Crime Fiction with Mat Coward

Crime fiction takes you around the world in a way that other genres rarely even attempt.

Today, more than ever before, British readers are presented with a global choice of villainy.

THE LATE-NIGHT NEWS (Harvill, £10.99) by Petros Markaris, a Greek writer born in Istanbul, is the first in a series featuring Inspector Costas Haritos of Athens CID.

Costas is aggressive, cynical and permanently in trouble with his bosses and, more importantly, his wife and daughter.

In this witty, well-plotted, jaunty and intelligent novel, he investigates the murder of a TV journalist.

It's a scandal which appears to have its roots in the days of the colonels.
What choices do former resistance workers make when corrupt capitalism replaces corrupt military dictatorship? Do they stick to their red principles or do they put on designer suits and stick their noses in the trough?

THE DAY OF THE DEAD by JA Jance (HarperCollins, £18.99) also takes us into a richly described, unfamiliar environment.

In rural Arizona, a sheriff who retired after being beaten in an election is given new purpose in life when approached by an organisation called The Last Chance, which exists to reopen unsolved murders.

He's asked to look into the 1970 killing of a girl who belonged to the Tohono O'odham people.

Ex-sheriff Walker's life is intertwined with that of the reservation, through family and friends, so the horror that he uncovers has a very personal dimension.

This complex but smoothly written thriller in part explores the borderlands between US Indian life and the rest of the country and the fundamental differences that still exist in politics, culture and belief systems.

Closer to home - though no less specific in its setting - is Stuart Pawson's OVER THE EDGE (Allison & Busby, £18.99), the latest case for likeable, laidback, but largely luckless in love DI Charlie Priest.

Priest does his crime fighting in a former wool town in the Yorkshire Pennines.
In this episode, he and his team become involved with the disappearance of a local gangster, the death of a local hero - a mountaineer killed with an antique ice pick - and a sex slavery ring.

Gentle in style, but often tough in content, this series becomes more enjoyable with each book.

"The best and most influential from an era when crime writing was exciting, fresh and - above all - new" is how editor Martin Radcliffe describes the contents of his new anthology of Victorian and Edwardian short stories, MASTERS OF MYSTERY (Do-Not Press, £8.99).

At 557 pages, this fat paperback is superb value.

"There were no rules," Radcliffe says, in his informative introduction, of the early days of crime fiction.

Thus, writers like Charles Dickens, JS Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins and Mark Twain - as well as many less-remembered pioneers - were limited only by their imaginations in laying the foundations of what has become the Western world's most popular literary form.