The best-written crime novel of the century: the Edgar Awards
California Girl ^ All Ready for the Big Night
Mother/The Experiment/Jowday in Twin Peaks: The Return
In today’s issue
— ‘Tough as a boiled owl’: as part of our project to find the best-written books of the century, our pick of the best-written previous winner of the Edgar award for best crime novel.
In a couple of days we’ll be posting our pick of the best-written novel from this year’s awards, the winner of which will be announced on the 1st of May.
— ‘That’s the thing about denial. It can make the most obvious fact of all, the fact it’s built your life around denying, seem like it’s from another planet or dimension’: All Ready for the Big Night, part 3 of The Demon Inside David Lynch. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have already shown this project.
We’ve now organised the site so you easily access our archives of author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
Restack any of our email posts and we’ll send you a complimentary paid subscription, or click the link below to join the 16k discerning readers who’ve signed up for free access.
Previous winners of the Edgar Award for best crime novel
2001 Joe R. Lansdale The Bottoms
2002 T. Jefferson Parker Silent9
2003 S. J. Roza Winter and Night
2004 Ian Rankin Resurrection Men
2005 T. Jefferson Parker California Girl
2006 Jess Walter Citizen Vince
2007 Jason Goodwin The Janissary Tree
2008 John Hart Down River
2009 C. J. Box Blue Heaven
2010 John Hart The Last Child
2011 Steve Hamilton The Lock Artist
2012 Mo Hayder Gone
2013 Dennis Lehane Live by Night
2014 William Kent Krueger Ordinary Grace
2015 Stephen King Mr. Mercedes
2016 Lori Roy Let Me Die in His Footsteps
2017 Noah Hawley Before the Fall
2018 Attica Locke Bluebird, Bluebird
2019 Walter Mosley Down the River Unto the Sea
2020 Elly Griffiths The Stranger Diaries
2021 Deepa Anappara Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
2022 James Kestrel Five Decembers
2023 Danya Kukafka Notes on an Execution
The best-written of these is
1
HERE AND NOW
I DROVE PAST the old SunBlesst packinghouse today. Nothing left of it. Not one stick. Now there’s a bedroom store, a pet emporium, and a supermarket. Big and new. Moms and dads and kids everywhere. Pretty people, especially the moms. Young, with time to dream, wake up, and dream again.
I still have a piece of the flooring I tore off the SunBlesst packinghouse back in sixty-eight. When I was young. When I thought that what had happened there shouldn’t ever happen anywhere. When I thought it was up to me to put things right.
I’m made of that place—of the old wood and the rusted conveyors and the pigeons in the eaves and the sunlight slanting through the cracks. Of Janelle Vonn. Of everything that went down, there in October, 1968. Even made of the wind that blew that month, dry and hot off the desert, huffing across Orange County to the sea.
I have a piece of the picket fence from the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza, too. And a piece of rock that came not far from where Mercury 1 lifted off. And one of Charlie Manson’s guitar picks.
But those are different stories.
LATER I MET my brother Andy at the Fisherman’s Restaurant down in San Clemente. Late August. The day was bright as a brushfire, no clouds, sun flashing off the waves and tabletops. Andy looked at me like someone had hit him in the stomach.
“It’s about Janelle,” he said.
Janelle Vonn in the SunBlesst orange packinghouse in Tustin.
Thirty-six years ago, two brothers who didn’t look much alike, staring down at her and across at each other while the pigeons cooed and the wind blew through the old slats.
A different world then, different world now.
Same brothers. Andy stayed thin and wiry. Tough as a boiled owl. Me, I’ve filled out some, though I can still shiver the heavy bag in the sheriff’s gym.
