Saturday, June 11, 2016

Mark Billingham's 6 best books

Mark Billingham is the author of the bestselling Tom Thorne detective novels, including the award-winning Lazybones and Death Message. An adaptation of his Time Of Death is being filmed for the BBC.

His latest novel is the standalone thriller, Die Of Shame.

One of Billingham's six best books, as shared at the Daily Express:
THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett

The best crime novel ever and the one I wish I had written. It’s fizzing and fat-free. Apart from introducing all the classic characters in hard-boiled crime fiction, such as the tarnished gumshoe and the femme fatale, the huge mystery at its heart is not the treasure of the title but private eye Sam Spade. Mesmerising.
Read about another book on the list.

The Maltese Falcon appears on Kathryn Williams's reading list on greed, Sara Brady's top five list of books with plots propelled by the search for an object, J. Kingston Pierce's top ten list of introductions to crime fiction and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best fat men in literature and ten of the best femmes fatales in literature, and among Armistead Maupin's five best San Francisco novels and Janet Rudolph's ten favorite San Francisco-backdropped crime novels.

--Marshal Zeringue