Crime book reviews: Written in blood

It’s a great idea, and I’m sure it will be a success: even in hard economic times, sales of crime fiction remain high. On top of that, Scotland’s crime writers are a disproportionately talented bunch. The Stirling festival – to be called Bloody Scotland – won’t announce its programme for a few months yet. For now we can still dream – and look back on last year’s crime books for a few clues about what we might expect.

I’m hoping there will be at least one of the top-drawer Americans on the bill. Even before he worked on The Wire, George Pelecanos was always a vital chronicler of the underside of life in Washington DC; after Baltimore, his work has become even more solidly grounded, and The Cut (Orion, £12.99) is no exception. For my ideal event, I would pair him with his fellow-Wire scriptwriter Dennis Lehane, whose Moonlight Mile (Sphere, £7.99) is not just a clever reworking of Gone Baby Gone but a powerful vignette of angry, recession-hit America. And why not? Harrogate had Lehane last summer, it’s had Pelecanos a couple of years before: if Stirling is to count on the maps of literary Scotland it has to look beyond literary Scotland too.

A crime festival shouldn’t just be about whodunits. There should be real-life forensic expertise, true-crime reportage – historical crime too. Judith Flanders’s The Invention of Murder (Harper Press, £20) is a masterpiece of research that shows how the 19th century reader of both true and fictional crime had a cast of mind that was radically different before growing more convergent with our own. At the start of the century, for example, the assassination of a British prime minister hardly seemed to interest anyone. Yet people couldn’t get enough about the now-forgotten bungling murderer John Thurtell, who was hanged in 1824. Even four years later, Sir Walter Scott paid “a truculent-looking hag” £150, the equivalent of a week’s wage, to nose around the Hertfordshire cottage where the murder was planned.

If we think the minds of past generations hard to fathom, though, our own are no less opaque. In Hood Rat (Picador, £12.99), English journalist Gavin Knight looked at crime in some of the scuzzier parts of this sceptr’d isle. Rightly, he was appalled at Scottish complacency about knife crime. In London in 2007, four knife murders in one weekend created such strong pressure among African-Caribbean community leaders that the Home Secretary was compelled to convene a task force. As part of it, two Glasgow experts on gang policing flew down for a meeting. When they returned, they found there had been FIVE murders in Glasgow that weekend – and hardly anyone mentioned it.

But enough of the sideshows: what about last year’s main crime fiction events? As Stuart Kelly points out on page 2, both Denise Mina and Ian Rankin delivered superlative new novels. Meanwhile, on the cosier end of the spectrum, in Alexander McCall Smith’s The Big Tent Wedding Party the redoubtable Mma Ramotswe solves a case of night-time cattle-killing with reassuring wisdom. At the sharper end, in The Retribution (Little, Brown, £18.99), Val McDermid wilfully allowed serial killer Jacko Vance to escape from the prison in which criminal profiler Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan thought he had been banged up for good in The Wire in the Blood 14 years ago. Personally, I prefer McDermid’s standalones – but I’m not going to pick a fight with the audience for Wire in the Blood, which has been screened on 130 channels worldwide.

The “New Blood” event McDermid chairs at Harrogate is usually an augury of a glittering career in crime fiction. That much seems assured for Steven Watson, whose amnesia thriller Before I Go To Sleep (Doubleday, £12.99) went on to win the top crime prize at the Galaxy National Book Awards and the crime writers’ own top prize for a debut author. Tellingly, Watson’s publishers insisted that the book should be marketed as being by SJ Watson, because most women wouldn’t believe that a man could write about women with as much insight as he shows here.

Who else should deserves the plaudits? First, the other three on McDermid’s panel – Julia Crouch’s psychological chiller Cuckoo (Headline, £12.99), Scottish author – and e-book bestseller – Gordon Ferris for The Hanging Shed (Atlantic, £7.99), and Melanie McGrath for her Alaska-set White Heat (Mantle, £16.99).

But there is simply so much crime writing around that even genuinely haunting new books often fail to make the mark they should. Former film censor Carol Topolski’s Do No Harm (Fig Tree, £12.99), about a psychopathic obstetrician, ought to have made a far bigger splash than it did. The same can be said about Mark Douglas-Home’s genuinely gripping debut The Sea Detective (Sandstone Press, £17.99).

Sometimes, though, you also have to allow room for the oldest favourites of all. And while The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz – the first new adventure to be sanctioned by the Conan Doyle estate – took us back up the steps to the first floor of 221B Baker Street with creditable panache, I remain loyal to Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (John Murray, £18.99). Every element is in place: historical accuracy (yes, Oscar did meet the Pope. Who knew?); a forbidden city, complete with maps (I love a good map with my murder), an ingenious story – and, above all, the engaging conceit that Conan Doyle – who here accompanies Wilde throughout – drew on him for his portrait, not of Sherlock, but of his smarter, older, fatter brother Mycroft. An absolute treat.