Paula Hawkins – author of one of the bestselling thrillers of the 21st century – is a crime author who needs little introduction. That 2015 book of hers, The Girl on the Train, was translated into 50 languages, adapted into a film, turned into a stage production – and inspired a whole new genre of unreliable narrator novels.
All Hawkins has written since – Into the Water, A Slow Fire Burning, and most recently, The Blue Hour – has been equally gripping and intelligent. But what of the books she reads herself? Here, the author shares her favourite crime thrillers which have shaped her life and writing…
“I can still remember, almost 30 years after I first picked it up, reading the final pages of In the Cut, the shock at its denouement – not some out-of-nowhere twist of the sort that cheapens so many thrillers – but the ending I dreaded, the one she’d been telling me was coming but which I didn’t want to accept.
In the 90s, Moore, who had written three literary novels about families but had been reading a lot of detective fiction, started to wonder what it would look like if “a woman wrote a noir”. The result is this taut, steamy thriller about a teacher New York who finds herself drawn into a murder investigation.
Atmospheric, intelligent and bold, In the Cut was reissued in 2015 after a period out of print. Re-reading it then, I was struck by how fresh it feels: Moore’s take on sexual violence and sexual desire, on language and class and race is sharp and relevant; like all the best writers she poses more questions than she answers.”
W&N Essentials, £8.99
“With the killer named on page one, there is no whodunnit to keep the reader turning the pages. Instead, in this quietly menacing tale of obsession, shame and sibling rivalry, we are compelled by the puzzle presented by the family at the heart of the novel, with all its fraught and complicated relationships.
“What makes Vine irresistible is the shrewdness of her psychological insight, applied not to serial killers or criminal masterminds, but to us, to ordinary people. In a later novel, Vine wrote that ‘much of the interest and terror induced by great crimes is due, not to their abnormal content, but to that in them which is normal’. In other words, the love and jealousy and everyday hurts that make up everyday life.”
Penguin, £9.99
“Highsmith was enthralled by the idea that anyone – the unremarkable neighbour; the dullest of co-workers – might be harbouring some terrible secret or sordid proclivity. ‘I can think of nothing more apt to set the imagination stirring, drifting, creating, than the idea – the fact – that anyone you walk past on the pavement anywhere might be a sadist, a compulsive thief or even a murderer,’ she famously wrote.
Her debut explores this idea, taking as its starting point a chance meeting between two young men which leads to a macabre folie à deux. Before our eyes we watch a good man turn murderous, corrupted by guilt.
Decades after it was published, Strangers has lost none of its power to disturb. High-concept and economic in style, it feels disarmingly modern, not least because we are allowed a glimpse into the mind of a killer. Decades before we rooted for Villanelle or Amy Dunne, Tony Soprano or Walter White, we were rooting for Highsmith’s Guy Haines.”
Vintage, £9.99
“She has written novels far more celebrated than this, but When Will There be Good News?, the third of Atkinson’s literary detective novels, remains my favourite. Opening with a shocking act of violence, the narrative then slows to a meander as we are guided through Edinburgh society high and low, through comedy and senseless tragedy and all the all the myriad ways in which men hurt women.
If you’re averse to coincidence, go elsewhere – personally I find far more preposterous things in fiction than the occasional quirk of fate. If you are compelled by gorgeous prose and deft plotting, by characters who will stay with you long after you read the final page, then Atkinson is for you.”
Black Swan, £9.99
“The brutality and ugliness described in Cormac McCarthy’s work might be all the more horrifying because of the beauty of his sentences. Elegant and intricate but nevertheless pared to the bone, McCarthy leaves no place for ambiguity or ambivalence; no reason for doubt and nowhere to hide.
Are his villains more terrifying for the same reason? I can think of no more frightening antagonist in modern fiction than Anton Chigurh, that ‘true and living prophet of destruction’, a relentless and pitiless assassin, subject to his own unquestionable code.
For all its violence there is a tenderness at the heart of No Country; we cannot help but empathise with the novel’s protagonist, the stalwart Sheriff Bell, who navigates all the drugs and guns and blood-soaked horror with bewildered stoicism, nostalgic all the while for a better world which probably never existed.”
Picador, £10.99
The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins is published by Doubleday and is out now
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