Too Much Choice
If you walk into any good bookshop and peruse the crime fiction section, you will find hundreds of authors and thousands of books. Whilst the choice is lovely, it can be a little overwhelming.
Life is too short to read a bad book, but as the old saying goes, you should never judge a book by its cover. If you don’t know who the best crime fiction authors are, there is no guarantee you will find a winner in a bookshop.
Who are the best crime fiction authors? Enter your e-mail address in the box below to find out.
What Do the Critics Recommend?
There are plenty of critics out there who will read the books for you and provide a recommendation, but an online search for “crime fiction review” brings back thousands of results. You could spend more time reading reviews than reading books.
Prize-Winning Fiction
Whilst it will never guarantee you will find a good book, a sensible bet is to browse the crime fiction awards. Yet even here, there is too much choice.
The prizes writers can win include Daggers, Derringers and Drops of Blood. Even SNCF, the French railway company, awards a “Prix du Polar”. There are far worse ways to spend your time than speeding across France in a TGV with a thriller in your hand.
Which Writers Won the Most Prizes?
I had too much time on my hands and decided to find out.
I studied the winners of six major awards (the American Edgars, British Daggers, French Grand Prix de Literature Policier, German Krimipreis, Japanese Nihon Suiri Sakka Kyōkai Shō and the Scandinavian Glass Key), then ignored anything that I couldn’t read. Lifetime achievements went by the board, as did awards for movies, jacket covers and anything that hasn’t been translated into English.
Finally, I counted every winner for the 41 years between 1980 to 2020, which is as long as I have been reading.
Using this hugely arbitrary but reasonably representative approach, I worked out who are the most critically acclaimed crime writers.
The Best English and Foreign Language Authors.
I totalled the awards to find the English language authors who had won the most prizes and their foreign counterparts. That gave me the top ten crime writers of the past forty years. A few of them are blindingly obvious, yet others are surprising, with one-hit wonders that swept the board and masters of the short story.
Who are the best crime fiction authors? Enter your e-mail address in the box below to find out.
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