LA Crime Books of 2014

The Los Angeles Review of Books critic and commentator Woody Haut saw fit to include Darkness, Darkness in his list of favourite crime novels published in 2014.

Here’s the list, as Haut says, in no particular order :

• A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Fever by Megan Abbott (Little Brown/Picador)
• Perfidia by James Ellroy (Knopf)
• The Death Instinct by Jacques Mesrine (Tam Tam)
• Brainquake by Samuel Fuller (Hard Case Crime)
• Half World by Scott O’Connor (Simon & Schuster)
• There Ain’t No Justice by James Curtis (Jonathan Cape)
• A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre (Crown)
• Of Cops and Robbers by Mike Nicol (Old Street)
• Darkness, Darkness by John Harvey (Pegasus)
• Goodis: A Life in Black and White by Philippe Garnier (Black Pool Productions)
• The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette (NYRB Classics)
• Futures by John Barker (PM Press)

And here’s what he has to say about Darkness, Darkness …

The world-weary, jazz-loving Nottingham copper Charlie Resnick is back, tracking down a case with origins in the UK’s 1980s miners’ strike. This is one of the always-interesting Harvey’s best, mixing, as it does, the personal and the political. If, as advertised, this really is Resnick’s final appearance, he goes out, after some three decades traipsing across the mean streets of Nottingham, in style. Harvey’s Darkness, Darkness, like Nicol’s novel, switches between the present — Thatcher has only recently keeled over at the Ritz — and the past. A heartfelt portrait of the East Midlands then and now, it’s further evidence of not only how the past affects the present, but how the present demands a revision of the past.

I should point out that Woody Haut is a good friend – we often pass one another taking our early morning exercise on Hampstead Heath, he’s the one running, I’m walking, and meet for coffee every so often to talk books and movies and bemoan the latest inconsistencies in the Tottenham Hotspur soccer team – but, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time one of my 20 or so crime novels has made its way onto one of his lists of favourite books. Might just be something to it, then. Other than cronyism, that is.