An astonishingly original new novel by the award-winning author of Harbor, The Room and the Chair moves from a newsroom in the American capital to a cockpit over Afghanistan, from an Iranian cemetery to a military intelligence office in suburban Washington, as it explores a world of entwined conflicts and the way narratives about violence are told, twisted, hidden, or forgotten.

Here are fine-drawn, empathetic portraits of the often overlooked actors of America’s infinite global war: the ridiculed night editor of a prestigious newspaper, an overburdened nuclear engineer, a duty-bound female fighter pilot, a religiously impassioned novice reporter, a sergeant major thrust into the responsibilities of a secretive command. Their longings and loyalties take us, in the course of one shattering year, from a forested city park where child whores set up business to a Dubai hotel where a desperate man tries to disappear, from the nighttime corridors of Walter Reed Hospital to the snow-thickened mountains of the Hindu Kush.

Told in language as stunning for its beauty as for its verisimilitude, The Room and the Chair dazzlingly bends the conventions of literary suspense to create an unforgettable, groundbreaking chronicle of today’s dangerous world.

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When Charlie Clark takes a break from his latest losing streak at the track to bring Drummond back to his Brooklyn home, they find it blown sky high—and then bullets start flying in every direction. At first, Charlie thinks his Russian “creditors” are employing aggressive collection tactics. But once Drummond effortlessly hot-wires a car as their escape vehicle, Charlie begins to suspect there’s much more to his father than meets the eye. He soon discovers that Drummond’s unremarkable career as an appliance salesman was actually a clever cover for an elaborate plan to sell would-be terrorists faulty nuclear detonators. Drummond’s intricate knowledge of the “device” is extremely dangerous information to have rattling around in an Alzheimer’s-addled brain. The CIA wants to “contain” him–and so do some other shady characters who send Charlie and Drummond on a wild chase that gives “father and son quality time” a whole new meaning.

With Once a Spy, Keith Thomson makes his debut on the thriller stage with energy, wit, and style to spare.

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Here’s the trailer!

After the trailer, check out Thomson’s discussion of that amazing Com-Bat on The Huffington Post!

OCCUPIED CITY: A fierce, exquisitely dark novel that plunges us into post–World War II Occupied Japan in a Rashomon-like retelling of a mass poisoning (based on an actual event). On January 26, 1948, a man claiming to be a public health official has been assigned by Occupation authorities to treat a bank’s employees who might have been exposed to a dysentery outbreak. Yet soon after drinking the medicine he administers, twelve are dead, and four are unconscious . . . Twelve voices tell the story of the murder from different perspectives (including one from the grave), and each voice enlarges and deepens the portrait of a city and a people making their way out of a war-induced hell.
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TOKYO YEAR ZERO: It is August 1946—one year after the Japanese surrender—and women are turning up dead all over Tokyo. Detective Minami of the Metropolitan Police—irreverent, angry, despairing—goes on the hunt for a killer known as the Japanese Bluebeard—a decorated former Imperial soldier who raped and murdered at least ten women amidst the turmoil of post-war Tokyo. As he undertakes the case, Minami is haunted by his own memories of atrocities that he can no longer explain or forgive. Unblinking in its vision of a nation in a chaotic, hellish period in its history, Tokyo Year Zero is a darkly lyrical and stunningly original crime novel.

And, in case you haven’t picked it up just yet, or they’re just at the top of your list of the “best books you’re not reading”, Vintage has THE RED RIDING QUARTET, the story of the Ripper murders (Nineteen Seventy-Four and Nineteen Seventy-Seven combine in the first of the three films, so you should read all four novels to match up with your movie-going . . . )

NINETEEN SEVENTY-FOUR: Book One follows Eddie Dunford, a newly minted crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Post. His first story is about Clare Kemplay, a young girl recently found brutally murdered. While the police department and other crime reporters at the newspaper believe it’s an isolated incident, Eddie finds a pattern between Clare’s disappearance and those of other girls from a few years earlier. Despite his better judgment, and against the advice of others, he starts to dig deep. What he finds is a nightmare of corruption, violence, blackmail, and obsession that ultimately leads to a shocking, explosive conclusion.

