The Electric Pitchfork

The 100 Best Crime Novels and Thrillers Since 1945 Our team pick their favourite crime and spy novels, from Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon to today’s edgy Scandi and Japanese masters Marlon Brando in The Godfather, based on the novel by Mario Puzo Mercy  by Jussi Adler-Olsen  Everyone assumes a missing politician is long dead, but they’re wrong, and the truth involves one of the most original plots in crime fiction. The first in the brilliant Department Q series, featuring an idiosyncratic team of cold-case detectives in Copenhagen. (2011) The Man with the Golden Arm  by Nelson Algren  The award-winning story of a petty criminal and drummer in 1940s Chicago, left addicted to morphine by treatment for war injuries. (1949) Absolute Power  by David Baldacci  A burglar witnesses the US president with his lover, then the mistress being killed by Secret Service agents. (1996) The Deadly Percheron  by John Franklin Bardin  In this cla...

The Interview: American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis on why he hates millennials “What is millennial culture? There’s no writing. None of them read books.” Interview by Decca Aitkenhead A lot of things have been said about Bret Easton Ellis over the course of his 34-year career, but no one could ever accuse him of being inoffensive. His first novel, Less Than Zero, portrayed the nihilism of privileged Los Angeles party kids lost in a blur of apathy, sexual deviance and drugs. Just 21 when the book became a hit, Ellis joined Manhattan’s literary Brat Pack, notorious for its chilling irony and prodigious cocaine consumption. But it was his third novel, American Psycho, that provoked the global uproar that would attach the prefix “controversial” to Ellis’s name for ever more. The 1991 tale of a sadistic Wall Street banker who becomes a serial killer featured so much rape, mutilation, necrophilia and cannibalism that its  original publishers refused to release it. Feminists...