July is Crime Month here at Booktopia — a month-long celebration of crime fiction and edge-of-your-seat thrillers, as well as the readers who devour them. Today, crime writing legend Ian Rankin is on the blog to share some of his favourite books with us. Read on …
A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
The film was banned in the UK but that only made reading this as a teen all the more exciting. Yes, it’s a story about gang violence but it is also beautifully written and raises big moral questions.
Buy it here
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
I studied this at university in Edinburgh in the 1980s. It’s a real Tardis of a book – bigger on the inside than the outside. It is funny and serious at the same time, and it made me want to write about Edinburgh.
Buy it here
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
My crime novels owe a huge debt to Stevenson’s short, sharp shock of a book. What makes we humans do terrible things? Crime writing continues to explore this deceptively simple question.
Buy it here
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
A book to lose yourself in. It is a mystery story and a love story and a social comedy and a dark satirical look at the gamut of English life. I probably read it every 3 or 4 years, always with pleasure and always finding something new in it.
Buy it here
The Snow Was Dirty
by Georges Simenon
I picked this up during the first Covid lockdown and was gripped by it. If you only know Simenon from his Inspector Maigret novels this may be an eye-opener. Written in the 1940s it is a hard-hitting story of an ugly life transformed, its anti-hero a venal killer who ends up in the clutches of the Nazis in occupied France. Brutal, frank and irresistible.
Buy it here
The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey
A detective, confined to a hospital bed, becomes fascinated by the story of King Richard III and the murder of the princes in the tower. Proof that the crime novel can do anything it sets its mind to – this is an unusual whodunit that works brilliantly.
Buy it here
Ian
A Song for the Dark Times
Inspector Rebus: Book 23
'He's gone...'
When his daughter Samantha calls in the dead of night, John Rebus knows it's not good news. Her husband has been missing for two days. Rebus fears the worst - and knows from his lifetime in the police that his daughter will be the prime suspect. He wasn't the best father - the job always came first - but now his daughter needs him more than ever. But is he going as a father or a detective? As he leaves at dawn to drive to the windswept coast - and a small town with...
Comments
No comments