I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers. As a high school student, I read Shakespeare and Dickens, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As a result, my reading taste has always been guided by the sense that a novel should be a complete work of art, that action, alone, is not enough, and that it is moral dilemma that ups the ante in crime fiction just as it does in all other literary forms. For these reasons, the 10 books listed below are all novels that skew toward the literary. Their plots are character-driven and their action is organic. They have distinct narrative voices and the sense of place is, as they say, palpable. That said, they are extraordinarily different in time, place, style, voice and probably in every other way one novel can be technically different from another. In the end, of course, the relationship between a novel and a reader is one in which one subjectivity confronts another. My choices are admittedly subjective, with plenty of room for disagreement, but in my view they remain if not the 10 best mysteries every written, certainly my favorites.
