If you are a regular reader or know me at all you’ll know the answer to this question is Dark, Gritty and Hardboiled. I’m a big fan of the hardboiled and Noir genres that have become famous in the 1940’s and you can see book reviews for these types of books under Pulp (if you are curious to know the difference between Hardboiled and Noir check out this post).

I’ve always been a fan of the dark and realistic, and while I do like that occasional cosy read, I often feel that the downplaying can often be overdone and in the end, I tend to not enjoy them. Those major bestselling crime novels tend to annoy me because they all feel formulaic and predictable. I want the laconic and dispassionate styles of a good pulp novel.

I know pulp novels don’t seem to be very popular anymore, there are some novelists that still write them like James Ellroy, James Sallis and Lawrence Block but I would love to know what others think of this genre and what they look for in a crime novel.