Forgotten No More

It’s satisfying when we see projects being kicked off on this page and then picked up elsewhere. The latest case of said phenomenon involves The Rap Sheet’s “one book project,” which had us asking more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.” Apparently, Wallace Stroby, the New Jersey author of The Barbed Wire Kiss and The Heartbreak Lounge, has decided to continue highlighting such works in his own blog.

Stroby’s choice for this page of an underappreciated novel was Any Cold Jordan (1987), by David Bottoms. But over the five months since our “one book project” was posted, he has written about three additional candidates, all of them excellent: 1969’s Fat City, by Leonard Gardner (“a beautifully etched portrait of the underside of American life, as told through the stories of two men in Stockton, Calif., in the late 1950s”); 1993’s The Devil Knows You’re Dead, by Lawrence Block (“It is, in my mind, the ne plus ultra of the [Matt] Scudder books and maybe one of the ten best private eye novels ever.”); and 1989’s Extenuating Circumstances, by Jonathan Valin (“It was Valin’s eighth novel about Cincinnati private detective Harry Stoner--and the most uncompromising.”).

We look forward to reading more from Stroby on this subject. And if anybody else has spotted blogs or other Web sites adding their own contributions to The Rap Sheet’s original list of underappreciated crime novels, please drop us a line here.