A concise reading list from Jeff Bercuson highlighting a classic hardboiled favourite, three historical crime novels with Canadian settings or sensibilities, and a bonus pick outside the genre.
Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels — especially The Drowning Pool — are recommended for their hardboiled prose and an unforgettable detective voice.
Two Toronto-set historical crime novels, The Road to Heaven and The Get, offer contrasting takes on 1960s city life: slow-burn noir versus Elmore Leonard-style gangster yarn.
Gil Adamson’s The Outlander is a literary chase story in the 19th-century Canadian West, notable for lyrical, dreamlike prose.
4 Crime Novels, and a Bonus Pick · Blog Post · 49th Shelf A recommended reading list by the author of The Queen of Florida (ECW Press). June who delves into the deep underbelly of paradise—Boca—to get everything she knows she deserves. In this list, Jeff Bercuson shares his favourite crime novels, plus one bonus.
It is my favourite book, my desert island book, the book that I've read more times than any other—probably because I cannot finish it without immediately going back to the first page. I really wish I had known that at the time, because it would have been great fun to imagine the third-greatest detective novelist of all time skulking around the fourth-floor stacks of the Welden Library, trying to decide between Red Harvest and The Long Goodbye. Because these books are damn seedy—and I mean that as a compliment!
The truth is, I can barely remember the plot of it. The same goes for The Galston Case, The Chill, The Zebra-Striped Hearse. Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson's The Road to Heaven and Dietrich Kaltheis's The Get.
When I wrote The Appeal on spec in 2018, it was my first novel and, with no deadline or editor waiting for the manuscript, I had a ball. It’s a lively story told in a modern epistolary style (that’s emails
I labor intensively over the twists in my novels, and what strikes me most of all is that the best writers make a twist look so easy, a flick of a wrist in a magic trick. In all of my
There’s no mystery here: We all love a good detective novel.
With some mysteries, whodunnit is only part of the story. These nine fascinating books all feature environs that play a major role in keeping the suspense high and the puzzle maddening: “Wheredunnits?” Whatever you might call them, they’re sure to
Canada is having a bit of a moment. The threat of annexation from the United States has awoken a sense of pride and respect for all that is Canadian made, including crime fiction. Murderous Ink Press, known primarily for its themed anthologies, has picked an... The post Crimeucopia Presents Canadian Chronicles first ap
The adaptation of a fantastic crime trilogy, the next installment in a cozy crime series, a fall mystery/thriller reading list to preorder now, and more.
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