If you are among those who believe in that species of monster that goes by the name “spoiler,” and if you haven’t read The Third Policeman, you may wish to skip this one.

Seventy-two years ago today, Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan) (Brian Ó Nualláin), wrote in a letter to William Saroyan: “When you get to the end of this book you realise that my hero or main character (he’s a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing. . . . I think the idea of a man being dead all the time is pretty new.”

Discussing The Third Policeman in class today, my students and I wondered whether this now familiar twist had in fact been done before 1940, but we couldn’t come up with an example. We also wondered whether certain phrases in the book—in particular “it is a difficult pancake” and “I am nothing but a gawm”—were O’Brien’s inventions, or if they were drawn from the common parlance of the day.

In any case, this novel is the finest of difficult pancakes, and I continue to puzzle over it with pleasure.

As one of the readers for this year’s Hammett Prize, I was tasked with helping to choose five finalists from among the hundreds of submitted books. As reported on the IACW site, the finalists were Feast Day of Fools by James Lee Burke, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran, The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, The Informant by Thomas Perry, and The Killer Is Dying by James Sallis.

Picking those five finalists was no simple matter, and I found many other books deserving of recognition. Here are five more that I personally recommend.

The End of Everything by Megan Abbott is the story of a thirteen-year-old girl whose best friend disappears, apparently kidnapped. It’s a devastating novel that captures perfectly the way a small town can feel both claustrophobic and isolating while in the grips of a traumatic event.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt is a western that pushes the boundaries of genre and form, and is at turns weird, brutal, and very funny. It put me in mind of Samuel Beckett, especially when the hired killer who narrates the story begins to ponder, say, the virtues of various tooth powder flavors. Probably my favorite novel of 2011, if I had to pick one.

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, narrated by a woman with dementia, is a book that might have gone terribly wrong in the hands of another writer. There’s a murder mystery, but we come to know it via a fractured lens. As much a study of language and consciousness as a crime thriller, this book loosens our hold on time, identity, and memory it unfolds.

The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen is a long novel, but I read it in one day. Couldn’t put it down, as they say. A literary thriller with a time travel subplot, this book was layered and often surprising. The science fiction element contributes a political angle—one of the main characters is fighting to preserve a future we understand to be a chilling dystopia. But the book is very much about us, here and now.

The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta takes place in Vienna under the Nazi regime, and most of the action is confined to a single apartment complex. A dog is murdered. People have secrets and try to keep them. The villain of the story is a police detective, and he is completely terrifying. This is a disquieting book, packed with desperate and memorable characters.