NINETEEN SEVENTY-SEVEN: Book Two. It’s summer in Leeds and the city is anxiously awaiting the Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Detective Bob Fraser and Jack Whitehead, a reporter at the Post, however, have other things on their minds-mainly the fact that someone is murdering prostitutes. The killer is quickly dubbed the “Yorkshire Ripper” and each man, on their own, works tirelessly to catch him. But their investigations turn grisly as they each engage in affairs with the prostitutes they are supposedly protecting. As the summer progresses, the killings accelerate and it seems as if Fraser and Whitehead are the only men who suspect or care that there may be more than one killer at large.

NINETEEN EIGHTY: Book Three. While Yorkshire is terrorized by the Ripper, the corrupt police continue to prosper. To give the case some new life, Peter Hunter, a “clean” cop from nearby Manchester, is brought in to offer a fresh perspective. As he goes about setting up a new case under the radar, he suffers the same fate as those who previously attempted to get in the way of the Ripper: his house is burned down, his wife threatened. But he soldiers on. And as he comes face to face with unthinkable evil, Hunter struggles to maintain his reputation, his sanity, and his life.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE: Book Four and the shocking conclusion of the series. With three separate narrators whose paths are on a collision course, Peace makes a dark study of perverted justice, retribution, and urban decay. Maurice Jobson is a Yorkshire cop whose greed and corruption has rotted the police force to the core; BJ is a local street thug who finds he can no longer safely lurk in the shadows; and John Piggott, a lawyer, is as honest and forthright as they come. His investigation of a long-cold murder might just be the cure for Yorkshire’s woes, but he’ll need to get through it alive first.

Pick up David Peace’s great books today!

WHO IS HENNING MANKELL?

Henning Mankell has completely dominated the genre of Scandinavian crime literature. He started writing fiction and nonfiction in his late 20s, but it wasn’t until his 40s, when his first novel starring Kurt Wallander, Faceless Killers, was published in 1991, that his fame spread across Sweden and then all of Europe. Mankell now travels the world and divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique (where he collaborates with the theater Teatro Avenida in Maputo). He says, “I stand with one foot in the snow and one foot in the sand.”

Mankell always wanted to be a writer, and now says “The only dream I had in my life is what I am doing now,” yet his early career was more steeped in criminal justice than great literature. His father was a judge in the small Swedish town of Sveg, and growing up in an apartment above the courthouse, it was almost inevitable that Mankell would be interested in the justice system and how it works. (Once his toy cars were used to demonstrate how a traffic accident occurred.) His novels are steeped in blood and mayhem, but also in the idea that an institution—a court system, a worldwide conglomerate, etc.—may be as dangerous as a knife-wielding criminal.

However, Mankell’s novels represent much more than just a chilly Nordic attitude. He creates unusually rich global portraits, in which mysteries extend far beyond their immediate reach. His early plays and novels have an international scope and are almost always about social injustice and the solidarity between nations necessary for obtaining peace. Mankell said, “I am like an artist who must stand close to the canvas to paint, but then take a step back to see what I have painted. Africa has provided my life with that movement. Some things you can only see at a distance.”

And what does the future hold for Mankell? More novels, he says, at least “until death interrupts. . . . But ars longa vita brevis — art is long but life is short. There will always be more stories than time.”

WHO IS KURT WALLANDER?

After many years living full-time in Africa, Mankell returned to Sweden in May 1989, wrote Faceless Killers, the book that introduced Kurt Wallander to the world. “I had been away from Sweden for some time,” he said, “and when I returned I became aware that racism was exploding and I decided to write about that. To me racism is a crime, and I thought: Ok, I’ll use the crime story. Then I realized I needed a police officer, and I picked the name Wallander out of the telephone directory.”

