureen Jennings, who nearly drowned last year on a Florida beach, paid tribute to two Americans who were awarded a Carnegie Hero Medal for their life-saving efforts, including Fred Hunt, a 51-year-old businessman from Maine who died during the rescue and was honoured posthumously.

The South Africa Mail and Guardian Online continues its discussion on the move afoot locally to hustle crime fiction into the thriller category, since "crime is too stark a reminder of contemporary South Africa realities."

The city of Albuquerque will rename a library in honor of late mystery author Tony Hillerman.

The Mystery Writers International Festival, which had been cancelled for 2009, may be back on again. The heart of the issue, like everything else these days, is funding, but nonetheless, Owensboro city officials are pushing for the festival to return this year.

Sue Grafton was included in a Forbes article on people who "got thrown out of their jobs, learned from the experience and rose to success and celebrity."

The Chatham Courier had a "local boy who's made good makes good again" story, profiling filmmaker Dennis Gelbaum, who recently published a thriller, Beyond Reasonable Doubt.

Author Link's interview column featured C.J. Box talking about "hot-button issues," his writing life, the game warden Joe Pickett series, and his latest stand-alone novel.

Alexander McCall Smith is going to launch his latest novel in Australia in February, saying that "I don't know why but my books click with Aussies. I also get a lot of mail from Americans but they seem to click with Australians and Swedes the most."

Ian Rankin has launched a campaign calling on writers, publishers and booksellers to make more books available to the visually impaired, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Braille's inventor, Louis Braille.

And for Halloween this year, make your plans now to take part in the Smithsonian's Mystery Lover's England and Scotland tour, October 23-31. For only $6,200 you can meet crime writers Ann Cleeves and Ian Rankin, among others, and visit famous crime fiction settings.

Media Murder

 

FILM

The Christian Science Monitor reviewed Nothing But the Truth, the political thriller from writer-director Rod Lurie, concluding that although actors such as Kate Beckinsale and Alan Alda "seem to be having a high old time," the film feels more like it belongs on television.

The Japan Times reviewed the new film, K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, from director Shimako Sato, based on a creation of pioneering Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo and featuring a Moriarty-like criminal rival to the Sherlock Holmes-esque detective Kogoro Akechi.

Nestled among all the tributes pouring out after the recent death of writer Donald Westlake, the Guardian has a slide show of Westlake's legacy at the movies.

The new DVD release Alfred Hitchcock: The Early Years Collection from Lionsgate offers cineastes a rare opportunity to see five of the Master of Suspense's early films: 1927's The Ring, 1929's The Manxman, (both silent), Murder! from 1930, and Skin Game and Rich and Strange, both from 1931.

TELEVISION

AMC has an untitled new political thriller series created by Jason Horwitch (The Pentagon Papers) in the works starring James Badge Dale and Miranda Richardson. Sopranos veteran Allen Coulter will direct the pilot, with production scheduled to begin this month.

60 Minutes on CBS rebroadcast their interview with Joaquin (Jack) Garcia, author of Making Jack Falcone: An Undercover FBI Agent Takes Down a Mafia Family.

Notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is getting his own reality show on the on Fox Reality Channel.

The Iceland Review took a look at the DVD Release of the four-part crime drama series I Hunt Men (Icelandic title: Mannaveidar) directed by Björn B. Björnsson, which follows two detectives as they attempt to track down a serial killer who has a penchant for murdering goose hunters.

Australian TV has a new six-party series, Carla Cametti PD, featuring Diana Glenn in the titular role of the Italian-Australian PI and Vince Colosimo as detective senior sergeant Luciano Gandolfi.

RADIO

Mary and Carol Higgins Clark were interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition.

Carol O'Connell discussed her novel Bone by Bone on Minnesota Public Radio.

PODCASTS

Deutsche Welle culled highlights from their 2008 Inspired Minds program, including an interview with crime writer Minette Walters, whose first book The Ice House became a worldwide best-seller just months after its publication and won the John Creasey Award in the UK.