Book World: ‘Books to Die For,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda

BOOKS TO DIE FOR

The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels

(Atria) - ‘Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels’ by John Connolly and Declan Burke (Atria)

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Edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke

Emily Bestler/Atria. 537 pp. $29.99

This is not your mother’s list of favorite mystery novels. Nor is it one that acolytes of the well-constructed whodunit will much care for. None of the rivals of Sherlock Holmes is included in “Books to Die For,” and few of the masters of Golden Age puzzles. Neither are the mistresses of the modern “cozy” anywhere in evidence. If you’re a fan of John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner, Michael Innes, Nicholas Blake, Ngaio Marsh, Dick Francis or —more surprisingly—Kenneth Fearing, Fredric Brown, Cornell Woolrich and Chester Himes, you won’t find their praises sung here. Don’t even think about most of the contemporary authors who regularly attend Malice Domestic.

Apart from a few nods to iconic figures like A. Conan Doyle, Josephine Tey and Rex Stout, “Books to Die For” emphasizes the hard-boiled masters (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Paul Cain), the pulpmeisters of Gold Medal paperbacks and their ilk (Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald, Harry Whittington, William McGivern, Mickey Spillane, Charles Willeford), naturalists of the criminal milieu (Donald Goines, Derek Raymond, Clarence Cooper Jr., George V. Higgins), and nearly all the contemporary sensei of brilliant, poetic, gut-wrenching novels about violence and corruption in modern society: James Ellroy, George Pelecanos, James Lee Burke, Richard Price, Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin and Daniel Woodrell, among others.

While editors John Connolly and Declan Burke prefer to use the word “mystery” rather than “crime novel,” I do think most readers associate the former with puzzles and weekend diversion and the latter with fiction addressing “the complexities of human motivation” and the social ills around us. Very loosely speaking , the old-style mystery or detective story is relaxing; the new-style crime novel is upsetting. The argument implicit in most of the essays included in “Books to Die For” is almost always the same one: “X” is no mere entertainment; it is an exploration of human darkness.

In fact, Bill Crider might be describing at least half the titles honored in these pages when he summarizes Harry Whittington’s “A Night for Screaming.” This novel, he says, sets its main character in “a really bad situation, one from which escape seems impossible. But as bad as things might appear for the protagonist in the beginning, they get even worse. And worse. And then worse still.”

As you might expect, the contributions to “Books to Die For” vary widely in quality. For instance, Bill Pronzini, best known for his Nameless Detective series, writes so enthusiastically in praise of Elliott Chaze’s “Black Wings Has My Angel” — about an ex-con, a high-priced call girl named Virginia and a robbery gone wrong — that I immediately ordered a copy. Jeffery Deaver offers a superb essay on John D. MacDonald’s “The Executioners” and the two “Cape Fear” films it inspired. Megan Abbott’s account of Dorothy B. Hughes’s “In a Lonely Place” — a source text for the serial-killer novel — makes this classic sound not only compelling but also just what she claims: a book that “says more about gender trouble and sexual paranoia in post-World War II America than perhaps any other American novel.”