Next Generation Detective Novels

Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen, plus some book news

Sunset and Jericho ended up at number twelve on the top 20 bestselling books in BC. That bodes well for the Wakeland series, and it’s incredibly gratifying that people are discovering the books. Credit goes to editor in chief Anna O’Keefe and at Harbour, and tireless publicist Fleur Matthewson.

I’m at work right now on the next Wakeland novel. This year I’ll have a standalone out, Ocean Drive, and Nolan Chase’s A Lonesome Place for Dying, set in Blaine, Washington.

But a new Wakeland novel is in the works—the only question being, do we go with an Out of Town Novel where he’s in an unfamiliar city, like Henning Mankell’s Dogs of Riga, Ian Rankin’s Tooth and Nail, James Lee Burke’s Black Cherry Blues, John D MacDonald’s Nightmare in Pink, or Naomi Hirahara’s Gasa-Gasa Girl? Or do we write the story where Wakeland comes back to Vancouver?

(Assuming he ever left.)

Anyway, thank you to everyone who read Sunset.

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It’s hard work kicking the door to your heart open, but you have to, over and over.

The Annie McIntyre series by Samantha Jayne Allen, Pay Dirty Road and Hard Rain, is tied with Chris Offutt’s Mick Hardin books as my favorite new detective series.

Both are about community. Both feature protagonists tied to their geographic regions (the kills of Kentucky for Offutt, the town of Garnett, Texas for Allen). And both are trying to do something different than just replay the clichés of touch guy/girl mystery novels.

Allen’s Annie McIntyre is a bundle of contradictions: young, but closer in temperament to her ex-lawman grandfather than her parents; educated and ambitious but stuck in her hometown; empathetic and trustworthy, in a business where secrets are a commodity; humble and possessing neither superhuman toughness or powers of deduction, yet constantly discovering her own abilities.

In reading both books, you see a character coming into their own, figuring out their niche, and it feels earned, and right. The clichés of the genre are abandoned in favor of a character whose chief virtue seems to be decency.

In Hard Rain, Annie is hired by the wife of a pastor to find the man who saved her life on the night of a terrible flood. The story involves a climate disaster, the pill epidemic, ex-felons trying to reform (or not), and a megachurch-in-the-making with a dynastic line of pastors.

All my favorite detective series are ultimately about how to live. I think Allen is a tremendous writer. What she, Offutt, and others are doing amounts to something new with the detective novel, different from what previous generations did.

There is a style of detective novel that is fundamentally nostalgic, every sentence expressing a longing for trenchcoats and shoulder pads. Full of characters so powerful they’re outside the limits of society.

There’s another approach which is grounded within society, using the form to talk about what could be called Real Life. The environment, money, religion, relationships, purpose, peace of mind. This style is more interesting to me, both to write and read.