Seven top antidetective novels

Eugenie Montague's short fiction has been published by NPR; Amazon; Faultline; Mid-American Review; Fiction Southeast and Flash Friday, a flash fiction series from Tin House and the Guardian Books Network. Her piece "Breakfast" was selected by Amy Hempel for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2017. Her hybrid work, Treating Attachment Disorder, won Eggtooth Editions' 2016 chapbook contest. She earned her MFA from the University of California, Irvine and lives in El Paso, Texas.

Montague's debut novel is Swallow the Ghost.

At CrimeReads she tagged seven favorite antidetective novels, including:

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

In a questionable translation of a missing manuscript, Adso of Melk, recalls the time he spent in a fourteenth-century monastery with Brother William, the Sherlock Holmes to his Watson. Monks are dying, and a power struggle is raging, involving the Emperor, the Pope, those Irish twins of the Catholic Church—the Franciscans and the Dominicans—as well as a handful of heresiarchs and a couple librarians. On the spectrum of antidetectives, it’s not a bad place to start as it offers a bit more closure than others. Then again, our Franciscan Sherlock has the occasion to say: “Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.” (If you like The Name of the Rose, you might also like A Wild Sheep’s Chase by Haruki Murakami. That Awful Mess on Via Meruluna is not very much like The Name of the Rose, but it is another classic written by another Italian author, Carlo Emilio Gadda, which is also translated by William Weaver).

Read about another novel on the list.

The Name of the Rose is on Douglas Westerbeke's list of eight top magical libraries in literature, Juliet Grames's ten books with vanishing narrators, Tessa Arlen’s top five list of historical novels, Sarah Dunant's six favorite books list, D.D. Everest's list of the ten top secret libraries of all time, Carolyne Larrington's top ten list of modern medieval tales, Jeff Somers's list of ten books you should finally have read in 2015, S. J. Parris's list of five favorite historical murder mysteries, Ian Rankin's list of five perfect mysteries, John Mullan's top ten list of the most memorable libraries in literature, Andy McSmith's top 10 list books of the 1980s, and Vanora Bennett's list of five favorite historical novels.

--Marshal Zeringue