2017 Arts Preview - The Year Ahead in Books

Sheena Mackay PIC: Copyright Graham Jepson/Writer Pictures

Murder stalks the publishers' 2017 catalogues. They know that crime pays

Arnold Bennett found publishers’ catalogues depressing; so many books, so many eager authors, so many hopes raised, so many to wither quickly. Spending a day going over the spring lists makes me sympathise with his gloom, and there are many more books and authors now than when he was writing more than a hundred years ago. One of the interesting, and in some ways depressing, changes over my own writing lifetime is a shift in the balance between what is styled literary fiction and crime – not of course that many crime novels aren’t literary too. More people are murdered every week in crime novels than in crimes recorded in a year, many more. The reading public has an insatiable demand for corpses, and novelists being tradesmen with an eye to the market as well as – sometimes – artists are ready to supply them. So, for example, we have Philip Kerr’s Prussian Blue coming from Quercus in April. It’s the 12th in his bestselling series about Bernie Gunther, the wise-cracking cop and later ex-cop who kicked off in Hitler’s Berlin. Now, post-war, he is on the run from the East German Stasi, pursued by a former colleague from the even worse old days. Heaven knows how many corpses Bernie has left in his wake.

Peter Manuel, Scotland’s most infamous serial killer, is the anti-hero of Denise Mina’s new novel, The Long Drop (Harvill Secker, March). I’ve read a proof copy, and been gripped, impressed by her insight into the mind of a psychopath, and her re-creation of a drink-sodden 1950s Scotland. Manuel dismissed his counsel and conducted his own defence. Mina brilliantly shows what a mistake this was. A grim novel, but a very good one.