Okay, I haven't worked out yet if the python was an April Fool's Joke or not, but this is such an amazing post from the Rap Sheet, that I reproduce it in full. With comments. Where appropriate.
It Was the Best of Crimes: Critics’ Choice In the summer of 2000, British critics H.R.F. “Harry” Keating and Mike Ripley were commissioned by the London Times newspaper to conduct a survey of the best crime novels (mysteries/spy stories/thrillers) of the 20th century, choosing one per year, 1900-1999. This, said the two critics, couldn’t be done so neatly, but what they would do was select 100 books to represent a century which began with the recall of Sherlock Holmes and ended with the death of Inspector Morse.
In the end, Ripley cheated a bit by nominating 101 titles to include Keating’s own The Perfect Murder from 1964, which modesty had forbidden its author from suggesting.
The survey, with a brief justification for each title, was published in a 16-page supplement to The Times on Saturday, September 30, 2000. The basic list of titles selected is republished here for the first time as a tribute to author and scholar Harry Keating, who died earlier this week at age 84. (Titles and years are as when published in the UK -- and I interpolate my thoughts, where I have any thoughts at all.)
1902: The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Yes, brilliant)
1903: The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers (Have it; have trouble reading it.)
– Edgar Wallace (Oh yes, brilliant again)1907: The Thinking Machine – Jacques Futrelle (Never heard of it)
1908: The Circular Staircase – Mary Roberts Rinehart (Remember reading that, and it was good)
1911: The Innocence of Father Brown – G.K. Chesterton (Oh yes, one of those books you remember ..)
1912: Trent’s Last Case – E.C. Bentley
1915: The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan (Unreadable now, unfortunately)
1918: Uncle Abner – Melville Davisson Post
1926: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie (This woman was so-o-o reliable, always good)
1928: Ashenden (The British Agent) – W. Somerset Maugham (Funny, that - thought I had read everything of his, but this is unfamiliar)
1929: Little Caesar – W.R. Burnett
1929: Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
1930: The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett (Tough times demanded tough sleuths, I guess)
1930: The Documents in the Case – Dorothy L. Sayers, Robert Eustace
1931: Malice Aforethought – Francis Iles (Who?)
1932: Before the Fact – Francis Iles
1933: The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers (Oh yes, was it that long ago? Great book, even 80 years later)
1934: Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie (See above, but this was one of her greatest)
1934: The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain (Saw the movie, too violent for me; a hint of the Stephen King books to come)
1934: Death of a Ghost – Margery Allingham (Another great, reliable writer)
1935: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
1935: The Hollow Man – John Dickson Carr
1935: The League of Frightened Men – Rex Stout
1936: The Wheel Spins – Ethel Lina White
1938: Lament for a Maker – Michael Innes
1938: The Beast Must Die – Nicholas Blake
1939: The Mask of Dimitrios – Eric Ambler (Yes! Chilling radio serial made from it)
1939: Ten Little Niggers (And Then There Were None) – Agatha Christie (Politically incorrect, dear, but great in its day - and a good movie, too)
1939: Rogue Male – Geoffrey Household (Totally brilliant book, still very apt.)
1940: A Surfeit of Lampreys (Death of a Peer) – Ngaio Marsh
1940: The Bride Wore Black – Cornell Woolrich
1942: Calamity Town – Ellery Queen (This guy made mysteries deliberately commercial -- the modern world owes him a lot)
1943: The High Window – Raymond Chandler
1944: Green for Danger – Christianna Brand
1946: The Big Clock – Kenneth Fearing
1947: The Moving Toyshop – Edmund Crispin
1948: Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly – John Franklin Bardin
1949: My Friend Maigret – Georges Simenon (Tried too hard to emulate Poirot)
1949: The Asphalt Jungle – W.R. Burnett
1950: Smallbone Deceased – Michael Gilbert (Was he the first lawyer to write mysteries? Did them very well indeed -- teethed on his short stories in Argosy)
1950: The Stain on the Snow – Georges Simenon
1951: The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey (Another one of those books that affects all your reading from then on -- wonderfully well researched, the first book that made me think deeply about history)
1952: The Tiger in the Smoke – Margery Allingham (Another superb choice)
1952: Last Seen Wearing – Hilary Waugh (Great writer; not the book of his I would have chosen)
1953: Five Roundabouts to Heaven – John Bingham
1953: The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
1953: The Burglar – David Goodis
1956: The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
1956: Mystery Stories – Stanley Ellin
1957: From Russia with Love – Ian Fleming (You have to be joking! Was 1957 that bad?)
1959: The Manchurian Candidate – Richard Condon (Great book, watchable movie)
1962: The Ipcress File – Len Deighton
1963: Gun Before Butter – Nicolas Freeling
1963: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré (Was I the only person in the universe who found this book unreadable?)
1964: The Deep Blue Good-bye – John D. MacDonald (Why choose this one? They were all the same, and they all did well to pass long airplane flights away)
1964: Pop. 1280 – Jim Thompson
1964: The Expendable Man – Dorothy B. Hughes
1965: Black Money – Ross Macdonald
1967: Roseanna – Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo
1968: Making Good Again – Lionel Davidson
1968: The Glass-Sided Ants Nest – Peter Dickinson (I tried so hard to read this book ...)
1969: Blind Man with a Pistol – Chester Himes
1970: Jack’s Return Home – Ted Lewis
1971: The Day of the Jackal – Frederick Forsyth (A whole new genre, and OMG he did it well)
1972: The Friends of Eddie Coyle – George V. Higgins
1972: Sadie When She Died – Ed McBain (Why this one? They were all pretty much the same, like watching a TV series. Mind you, all his Ed McBain books were Evan Hunter lite)
1972: The Players and the Game – Julian Symons (Brilliant writer -- I was addicted to him at the time)
1974: Other Paths to Glory – Anthony Price
1976: The Wrong Case – James Crumley
1976: A Demon in My View – Ruth Rendell
1976: A Morbid Taste for Bones – Ellis Peters (Yes, still very readable)
1977: A Judgement in Stone – Ruth Rendell
1977: Laidlaw – William McIlvanney
1978: SS-GB – Len Deighton
1979: Whip Hand – Dick Francis (Another reliable writer -- don't stick with just this one, as the other years were just as good)
1979: Skinflick – Joseph Hansen
1979: Kill Claudio – P.M. Hubbard (Why three 1979s?)
1981: Red Dragon – Thomas Harris
1981: Thus Was Adonis Murdered – Sarah Caudwell
1982: The False Inspector Dew – Peter Lovesey
1982: Indemnity Only – Sara Paretsky
1982: The Artful Egg – James McClure
1984: Stick – Elmore Leonard
1984: Miami Blues – Charles Willeford
1986: A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré
1986: A Taste for Death – P.D. James
1987: The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
1988: Double Whammy – Carl Hiaasen
1989: Lonely Hearts – John Harvey
1990: Postmortem – Patricia Cornwell (Another new take on the genre -- and only take it if you have a strong stomach for ersatz pathology)
1991: Devil in a Blue Dress – Walter Mosley
1991: Dirty Tricks – Michael Dibdin
1993: The Sculptress – Minette Walters
1993: In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead – James Lee Burke (One of the first literary mystery writers)
1995: The Mermaids Singing – Val McDermid
1998: On Beulah Height – Reginald Hill
1998: The Hanging Garden – Ian Rankin
1999: The Remorseful Day – Colin Dexter
2000? 2001? etc.? And why not Elizabeth George?
Suggestions welcome.
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