The best crime novels with supernatural overtones

Superficially, The Minnesota Trilogy is a murder mystery. When two Norwegian tourists are slaughtered in a national forest, it seems like an open and shut case. All the evidence points in one direction, but park ranger Lance Hansen is not convinced. He suspects his own brother. Hansen’s amateur investigation accidentally uncovers a second mystery involving his ancestor and the death (murder?) of a nineteenth-century Ojibwe medicine man. Sundstøl’s depiction of contemporary rural Minnesota is as full of magic, menace, and intrigue as the best fantasy world-building. The American Midwest becomes a land of prophetic dreams and roaming ghosts. The clash of cultures is less political than mythic, and the stakes are spiritual. History is still happening. Family is deeper than blood. These books open my imagination and tear my heart in half.

Lois Cairns, unemployed film historian, discovers a cache of haunted movies on silver-nitrate film stock. She might’ve discovered Canada’s first female filmmaker, a woman who disappeared under mysterious circumstances nearly a century earlier. This is a novel about obsession, history, art, love, and things that go bump in the night. Files utilizes tropes from weird horror tales, Victorian ghost stories, Slavic folklore, and experimental film theory, and includes an excellent depiction of the agonies and ecstasies of raising an autistic child. She ties all of this together without becoming pretentious or pedantic. Quite the opposite—Experimental Film is intelligent and hip, jaded and compassionate, laced with ever-present crawling dread. I read it curled up in a big chair with a glass of scotch and an overwhelming sense of impending doom. I recommend you do the same.

I love the Jimmy Paz novels. I wish there were more of them. Gruber’s are the most conventional crime plots on my list—tightly-crafted, intricate, and intelligent. His detective is the archetypal hero: smart, resourceful, big-hearted, brave. But in this world, science and rational deduction are insufficient to solve the crime because reality is not just unknown. It is unknowable. This is the cardinal sin of the detective genre. Even worse, Gruber completely gets away with it. With forays into Siberian Shamanism and Santeria, Tropic of Night is as much an investigation of consciousness and perception as it is the hunt for a murderous warlock. When the orishas finally arrive for the climax, my hands trembled. I got some small inkling of what it means for the fear of god to be the beginning of wisdom.

A murder cover-up in the Classics department of an elite liberal arts college. Tartt reveals the murderer on the first page. The Secret History is riveting crime fiction because it understands the most compelling element isn’t “whodunnit”, but “why?” What follows is Greek tragedy, at once immersive and compulsively readable. I wish it would never end because it’s not the kind of novel you read to find out what happens. You read it because you want to live in its world forever. For the way it comes to aesthetics with awe and terror. The supernatural crashes in only briefly, in the form of a pagan god come to teach us beauty isn’t about pretty things or pleasant feelings. It’s not sexy. Beauty disturbs and threatens. It doesn’t offer amusements. It compels us to worship.   

All of Eco’s novels defy easy description, this one most of all. It is a post-modern dystopia masquerading as supernatural suspense. A conspiracy thriller that feels more like an epic quest fantasy. Cosmic horror in which the greatest monster of all is the human imagination. It starts with an occult conspiracy designed by artificial intelligence. Casaubon knows it’s fiction, but that doesn’t stop the conspirators from hunting him. The Knights Templar, Comte de Sainte-Germaine, ritual spirit possession, the alchemical homunculus, witches, spiritualist mediums, and the King of the World, all make appearances. Eco is a wizard disguised as a troubadour pretending to be a scholar, and Foucault’s Pendulum is his masterpiece. He will show you how he does the trick, but the illusion he casts is so complete, you will believe in it anyway.