Summer crime Choice crime hand-picked by Karen Robinson

At the current rate, by the end of the decade there will be more Philip Marlowe tribute thrillers than the seven Raymond Chandler actually wrote himself. The latest author to be handed the challenge is an inspired choice by the Chandler estate: Denise Mina’s The Second Murderer (Vintage, 256pp, £18.99) gives us the LA gumshoe at the height of his powers. There are sizzling one-liners, hard-boiled philosophy via the bottom of a bottle of rye and a seen-it-all humanity that expands on the original’s as the plot careers into the secretive gay world of 1940s California.

Mark Billingham has relocated to Blackpool for The Last Dance (Sphere, 400pp, £22), the first in a series featuring a new detective. Declan Miller is traumatised: his wife has just met her death at the hands of a yet-to-be identified assailant among the tawdry resort’s criminal classes. The sometimes brooding, sometimes wisecracking widower attempts to assuage his grief by flouting his superiors - so far, so normal for a maverick-cop hero - but also by enthusiastic participation in ballroom dancing, a pleasingly original twist. Reliable crime-fiction veteran Billingham, delivers gentle laughs and darker emotions in a pacey plot shaped by its unique location.

Readers first encountered Ray Carney, furniture shop proprietor and part-time fence, in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, set in the African-American heartland of New York in the 50s and 60s. Now he’s back, older but not quite wise enough, in Crook Manifesto (Fleet, £20). Three linked stories span1970s street life -a world of explosive violence, pervasive fear and the slim chance of redemption. There’s spikey humour and perceptive honesty from the get-go as a bent cop lures Carney back into the criminal life he has renounced, with jewel-heisting Malcolm X-inspired black liberation activists upping the ante.

Short stories are the perfect opportunity to explore an idea or a character that wouldn’t sustain a full-length book. In Best Crime Stories of the Year Volume 2, edited by Sara Paretsky (Head of Zeus, 560pp,£20) Susan Frith’s Better Austens conjures a disturbing dystopia: the US is an ‘execution economy’ - and it’s mothers who do the executing. The 21 stories include polished gems by big names Michael Connelly and Jo Nesbo, and plenty of smart one-act entertainments by American writers better known in their own country.

Granta’s latest Best of British Novelists list, has made up a grisly crime: the killing of a teenage girl in a small Yorkshire coastal town by three fellow teens on the night of the Brexit vote in 2016.

Our narrator is a washed-up hack who puts in the legwork with interviews and research, and his story is studded with podcast chat and the girls’ own accounts of themselves.

The relationships and feelings are raw, complicated, half-understood – but this is no freak show, they are touchingly ordinary and their lives in the comically horrible Crow-on-Sea, with its UKIP vibe and its own version of Jimmy Savile, don’t explain them either. We know whodunnit, but whydunnit remains tantalisingly out of reach.

Global bestseller Cara Hunter has also embraced the true crime trend.

In Peter May’s A Winter Grave (riverrun, 368pp, £22), it’s 2051, and climate chaos has plunged Scotland into even worse weather than usual: ice storms, perma-floods, freezing temperatures. That the country is now independent, and back in the EU, doesn’t seem to help much. Baffled by self-flying helicopter drones and other futuristic gizmos, ageing detective Cameron Brodie heads to the ice-bound Highland village of Kinlochleven to investigate how a journalist ended up dead there, and to confront his own troubled past.

The ubiquity and popularity of true crime stories has not gone unnoticed by novelists. For Penance (Faber, £14.99), Eliza Clark, one of the under-40s on

Murder in the Family (HarperCollins, 480pp, £8.99) centres on a TV show investigating a cold case. Who killed Luke Ryder in the garden of his wife’s opulent west London home 20 years ago? She tells the story entirely via scripts, transcripts, e-mails, group chats, press reports and sundry documentation.

It’s a convoluted puzzle, with timely shock reveals and new suspects entering the frame. But with characters you never quite get to know or really care about, having only read their emails, scripts, etc, it’s sometimes hard to engage.

There has been no shortage of excellent crime fiction from Australia in the past few years, and newcomer Hayley Scrivenor’s Dirt Town (Macmillan, 368pp, £8.99) is outstanding. Nailing the atmosphere of a depressing, dying, dried-up bush town, the book charts the effects of the disappearance of a schoolgirl, as detective Sarah Michaels’s investigation causes tightly held secrets to unravel in a mire of guilt and shame. Scrivenor even tells part of the story through the voices of local kids, a big risk for a writer, but she’s pitch-perfect on the voices of the downbeat community’s next generation.

HUMANLY POSSIBLE SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS OF HUMANIST FREETHINKING, ENQUIRY AND HOPE SARAH BAKEWELL

Chatto & Windus, 464pp, £22

whose buoyant lack of discretion gives the impression of all the passing monuments being of equal importance’.

Maier also accused Bakewell of a ‘soupy benevolence’ towards the great men (they are invariably men, and white) she venerates, such as Bertrand Russell, who ran a ‘dysfunctional’ school that its pupils, trying to set fire to some pet rabbits, almost burned down. ‘Some authors might regard this as an opportunity to reassess the soundness of Russell’s humanist commitment. Not Bakewell.’

Unscripted

THE EPIC BATTLE FOR A HOLLYWOOD MEDIA EMPIRE

The Guardian’s Edward Helmore seemed equally aghast at ‘just how awful, shocking and abusive’ the culture was at one of America’s biggest media empires. Billson supplied the telling detail of how Sumner ended his days communicating via a laptop programmed to respond ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘F*** you’.

Great And Horrible News

Murder And Mayhem In Early Modern Britain Blessin Adams

William Collins, 304pp, £18.99

Spinoza: defender of the ‘free mind’

Sarah Bakewell’s popular blend of philosophy, history and biography was welcomed by most reviewers of her latest, an account of freethinking from the medieval Christian umanisti to today’s secular advocates. Her ‘scholarly yet accessible’ approach was applauded by Jane O’Grady in the Guardian, along with her ability to animate the past without anachronism. Her fans acknowledged that humanism has not proved a viable weapon against censorship, war, fascistic autocracies et al, but then, as Bakewell said, it’s a work in progress.

Kathryn Hughes in the Sunday Times found the book ‘bracing’ and ‘exhilarating’, a clarion call to those who, in Bakewell’s words, ‘try hard to live bravely and humanly in what sometimes seems like an aridly abstract and loveless world’. For the New York Times’s Jennifer Szalai it was a ‘brisk narrative’ filled with her ‘characteristic wit and clarity’, though possibly lacking her usual ‘bracing focus’.

This last point was amplified into an extended snort of derision by John Maier in the Times, for whom the endeavour was a ‘ramble’, and in trouble from page one, through its failure to clarify the term humanism. Bakewell suggests it’s ‘a semantic cloud of meanings and implications’. She also uses Forster’s dictum ‘only connect’ as an organising principle, which, Maier decided, gave the reader ‘the unsteadying sensation of being taken for a random walk through all cultural history, conveyed by a guide

JAMES B STEWART AND RACHEL ABRAMS

Cornerstone, 416pp, £25

This book by two New York Times reporters arrived in a world already engrossed in the shenanigans of Logan Roy’s family in Succession, so unsurprisingly reviewers found its revelations even more enthralling — and grotesque —for being real. But as Adam Davidson noted in the New York Times, Unscripted’s antihero, the cruel, womanising corporate raider Sumner Redstone, head of Viacom/CBS/Paramount, was ‘as odious a character as I have encountered in fact or fiction’ and that Logan Roy had ‘nothing on him’.

In the first half, the fading nonagenarian’s abusive behaviour and decline are laid out; in the second, Les Moonves of CBS is in the dock. Sumner’s daughter Shari finally saw off his two predatory girlfriends, who had trapped him in his room while they went through $150 million of his fortune; in the second half, the MeToo allegations bring down Moonves, though he was never prosecuted.

It was not a tragic story, Anne Billson noted in the Times: ‘these people are hardly what you might call losers, with their $24 million mansions and private jets. But at least the rest of us can wallow in this racy slice of schadenfreude about people with more money than taste’.

‘The early moderns were obsessed by stories of death, crime and justice,’ declares Adams in her introduction. Her book, wrote Nick Rennison in his review for the Daily Mail, ‘proves her point with a succession of grisly but engrossing cases. People in the past enjoyed learning about true crime as much as we do – and the bloodier the better. We have podcasts and gritty TV dramas; they had lurid broadside ballads and cheap pamphlets.’ However, ‘one thing that has changed over the centuries, thankfully, is the nature of punishment.

For example, we no longer take such a harsh view of sex outside marriage. Adams quotes the case of Henry Wharton and Elizabeth Mason who were condemned for the “crime” of begetting a “base born childe”. Stripped naked to the waist, they were paraded through the streets of their Middlesex village and flogged.’

A former police officer turned historian, Adams has combed through an astonishing array of sources to retell nine stories of crime and punishment in England between 1500 and 1700.

As an ex-copper, Adams is greatly interested in developments in forensic pathology in this period, which are superbly reconstructed from the sources. As a modern historian, she is reluctant to give us a both-barrels moral lesson, beyond implicitly suggesting that England’s dirty, filthy, gritty past was much crueller and more sexist than the present. Her book, oddly, ends without a conclusion... So, in the end, and inadvertently, she has written a history that is more revealing about present squeamishness than past crimes.’