I’m not a fan of Hammett per se, but I can’t deny that he did some interesting things in his career. Not least of these is the fact that we spend the whole of The Maltese Falcon (1929) with Sam Spade but only ever observe him from the outside: rolling innumerable cigarettes, calling on people left, right, and centre, having conversations and doubtless coming to all sorts of conclusions…but never are we privy to his thoughts, and never — or so I remember it — does he explain how he achieved the conclusions he reaches. I remember becoming aware of this about halfway through, and it had a transformative effect on how I read books. Ask me about my point-of view-agenda one of these days, and I’ll go on for hours…all fuelled by the experience of reading this.

Swift, savage, amoral, and magnificently bleak, this story of two lovers conspiring to kill her husband and make a new life together treads ground that was already pretty well-worn even at the time of writing, but it feels like the blueprint of everything that followed in this vein. For my money, only Jim Thompson walked this path even half as well, with Cain himself improving on the essential themes of his earlier The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). I have little doubt that positively swathes of noir and crime writing was born when its authors first read this, and it was the desire to reread this which prompted this list in the first place, so expect a reevaluation to turn up on the blog before too long.

Consider yourselves lucky that this list isn’t simply the ten Jim Thompson books published in this series, because it was here that I first encountered the Dimestore Dostoyevsky, and nothing has been the same since. As a descent into the grip of a brutally unhinged mind, The Killer Inside Me (1952) is pitiless and at times uncomfortable reading…but, holy hell, I could not look away. It also shows the folly of dismissing Thompson as simply a sensation man, too, because the plot Lou Ford puts into action is remarkably convoluted and plays out in complex and surprising ways. Made me realise that you don’t always have to like your protagonist for the book to be compelling, and I still carry the bruises from the experience of reading this to this day.

The contemporary fiction I was reading at the time — Robert Crais, Harlan Coben, Lee Child — was full of wisecracking tough guys who knew they were badasses, but encountering Travis McGee in The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964) was the first time I read a book and thought the main character was actually cool. I’ve tried reading more MacDonald in the years since and, perhaps because I’m now an old and jaded sourpuss, nothing I’ve picked up has quite worked for me, but it was a revelation to not just be told someone was aspirational and to instead decide it on my own. Living on a houseboat and taking on cases from the attractive women who wandered into my orbit never appealed as much as it did in these pages.

Another Thompson masterpiece, and another unhinged, savage protagonist who pulls you down into the maelstrom and holds your eyes open and forces you to watch everything unfold. It’s the subtlety of Nick Corey’s insanity in Pop. 1280 (1964) which gets me — the aw-shucks nice guy act peeling away like the layers of an onion to reveal the tear-inducing brutality and native intelligence lingering below the surface. I can fault this only in that Thompson has created a world so perfect and a protagonist so complete that he has no idea how to extricate himself from the novel and so the ending sort of drops in on you unexpectedly. That, though, is perhaps also the perfect metaphor for what has unfolded, so maybe I need to reread this, too. Damn, Jim, stop adding to your TBR.