Picky, Picky

While those of us responsible for The Rap Sheet and its great mothership, January Magazine, hammer out the last details of our Best Books of 2006 feature, other Internet-accessible publications are pumping out their own necessarily biased choices. Unfortunately, most of those don’t seem to contain much crime fiction. Time magazine, for instance, lists not a single mystery title among its top 10 choices, though it does include Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, an excellent partial history of America’s Southwest told through the lens of the life of wilderness scout Kit Carson. Almost equally negligent is The Times of London, which features nary a crime novel in its top 10, but does award an honorable mention to C.J. Sansom’s Winter in Madrid, a thriller set in 1940, following the Spanish Civil War.

Kate Atkinson’s crime-novelish One Good Turn ranks among the San Francisco Chronicle’s favorite books of 2006. And that California daily includes on its lengthy rundown of “other notable works” published during the last year both The People’s Act of Love, James Meeks’ compelling tale of fanaticism and murder in a World War I-era Siberian village, and Julian Barnes’ Arthur & George, which fictionalizes a real episode in Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, when the creator of Sherlock Holmes sought to help a half-Indian solicitor accused of mutilating cattle and penning obscene missives to his own family. Meanwhile, the London Observer declares Michael Cox’s hefty tome, The Meaning of Night, to be “well worth the eye--and wrist--strain” as it reveals the criminal underworld of Victorian London.

C. Max Magee has been collecting “best of 2006” book lists from all over the blogosphere for his own Web log, The Millions. Again, the crime-fiction pickings are pretty damn paltry, but Magee has featured mystery novelist Sandra Scoppotone’s list, which includes Jess Walter’s Citizen Vince, a tale of crime and politics in Washington state in 1980, and Daniel Woodrell’s haunting Winter’s Bone. Meanwhile, and as one should expect, Oline Cogdill, the mystery fiction columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, presents a “best of” list that’s only about recent crime novels. Her nominees for the best such works of 2006 are:

1. The Night Gardener, by George Pelecanos (Little, Brown)
2. A tie: The Two Minute Rule, by Robert Crais (Simon & Schuster), and Echo Park, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
3. No Good Deeds, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
4. Promise Me, by Harlan Coben (Dutton)
5. Kidnapped, by Jan Burke (Simon & Schuster)
6. Piece of My Heart, by Peter Robinson (Morrow)
7. Prisoner of Memory, by Denise Hamilton (Scribner)
8. Stripped, by Brian Freeman (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
9. Silence of the Grave, by Arnaldur Indridason (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press)
10. A Garden of Vipers, by Jack Kerley (Dutton)
11. Killer Instinct, by Joseph Finder (St. Martin’s Press)
12. A Long Shadow, by Charles Todd (Morrow)
13. White Shadow, by Ace Atkins (Putnam)

Finally, although it comes from an author, rather than a regular, paid critic, I want to note that when asked by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to identify the best book he read in 2006, author Tom Robbins (Villa Incognito) selected Don’t Point That Thing at Me, by Kyril Bonfiglioli, explaining: “Laden with ornate language and a dangerous wit, this is the first volume in a reissued trilogy of British comic crime novels that feature a degenerate aristocratic art dealer and his thug of a butler. It’s like P.G. Wodehouse with live ammunition.”

You just never know who’s reading in this genre.