In Faceless Killers, an elderly couple is murdered on an isolated farm after being brutally tortured. The woman’s final word—“foreign”—unleashes a racist and xenophobic frenzy in the small town of Ystad, which August Strindberg described as “a nest of pirates and fraudsters.” The policeman Kurt Wallander (currently personified to great acclaim by Kenneth Branagh in a BBC adaptation, above) arrives to take the case, and he is not much more attractive than the town’s denizens—as his TV personifier has gone to great lengths to emulate, he has an unshaven face, red-rimmed eyes, and dirty laundry. He drinks too much, eats too much fast food, is usually recovering from a hangover. Yes, his brilliance is unwavering, but frankly he’s also a mess, prompting many readers to scream out “Get it together, man, and take a shower while you’re at it!” This is no cool Sam Spade, no purely professional George Smiley; Wallander is much more like his readers than most literary detectives. He’s flawed, with foot-in-mouth moments and sometimes following the wrong hunches, yet he, like us, can’t resist his own curiosity. Wallander has fans all over the world, and you can even tour Sweden in Wallander’s footsteps. He has all the traits of a classic curmudgeonly gumshoe, and Mankell’s series brilliant chronicles how the cases he’s solved have shaped his dark perspective on the world. But be sure that Mankell and Wallander are not the same person; Mankell notes, “Wallander and I have only three things in common: our age, our belief that no one is born evil, and our love of opera. If he were a real person, I don’t think that we would be friends. I don’t really like him, and that’s the way I like to keep it.”

Why You Will Love THE MAN FROM BEIJING:

In a recent interview with the Irish Times, Mankell said, “my books all have in common my search for understanding of the terrible world we are living in and ways to change it.” Reading The Man from Beijing makes this abundantly clear—though Mankell begins with a vicious crime, the roots of this crime are in the injustices perpetuated hundreds of years earlier, through the systematic oppression of the powerless by the powerful. The scope of this novel is extraordinary—this is a mystery where the motive reaches far back into the past, its tendrils extending into wrongs perpetrated centuries before the crime scene we must explain in the present day. On top of all of this, Mankell writes the best, goriest, most surprising and off-putting crime scenes I’ve ever read. He puts the blood where you haven’t seen it, and when the brutality emerges before you, you feel both the savagery of the crime and the immediate intrigue that comes with guessing at its perpetrator. (In the final Larsson book, careful readers will note a neat little homage to Faceless Killers in the form of a peculiar knot in a hangman’s rope. Clearly Larsson owes something major to Mankell’s great work, especially in crafting Mikael Blomkvist’s initial fall from grace.)

The novel opens in January 2006 in the Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen. A wolf emerges from the woods, smelling blood in the air, and finds a carcass to drag home before the village dogs can get to it:

“The wolf starts eating when he comes to the edge of the trees. It is easy, as the flesh has not yet frozen. He is very hungry now. Having pulled off a leather shoe, he starts gnawing away at an ankle.

It snowed during the night but stopped before dawn. As the wolf eats his fill, snowflakes once again start dancing down toward the frozen ground.” (p. 4)

Nineteen people have been massacred; “it was as if a blood-laden hurricane had stormed through the village just as the old people who lived there were getting up” (p. 13). And in the middle of this horrifying scene, the only clue is a red ribbon.

Judge Birgitta Roslin has particular reason to be shocked: she is the first person to link the murders to a much larger plot when she sees her mother’s adoptive parents, the Andréns, are among the dead. As a reader, you’ll get behind Roslin when you realize she’s as magnetic and compelling as Wallander. Smart, tough, but compassionate from head-to-toe, Roslin’s keen intellect and her passion to clear away the lies and conspiracies drive the novel forward. She discovers the nineteenth-century diary of an Andrén ancestor—a gang master on the American transcontinental railway—that describes brutal treatment of Chinese slave workers. Roslin follows the diary’s path to Beijing, then to Zimbabwe and Mozambique, all the while excavating the motives behind the horrific murders in Hesjövallen.

The novels of Henning Mankell, from his earliest efforts to the Wallander chronicles, have provided readers with one hell of an addictive, spellbinding ride, and The Man from Beijing proves to be no different. In just two short weeks, this thrilling new novel is up for grabs, so be sure to get your hands on a copy!

For more information about Occupied City, click here.

