Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead Included on Time’s Top 100 Mystery and Thrillers List

In their recent issue, also available online, Time Magazine offers top-100 list, put together by some of the biggest names in contemporary crime fiction, alongside several intriguing mystery-themed articles, including Rachel Howzell Hall’s “The Rich, Underappreciated History of Mystery Writers of Color.“

This Time feature issue was brought to my attention by no less than Louise Penny, courtesy of her warmly friendly and funny monthly newsletter, my favourite part of the first day of each month.

Here is the magazine’s list.

The books appear in chronological order, which saves haggling over whether number seven should be number three, for instance.

And Penny’s Bury Your Dead is here! This is her Quebec City-set novel about Gamache’s recovery from trauma and loss. A murder in a venerable English-language private library, where he’s conducting research, leads him to the non-official investigation of both a contemporary crime and a historical mystery: Where is provincial hero Samuel de Champlain buried?

And there’s other Canadian representation, including Margaret Millar’s Beast in View.

Millar’s psychological thrillers are terrific, and this one, from 1956, won the Edgar for Best Novel. The description from Penguin’s website:

“Thirty-year-old Helen Clarvoe is scared and all alone. The heiress of a small fortune, she is resented by her mother and, to a lesser degree, her brother. The only person who seemingly cares for her is the family’s attorney, Paul Blackshear. A shut-in, Helen maintains her residence in an upscale hotel downtown. 

But passive-aggressive resentment isn’t the only thing hounding Helen Clarvoe. A string of bizarre and sometimes threatening prank phone calls has upended her spinster’s routine. Increasingly threatened, she turns to a reluctant Mr. Blackshear to get to the bottom of these strange calls. Blackshear is doubtful of their seriousness but he quickly realizes that he is in the midst of something far more sinister than he thought possible. As he unravels the mystery of the calls the identity behind them slowly emerges, predatory and treacherous.”

It’s not my absolute favourite Millar, since I think her novels actually got richer over the subsequent decade, but it’s up there, and it’s a reasonable choice.

A few caveats about this top 100 list:

To my eye, excepting the decent representation of contemporary Japanese crime writing, this is a very Anglo-American list.

There are exceptions–a handful of Scandi noir books, and some stand-out international novels, like Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra’s Morituri [an unusual instance of a male author uses his wife’s name as his pen name]–but Scottish writers, for instance, are underrepresented. So Val McDermid is here, for A Place of Execution, but neither Denise Mina nor Sir Ian Rankin appears.

I’m not sure that’s defensible, when a few more negligible 1950s authors of romantic suspense-style thrillers make the cut.

What’s really interesting about this list, however, is the inclusions, not the omissions. The judging panel has included a substantial number of literary novels that have crime elements but aren’t strictly crime novels: Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, for instance.

They’ve also been generous about included representative spy thrillers and other sub-genres that sometimes get overlooked.

The books were picked by a coterie of celebrated crime writers: Megan Abbott, Harlan Coben, S.A. Cosby, Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Rachel Howzell Hall, and Sujata Massey. Again: one can hardly complain, but it’s clear there’s an American slant.

I’m most intrigued and pleased by the inclusion of a third Canadian writer, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, represented here by her hallucinatory fantasia of a novel, Mexican Gothic.

She has other books with more claim to being crime fiction, but this is a brilliant book, and it deserves more attention.

In other news: I took a deep breath this weekend and hired a developmental editor, a literary writer who is also a terrific suspense novelist. I need help with big cuts to a 125,000-ish word manuscript, and I’m going to aim to pare down 25K before I put it in her hands on May 1. Time to kill my darlings, but this is going to be a bit painful.