Books to Die For

February 18, 2013
Ignore the subtitle's hype. It's not important whether readers agree that the more than 120 contributors all deserve the label "greatest." All of them, ranging from the extremely well known (Lee Child, Rita Mae Brown, Elmore Leonard, Joseph Wambaugh) to the more obscure (South African crime expert Mike Nicol), weigh in with short essays that succinctly lay out the crime fiction that impacted them the most. Almost all the entries are original, and convincingly advocate for authors who also span the spectrum in terms of name awareness. The volume works both as a source of analysis as to why Agatha Christie is underrated and as to why writers even many cognoscenti won't be familiar with (such as Jean-Patrick Manchette and Kenneth Orvis) are worth a read. The editors' thoughtful introduction preempts any complaints about authors or books that the volume doesn't cover, and intriguingly notes that Josephine Tey was "the writer who had the greatest number of advocates."