The Red Riding films will have their theatrical release in the U.S. this month. Read The New York Times’s feature on the series and watch the trailer:

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December 1: In case you missed it, the illustrious P.D. James (she of the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame) has issued her missive on what makes detective fiction work. Talking About Detective Fiction should be the first thing on your reading list this season, if only to make you add four or five more titles to your near-tumbling pile of books. (Don’t forget to check out her rules of detective fiction applied to our great list!)

January 12th: Now, an utterly addictive new book from John Burdett, The Godfather of Kathmandu. Sonchai Jitpleecheep—Burdett’s Royal Thai Police detective with the hard-bitten demeanor and Buddhist soul—is summoned to the most shocking crime scene of his career. If you dug the adventures in Bangkok 8, Bangkok Haunts, and Bangkok Tattoo, you’ll dig this one.

February 2: Cold winter winds will bring you to David Peace’s Occupied City, a Rashomon-like telling of a mass poisoning in post-World War II occupied Japan. If you’ve read the Red Riding books, you know Peace is great at this kind of edge-of-your-seat storytelling, and this follows his stunning novel Tokyo Year Zero, which James Ellroy called “part historical stunner, part Kurosawa crime film, an original all the way.”

February 9th: Peter Straub’s A Dark Matter arrives from Doubleday, and the premise alone leaves me craving a copy: a gathering of acolytes for a charismatic guru results in a gruesome death and widespread trauma. As the survivor stories emerge, you understand why Lincoln Child called Straub “the most important voice in suspense fiction today.”

February 16th: I’ve been waiting for the new Henning Mankell, The Man from Beijing, ever since my first taste of the brilliant Wallander series. Here, Mankell starts with a brutal murder in a small Swedish hamlet, and it’s up to his fascinating new hero Judge Birgitta Roslin to trace the crime’s roots back to worlds away and over a century earlier, to a personal vendetta passed down through generations. If the chilly setting of Stieg Larsson gave you a taste for great Swedish writing, you must pick up the new Mankell and see the master at work.

February 23rd: Two fantastic new thrillers on one day! First, Doubleday brings you S.J. Parris’s Heresy, a thriller set at Oxford University in 1583. Giordano Bruno–monk, scientist, philosopher, and magician–is on an unofficial assignment to uncover a Catholic plot to overthrow the queen, and when Oxford students start turning up dead, his job only gets harder. I love it when historical fiction gets into the mystery game…

That same day, Pantheon also delivers Nigel McCrery’s Tooth and Claw. In this electrifying new novel, Detective Lapslie must overcome his almost uncontrollable case of synesthesia (in which his brain tends to crosswire his senses) to investigate the murder of a television reporter. With the police pressing him for results, the media bearing down on him, and the synesthesia going wild, Lapslie is reaching his breaking point.

March: On March 3rd, dive into Keith Thomson’s Once a Spy, which, like McCrery’s book, has the human brain as one of its primary villains. In this new mystery from Doubleday, Charlie Clark is running for his life after his Brooklyn apartment goes up in smoke. He thinks his pursuers might be chasing down his gambling debts, but then he realizes his father Drummond might be the real target. But why?, Charlie wonders, when his father is an Alzheimer’s-addled old man and a former “appliance salesman” ? The Clarks must both dodge the threat and uncover the mysteries buried in Drummond’s rapidly deteriorating brain, making for a case of forgotten–not mistaken–identity as thrilling as the Jason Bourne trilogy.

April 20th: In late April, lead into our spectacular summer season with Michael Harvey’s final chapter in his Chicago trilogy, The Third Rail. Harvey’s tough-talking, Aeschylus-quoting, former Irish cop turned-PI, Michael Kelley, is back in a sizzling murder mystery that pits him against a merciless sniper on the loose. Kelly find sthat the murderer has an unnerving link to his own past, something he’d prefer to leave unexamined, but when his girlfriend Rachel Swenson is abducted, he has no choice but to find the killer himself. For Harvey, Chicago is a primo setting for a great caper, and if you haven’t checked out the writer Michael Connelly called “a major new voice”, now’s the time.

