From the Introduction:
This is not a pollsters' assembly of popular novels, compiled with calculators and spreadsheets. Neither is it a potentially exhausting list of titles that winds back to the dawn of fiction, chiding the reader for his or her presumed ignorance in the manner of a compulsory reading list handed out in a bad school at the start of summer to cast a pall over its students' vacation time. What we sought from each of the contributors to this volume was passionate advocacy: we wanted them to pick one novel, just one, that they would place in the canon. If you found them in a bar some evening, and the talk turned (as it almost inevitably would) to favorite writers, it would be the single book that each writer would press upon you, the book that, if there was time and the stores were still open, they would leave the bar in order to purchase for you, so that they could be sure they had done all in their power to make you read it.
The Editors
John Connolly is the
author of such international bestsellers as The
Whisperers, The Gates, The Lovers, The Reapers, The Unquiet,
The Black Angel, Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow,
The Killing Kind, The Book of Lost Things, and Bad Men. The eleventh Charlie Parker novel, The Wrath of Angels, was published in Ireland and the UK in August 2012, and will be out in the United States on January 1, 2013. John is also the host of the
weekly radio show ABC to XTC. He divides his time between Dublin, Ireland
and Portland, Maine.
Declan Burke is the author of Eightball Boogie, The Big O, Absolute Zero Cool, and the recently-published Slaughter's Hound. He is
also the editor of Down These Green
Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century. He lives in Wicklow with his wife Aileen and
daughter Lily, and hosts a website dedicated to Irish crime fiction called
Crime Always Pays. 