San Clemente, and you have to think Nixon. The western White House, right up the road. I picture him walking down the beach with the Secret Service guys ahead and behind. Too many secrets and nobody but the seagulls to tell them to. Andy’s newspaper ran a cartoon of him once, after he’d been chased out of office, and the cartoon showed him walking the beach with a metal detector, looking for coins. Thought that was a funny one. I kind of liked Dick Nixon. Grew up just over the hill from us. He was tight with my old man and his Bircher friends for a while, used to come to the house back in the fifties when he was vice president and in the early sixties when he’d lost for governor. They’d sit around, drink scotch, make plans. Nixon had a way of making you feel important. It’s an old pol’s trick, I know. I even knew it then. In fifty-six I graduated from the L.A. Sheriff’s Academy and Dick Nixon sent me a note. The vice president. Nice handwriting. It’s still in my collection of things.
But that’s a different story, too.
“You don’t look so good, Andy,” I said.
Brothers and we still don’t look much alike. An old cop and an old reporter. There used to be four of us Becker boys. Raised some hell. Just three now.
I looked at Andy and I could see something different in his face.
“What gives?” I asked.
“Listen to me, Nick. Everything we thought about Janelle Vonn was wrong.”
The Orange County, California, that the Becker brothers knew as boys is no more—unrecognizably altered since the afternoon in 1954 when Nick, Clay, David, and Andy rumbled with the lowlife Vonns, while five-year-old Janelle Vonn watched from the sidelines. The new decade has ushered in the era of Johnson, hippies, John Birchers, and LSD. Clay becomes a casualty of a far-off jungle war. Nick becomes a cop, Andy a reporter, David a minister. And a terrible crime touches them all in ways they could never have anticipated when the mutilated corpse of teenage beauty queen Janelle Vonn is discovered in an abandoned warehouse.
A puddle of engine oil in Twin Peaks
.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire.
All Ready for the Big Night
When I arrived at my flat on Montera I took the latest supplies from shopping bags and began to decorate the front room for tomorrow night’s premiere party, so doped up on sex and love and on research chemical afterglow I could barely remember who or what I was.
I was a recovering grappling addict and alcoholic in the top 40-50% of screwed-upness and volatility among those in GA/AA, which might not sound that great but was progress on my early years in these fellowships, which themselves showed progress on my years as an active drunk and sudden grappler, which themselves showed progress on my state of mind as a child.
I was a nightguard at Santa Rita’s psychiatric hospital, where my colleagues were unusual.
Trinna K. was an alcoholic Serbian giantess with hormonal problems that sometimes made her weep with overexcitement when we discussed public wrestling, which I’d been banned from because I fought too dirty and which Trinna’s father and ex-wife had never let her do professionally, so what the families of patients sometimes saw as they visited the hospital was respect and envy for pro-wrestlers as it poured in rapid Serbian from this woman paid to guard their psychically delicate son or grandfather, and me reaching up to pat her colossal shoulder and calm her down, one time in AL-LAD afterglow crying myself with joie de vivre.
My supervisor Jorge didn’t spit at you if he was angry, but he did spit just past you at the nearest wall, left of your head then right and back again, which only ended during the pandemic, when he had to stop himself spitting in his own mask. This father of four claimed he couldn’t wait to die and be reincarnated as a female guard generous with her favours among the hospital’s patients.
Ecologistas Insurreccionales founding member Jorge was engaged in a feud with the National Socialist and Satanist Trinna, a feud that mostly consisted of them raging in their respective security huts and training the CCTV cameras on each other and nowhere else, so when the cops turned up to investigate the latest violent clash between patients and asked to view the CCTV files, all they often saw were close-ups of two guards in their mid-forties as they practised their Sieg Heil or their spitting accuracy, downed Aldi’s own-brand vodka, cried convulsively, browsed online for pentagrams and goat skulls, or for survivalist camouflage or lingerie ahead of the climate apocalypse or of reincarnation, close-ups that the cops’ body language suggested they thought I was responsible for.
When they called a summit to discuss the hospital-wide thefts our team’s unorthodox approach to security had facilitated, our colleague Har from rural Andalusia fingered the gang that sometimes lurked near his hut: four guilty-looking crows.