And finally, what better way to head into your summer than with the newest installment of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency? Pantheon brings you The Double Comfort Safari Club, in which Mma Ramotswe finds herself solving a mystery while on safari–no doubt sorting out a few grumpy hippopotamuses along the way (or is it hippopotami?) Mc Call Smith never fails to deliver something utterly delicious, so make sure you have this one on your list.

Lots to look forward to this upcoming season–what are your picks?

Baroness James is no slouch when it comes to detective fiction: she’s written over twenty books, was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame in 2008, and is nearing her ninetieth birthday with no signs of losing her title as the queen of detective fiction. It is only fitting that’s she’s now delivered her rules of the trade, Talking About Detective Fiction, and while she focuses on the evolution of the British and American classics, she lays out a few principles that are clearly applicable to some of our most exciting titles.

James is an ideal tutor; her book is a primer to the genre, how it came about, its early forms and where its first fans came from, how Sherlock Holmes was established as the model detective, and how later writers shook up the genre. The early writers James discusses often appear in our Everyman’s Library, so you can easily follow along:

Start with Jane Austen’s Emma (in which the scandalous secret at its core is “the unrecognized relationships between the limited number of characters”). James defines a detective novel first and foremost by its ingenuity, and Emma Woodhouse is one of the most ingenious (and, naturally, meddling) characters in the Austen canon. She is a detective of relationships, making matches and yet never realizing who her match might be. At the end of the novel, James says, “when all becomes plain and the characters are at last united with their right partners, we wonder how we could have been so deceived.”

Follow that with Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (chock-full of forensic details and shifting suspicions that would be welcome to any regular consumer of Law and Order or CSI). A diamond stolen from an Indian shrine, meant to be a young girl’s eighteenth birthday present, goes missing, and one of the suspects ends up taking over the investigation of the theft. James makes particular note of Collins’ attention to the importance of physical clues, all of which are made available to us so the detective and the reader have the same information.

Finish with a glimpse of the future in our newest EML collection of Detective Stories, which contains both new favorites from Sara Paretsky and Ruth Rendell to old standards by Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe. The stories vary in their scope (one crime scene being a weekly Go game in Chicago, another an attack in a stylish flat on the Rue de Caulaincourt) and suspects, but all offer ample evidence of the detective novel’s enduring appeal.

Though James praises Austen and Collins, her rules mainly apply to their literary descendants who defined the classic detective novel by a few key characteristics:

“a closed circle of suspects, each with motive, means, and opportunity for the crime”: A perfect example of this device? On a dark and stormy night, several people with dark intentions assemble in an old manor, and one leaves with a knife in his back. Peter Mayle’s The Vintage Caper uses this convention beautifully: a small group of European oenophiles who might have taken it upon themselves to steal a valuable collection. Dan Brown, too, set up a perfectly small circle (albeit a very powerful one) in The Da Vinci Code, using one group (the Priori of Zion) against another (Opus Dei). Luckily, Brown writes them as galvanizing forces rather than central characters, and so we never lose sight of the actual crime in question.

“A detective, either amateur or professional, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve it:” This could be any number of our protagonists, though very few of them are now called “detectives.” Now they might be journalists or hackers thrown together on a decades-old case, a former professor hoping to unlock his father’s past, or amateurs who find trouble everywhere they go. But all these characters have the instincts that James prizes: insatiable curiosity, a sense of fundamental right and wrong (even for the most cynical), and a drive to solev the case no matter how difficult. For a classic detective in a contemporary novel, you can’t find much better than Mme Precious Ramotswe of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. Though she may have come to the detective profession late in life, her agency functions because she carries all the skills of an African Sherlock Holmes; her personal motives are sometimes inscrutable, but she’s got a method to her work, meticulous attention to detail, and a deep understanding of human motives and weaknesses.

