Favourite Crime Books

What are your favourite crime books Veeky Forums be they fiction or none fiction.

Helter Skelter

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

The early Richard Stark books, up to and including Slayground
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt

Chronicle of a death foretold

John Douglas' books are good.

I can't read any crime books except for Sherlock Holmes. Everything else feels like garbage in comparison. Tried to get into Agatha Christie, felt like a poor imitation.

James. Ellroy. American Dostoyevsky.

i'm not a big crime novel fan but i picked up some of the british library crime classics series in a secondhand bookshop recently. good stuff from the golden age.
pic related is awesome

i liked this too

Die Judenbuche and early Sherlock Holmes stuff.

>Sherlock Holmes

Seriously?

But it's really fucking long. Is it worth the time?

These two are my faves as well though very different of course. Ellroy utterly surpasses Chandler and Hammet in every way.

Yes

I picked up a new Japanese novel maybe a year ago. Bought it for the cover. Turned out p good. Nice twist at the end.

Six four by hideo yokoyama

Dashell Hammet

Why?

This.
This reminded me of "Max Payne".

It is extensive and has good prose.

Eighties Elmore Leonard; James Lee Burke (even though he's mostly just doing a formula nowadays); Elroy, especially White Jazz (the winos 'hip-hopping' as werewolf movie extras kills me); Ian Rankin's original Rebus series for Edinburgh atmosphere.

Comfy and interesting read if you're into serial killers like I am.

>The early Richard Stark books, up to and including Slayground

Why stop there? I remember liking Plunder Squad and Butcher's Moon when I read them. Haven't read any of the series in years though. The later 90s/00s ones are definitely weaker.

I used to read a lot of crime fiction, but there's only a few authors whose quality really stands out in my memory: Chandler, Hammett, early James M. Cain, Ellroy, Charles Willeford, Ted Lewis, early James Crumley, and of course Westlake's first run of Richard Stark books. There's also some great one-offs like Elliott Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel and Dorothy B. Hughes' In a Lonely Place (everything else by her that I've tried has been no good).

Recently I tried Christie's Murder on the Orient Express before seeing the movie. Really, really piss-weak stuff. The movie isn't great but it surpasses the book easily.

Hard Case Crime books are pretty comfy

The lime twig.

Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon + Hannibal, but not Hannibal Rising he only wrote that book because a film studio pressured him to do so.

I'm reading pic related right now. It's child murderer Ian Brady espousing his philosophy of moral relativism while jerking off Sade and Nietzsche and then offering his own analysis of several serial killers such as Bundy and Sutcliffe. Worth looking into if you want to get some insight from a criminal rather than a detective or reporter.

>be fan of true-crime, Anne Rice stuff
>decide to read "Anatomy of Violence" on a lark
>everything is Pb, MAPK and Ca++ exicitotoxicity
>can never enjoy the genre again