A fully rounded character from her first outing, when she solves the murder of a man dressed as Sherlock Holmes, JB Fletcher is my model of what it means to be a successful author: famous enough to be invited to everything, read by almost all policemen, present at the scene of multiple crimes yet suspected of none. I have too many favourite literary detectives to pick one, so I’m going for Jessica Fletcher of the long-running US TV series Murder, She Wrote. They are the perfect hardboiled mix of grit and poetry: cool jazz with surface noise. The novels are all great, but my favourites include When the Sacred Ginmill Closes and A Walk Among the Tombstones. I’d say that the gangland boss Cafferty in my novels owes a large debt to Ballou and (especially in his early outings) my hero John Rebus shares DNA with Scudder. His beat is contemporary New York and his friends include a brutal yet gracious villain called Mick Ballou. He’s conflicted, driven and an alcoholic. Scudder is a private eye who is an ex-cop. I was a fairly late convert to crime fiction as a reader, and one of the first characters I remember falling for in a big way was Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder. Photograph: Momentum Pictures/Sportsphoto/Allstar Ian Rankin Conflicted, driven and an alcoholic … Matt Scudder played by Liam Neeson in A Walk Among the Tombstones.
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