This hospital for the mentally ill also had a crazy-golf course. It did.
But working at Santa Rita’s stopped me losing my mind completely. When sent to work there at first I did not want my nightly environment to be a psychiatric hospital. I was a mess at the time, boozing and pilling far too much and surely in the top 20% nationally when it came to screwed-upness. But luckily part of my duties at the hospital was to open up room E5 for AA meetings and set up the pamphlets and books and two bronze sculptures of the AA symbol of a triangle inside a circle. One night as I carried those sculptures across the room I abruptly knew for certain that I would never beat the drink by my own efforts. Never. I understood what had been obvious for years to everyone who knew me. But not me. That’s the thing about denial. It can make the most obvious fact of all, the fact it’s built your life around denying, seem like it’s from another planet or dimension: you won’t beat this problem by your own efforts alone. Submit. You need help, boyo.
This wasn’t any kind of rock bottom, but it was the absolute defeat I’d sought in my rock bottoms without knowing it. Absolute surrender, and acceptance of that defeat. A vertical insertion of data, that’s how it felt, from some mysterious source. At the time of this mystical insertion I was of course carrying Alcoholics Anonymous sculptures across a room soon to fill with a bunch of ex-drunks, but honestly it’s now hard not to view this lucky break at Santa Rita’s as an interference by the hyperdimensional entities, a necessary part, and one I still don’t really understand, of their David Lynch project.
I asked the AA secretary Diego P. for the list of meetings in Madrid and he became my sponsor until I met Les W., who had experience with recovery from grappling as well as booze and compared to Diego was obviously on a different level of wisdom and solidity. Useful in the early stages were our daily ‘fire drills’ when I’d phone Les up and roleplay having an urge to relapse, which made it easier to ring him for support when I actually had such an urge.
It helped that I was already familiar with AA’s main text, called the Big Book, and that I’d to open Santa Rita’s gates to admit ambulances throughout the night and watch tearful bloodsplashed drunks wheeled in on trolleys, and every now and then a relapsing sudden grappler, and witness close-up the future waiting for me if I didn’t do exactly what Les told me. It helped too that when the AA crowd left E5 they’d a dignity about them—straight backs, eye-contact, faces not twisted in self-hatred—that my own existence had lacked for years.
After twenty months of sobriety and only grappling in the bedroom I took Trinna to AA and GA meetings too, though sponsoring her then proved a challenge. Our similar histories with drink and wrestling and rape, and also to be honest her tears and bubonic-looking acne, made me warm to her more than I perhaps should have considering her politics and devil-worship, with the result that the tough love sponsorship requires was sometimes beyond me.
Took me all day, but at last I’d my flat decorated the way I wanted. Red drapes, chevron-patterned lino, tree branches, plastic owls, small puddles of motor oil, etc.
A few hours watching WWE would be followed by the night’s main event, Twin Peaks back after twenty-six years, ‘the pure heroin vision of David Lynch’ as we’d been promised, a party with Ella’s coven and a few of the robe-free among her Strobes + Robes crowd, plus my recovery friends and sponsees, plus Les and his normally mellow Rottweiler Stanley, and Dougal who’d be flying down from Glasgow. Also my friend César Grez who after years living in Austin, Texas was back in Madrid wearing a greying manbun and jeans too skinny, way too skinny, for a man his age.
Next it would be some time with my Spanish Laura Palmer, probably gentle and celebratory with no fancy grips or the like. Then before I slept I’d get down on my knees and thank my higher power Mr Lynch for helping me through another day.
Looks like I did read a T. Jefferson Parker novel, L.A. Outlaws.
From your Best Crime Novels list, these are the two I've read:
2001 Joe R. Lansdale The Bottoms, 2006 Jess Walter Citizen Vince.
Saw Jess Walter read several times when I lived in Seattle.
I've read about half of Joe R. Lansdale's books.
I'm digging the chapters from The Demon Inside David Lynch.