The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime, Volume 8

Introduction Maxim Jakubowski

Introducing last year’s volume of our annual anthology collecting the best crime and mystery stories penned by British authors during the course of the preceding calendar year, I mentioned the fact that Ian Rankin had called a halt to the perennially popular series featuring Edinburgh cop Inspector Rebus. Well, mourn not, our much-loved character returns briefly to open this year’s volume with a short but intriguing story which Ian initially agreed to write for charity! And to please our readers even further, there is a double helping of Ian Rankin, as we close the book with another great tale set in Edinburgh. Two for the price of one can’t be bad. And a heartfelt vote of thanks to Ian and his agent Peter Robinson for allowing us to feature him twice this year.

Crime writing in the UK continues to thrive ever vigorously and in addition to several handfuls of stalwart regulars, it’s also a great pleasure to welcome to our series many new names who have not previously appeared herein, including such luminaries as Kate Atkinson, Louise Welsh, Stephen Booth, Christopher Brookmyre, Colin Bateman, literary star A. L. Kennedy, Sheila Quigley, Lin Anderson, Simon Kernick and David Hewson.

In addition, it’s a decided pleasure to be able to introduce many new talents who’ve mostly hitherto only appeared in the proliferating web magazines devoted to the genre: Nick Quantrill, Jay Stringer, Paul D. Brazill and Nigel Bird. Also comforting is the ability to feature stories by father and son, with Peter Lovesey and Phil Lovesey sharing our pages, together with a wide assortment of other talented writers whose imagination somehow never fails them when it comes to creating stories which blend thrills, puzzles, emotions, shock and great writing.

Long may all these fictional criminals thrive and keep on entertaining us with a dash or more of blood, a zest of death and a galaxy of grey cells involved in solving the dastardly crimes that pepper our pages and delight us in myriad ways.

Another good year for crime!

Maxim Jakubowski