“By the end of the book, a solution which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel with deceptive cunning but essential fairness”: Most modern novels don’t follow this rule—after all, when your great protagonist has a 3-book contract, why not extend the original mystery for as long as possible? (This was a trend that started when readers kept pushing Arthur Conan Doyle to continue his stories with Sherlock Holmes.) However, for authors with serial subject matter—say, the intrigues of the law and the criminal justice system—each novel’s mystery has to come to a logical and “fair” conclusion, as with John Grisham’s great series of legal thrillers. From A Time to Kill to The Associate, each of Grisham’s novels wraps up like a court case, with all evidence presented, all suspects thoroughly investigated, and a degree of moral certainty with the rendered verdict that, however ambivalent it might seem, satisfies the reader…

James’ rules hold up fairly well for the early novels, but when she goes through the Golden Age of detective fiction, all rules are thrown away. Gone are closed circles, avenging detectives, and logical, fair conclusions—and what arrives are cities and countries gone wrong; detectives as fallible, misguided, and often cynical to the point of  criminality (see: Lizbeth Salander); and endings that, though they may put villains away, feel less like justice than we’d expect. The new novels “deal with violent death and violent emotions . . . We are required to feel no real pity for the victim, no empathy for the murderer, no sympathy for the falsely accused. For whomever the bell tolls, it doesn’t toll for us.”

As the American hardboiled crime detectives enter the genres, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler redefined what was possible in a detective novel—it’s harder, less neat, less fair, but, James insists, unflaggingly entertaining. On Hammett, she says his stories “are not about restoring the moral order, nor are they set in a world in which the problem of evil can be solved by Poirot’s little grey cells or Miss Marple’s cozy homilies . . . Hammett knew . . . how precarious is the moral tightrope which the private investigator daily walks in his battle with the criminal.” The new detective is as troubled as the villain, and this makes for a very different kind of reading experience, one which, after the rise of film noir, never fully returns to its classical roots and rules. If you pick up any book by James Ellroy or John Burdett, it becomes clear that the detective novel has changed dramatically since its English manor days, and many argue for the better (if much darker).

So where does that leave James with contemporary fiction? What does she see for its future—and which books are her “must-reads”?

Now that the detective novel into an international phenomenon, James calls out Henning Mankell, whose Kurt Wallander series confirms the reemergence of the professional detective as a desirable protagonist, and establishes Mankell as one of the preeminent novelists working in the genre today. (As someone who’s had a peek at his newest non-Wallander book, The Man from Beijing, he gives you one of the most brutal, magnetically-described crime scenes in recent memory.)

From her appreciation of fiction’s new knowledge of crime science, you can bet that Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter would earn a place in her pantheon of great detectives AND criminals. (How often do you get both sets of knowledge in one narrator?)

Given her extensive section praising the growing number of female authors, Stella Rimington would have to be present with her Liz Carlyle novels, written from Rimington’s true-life experience of the MI5.

And finally, dozens of the authors noted in James’ research can be found in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulp, both of which I’ll be racing through over the holiday break. If you’re not reading to dive into novels just yet, these short story collections will be more than enough to give you a feel for the genre.

At the very beginning of her book, James quotes the poet Robert Browning as saying this:

“Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist.”

James has staged an exquisite defense of Browning’s assessment: we are on the “dangerous edge of things,” at least when it comes to our reading habits. But of course, the more you read, the savvier a critic you become . . .

“[James is] a master…Nothing is as it first appears.”—The Boston Globe

Cheverell Manor is a beautiful old house in Dorset, which its owner, the famous plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell, uses as a private clinic. When the investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, arrives to have a disfiguring facial scar removed, she has every expectation of a successful operation and a peaceful week recuperating. But the clinic houses an implacable enemy and within hours of the operation Rhoda is murdered. Commander Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate a case complicated by old crimes and the dark secrets of the past. But Before Rhoda’s murder is solved, a second horrific death adds to the complexities of one of Dalgliesh’s most perplexing and fascinating cases.

Read additional praise.

“A big, fat, rich piece of history-flavored fantasy…Imagined with remarkable thoroughness.” —Time

“…The second volume in the Acacia Trilogy is another strong effort once again led by David’s accomplished and poised writing, rich characterization and world-building that wonderfully reflects the cultural and racial diversity of our own world.” —Fantasy Book Critic

Read through an Author Chat with David Anthony Durham hosted by Suvudu.

Visit David Anthony Durham’s blog for more information about the Acacia Trilogy.