A review by rebus
The Graphic Canon of Crime and Mystery, Volume 1: From Sherlock Holmes to a Clockwork Orange to Jo Nesbø by

5.0

My admission of bias is that the crime novels of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain are to me among the greatest literature in all of human history, particularly those of Thompson, one of the few authors in human history writing from the perspective of the underclass. Crime is the soul of lust and happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime, at least according to deSade. I can't help but agree in our fascist world where all the serious and damaging crime has always been done by the State (indeed, it is explicitly stated in many tales from the 1800s, when policing began, that even then cops were wholly corrupt, looking for someone to punish rather than looking at the facts and seeking the truth). 

There are too many highlights to choose from, but I was most delighted by the tale from the Bocaccio and another from the bible and the stories from Joyce and Greek myth, not typically sources that are called genre fiction, but crime tales nonetheless! 

The best of all the Russ Kick books.