Criminal Intent 

I was a fan of Crime Fiction long before I read my first crime-based novel. I had grown up on a diet of Film Noir and the classic crime series from the 1970’s and beyond. Even in the 1960’s I remember shows such as ‘Z-Cars’ as well as movie adaptations of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. Apart from the inevitable drama I loved the, all too often failed, attempts to create the perfect crime and especially the follow up investigation, the searching for clues, the putting together of evidence, the theories and ultimately the puzzle solving. 

But I was never a great one for other types of puzzles growing up. I never enjoyed crosswords or (much later) things like Sudoku. I did ‘play’ with jigsaws for a while, but only those my mother bought and never for long. What I did enjoy in crime shows and movies was the attempt to understand the human element in the puzzle that surrounded various crimes. Naturally, because of the drama element, most of these crime shows revolved around murder. The interesting bit was, I’m guessing for most people, a mixture of understand the motive (and maybe the ingenious methods) for the crime as well as the ingenious pattern of the investigation. The payoff, for me and no doubt many others, was always successfully detecting the killer (or perpetrator of the crime) before its revealed to the viewer/reader. That’s always very satisfying. Almost as satisfying, however, is a clever reveal that the viewer/reader did NOT get ahead of time. 

One of the major attractions of Crime fiction to me is the sheer variety out there. Not only is there the home grown and home-based contemporary crime fiction, but there’s crime fiction to be devoured from across the globe. Nordic noir used to be (and still is I think) big but now we’re having access to crime fiction from Africa and points East. There’s lots to choose from and that’s before we start digging into Historical crime fiction – from Roman times, post-Norman Invasion, Victorian, both World Wars and so on. Then there’s Classic crime – again these days from across the globe – and that’s before we start moving onto the more exotic types such as Sci-Fi Crime where the methods and investigations have strange (but hopefully believable) SF elements and even Fantasy crime where Magic is used both in the commission and resolution of criminal activity. Oh, and not forgetting the ever-fascinating sub-genre of Vampire detectives! 

The fact that Crime fiction seems endlessly inventive and (at least seemingly) endlessly expandable is a big selling point for me. As long as authors keep coming up with interesting ways to kill people and steal stuff and even more interesting ways (and detectives) to investigate and detect it I for one will be more than happy to lose myself in a good Crime thriller and hopefully beat the author/detective to the solution. MUCH more crime reading to come!