The first time I ever saw one of my books on a "best of crime fiction" list, I felt sure that someone had missed an important piece of information. I wasn't sure if it was me or the writer of that list. In my mind, "crime fiction" was exclusively written about crime and criminals from the perspective of detectives trying to thwart the criminals and their crimes.
I'd grown up on Dell Shannon and Ed McBain novels I got from my grandfather, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and G.K. Chesterton books from the library. A child of the 70s and 80s, I'd been exposed to an endless stream of cop TV show-Adam-12, Kojak, Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey.