british and american crime fiction

Patricia Highsmith.

Quirky detectives are a British thing?

american writers have exceled at crime writing as opposed to mystery fiction ... so james m cain, jim thompson, patricia highsmith, to a lesser extent chester himes wrote amazing fiction from the criminal POV. more recently james ellroy and elmore leonard (my mileage on him varies), chandler and stark are basically using antihero protagonists if not criminals.

in my opinion the american proper mystery genre piece (rex stout, dashielle hammet, etc) pales in comparison to both our crime writing and the british equivalent

british mystery writing: is there a british tradition of crime writing? my sense is that the traditions is much more rooted in the "whodunit", detective-protagonist model. of course, then there's the recent post-"get carter" or "lock, stock..." british crime flick trend to content with.

This seems as good as place as any to put in a mention for the best crime fiction/fiction of any stripe book I have read this year, Oliver Harris' The Hollow Man:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hollow-Man-Oliver-Harris/dp/0224091220

Full disclosure: the author is a friend of mine, but regardless, I read the whole thing during one transatlantic flight and it was the most pleasurable few hours reading I have had in a long time. It's pretty relentless, well-plotted and full of good writing. It is also the first in a series and I am already jonesing for the next one. It really hit the spot and I'm having trouble finding other recent crime/thriller books that measure up.

So, just to counter what has been said above about British "crime" writing. All that might be true, but I think The Hollow Man does crime without resorting to any Lock Stock cliches even once, and there is one part of the book that definitely could have gone there. There is also a mystery element, but it is really the sheer vicarious thrill of reading about bad things done well that makes the book so great.

ha for a second i thought that was the oliver harris whose class i was in when i started this thread

I am still meaning to read this.

"is there a british tradition of crime writing?"

Derek Raymond/Robin Cook, David Peace, there must be more like this, right? Plus there is a long tradition of british underworld film so I imagine that's got to have come from a literary equivalent.

ha for a second i thought that was the oliver harris whose class i was in when i started this thread

Which class?

in my opinion the american proper mystery genre piece (rex stout, dashielle hammet, etc) pales in comparison to both our crime writing and the british equivalent

S.S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen were Americans. Weird thing to say.

I finished The Murder of Roger Ackroyd last night. It got very exciting realizing what was going to happen near the end, as you start ruling out suspects yourself. I think it was natural, in 2011, to consider the possibility of that ending early on, but she makes you forget about it as the book wears on. I would ask who else ends their books this way (Fitzhugh's The Long Secret is kind of like this), but I don't want the books spoiled for me if I don't already know.

Hammet is amazing. I don't understand referring to him as either a "proper mystery genre" writer or paling in comparison to anyone.

Yeah, Hammet is great.

I didn't even catch that, that he classified Hammett as "proper mystery." I only meant that "proper" American mystery could very good and was influential on even the British authors.