As gumshoes go, British Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is a more realistic guy than most: less brooding than his Scandinavian counterparts, more restrained than Robert B. Parker’s wise-ass Spenser. So it’s easy to relate to and root for Banks, a “Treme”-watching, Bach-loving copper whose creator, Peter Robinson, puts through labyrinthine plots. No wonder the Banks novels have been named Best Book of the Year and morphed into a TV series. The latest caper, “Watching the Dark,” has Banks trying to brush off an officer from Professional Standards as he investigates the murder of a colleague (by crossbow!) found with a compromising photo. Here’s what’s in Robinson’s library.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
This collection has been in my library, in one form or another, since I was a child. I’ve read the stories countless times and seen or heard numerous adaptations. I could read them all again tomorrow and enjoy them just as much as I did the first time.
The Harvill Book of 20th Century
Poetry in English
edited by Michael Schmidt
Before I started writing crime fiction, I wrote almost exclusively poetry. It was hard to pick out my favorites from my library, so I picked out this book, which contains them all. There’s Hardy, Eliot, Auden, Frost, Stevens, Lowell, Ginsberg, Heaney, Hughes, Hill and Larkin, and editor Michael Schmidt isn’t afraid to represent many by their best-known poems.
Brighton Rock
by Graham Greene
This was Greene’s breakthrough book. Featuring one of the most exciting opening scenes in fiction, it turns from a thriller into a detective novel, then into an inquiry into the nature of good and evil, without losing momentum. There have been two movie versions, the first a classic, the second lamentable.
People Who Eat Darkness
by Richard Lloyd Parry
I rarely read true crime unless I have to, and I read this book as part of my research for “Watching the Dark.” It turns out to be a thrilling and absorbing read about the murder of Lucie Blackman, who went from England to work as a Tokyo hostess, and it sheds light on the shadowy world below the surface of the Tokyo most tourists see.