Ray Banks is author of the Cal Innes series, the most recent (and final) of which is Beast of Burden. Through four books, Banks punished Innes mightily for our benefit, or maybe just mine – could I be the only one who relishes how much hell his detective absorbs? No, I’m not alone. The Scottish born author has proved himself a master of delivering the goods whilst elevating the whole shoddy affair to heights rarely discussed in genre circles.

I love, love, love that he's written a short series (with a helluva final act, folks) - it's one of my favorite things (a short series) because it lets the characters grow on us without ever becoming stale (that's how it should work, anyhow.)

In honor of the last Innes book (also check out Saturday's Child, Sucker Punch, No More Heroes), I asked Ray to give me a list of his personal favorite short series. Peruse this list then and for goodness' sake head over to Hardboiled Wonderland for my interview with Mr. Banks who says some awful smart things. He takes his work (not himself) seriously, and it shows.

I asked him what he looks for in a book, to which he replied:

An authentic and compelling voice. Clarity of thought and description. Brevity of action. Wit and originality. I want to see recognisable human beings as characters, and I want to see those characters treated with emotional integrity. There should also be the ambition to create something beyond entertainment, but also the knowledge that entertainment is a narrative necessity. A great book might not have all of these things, but it should have as many as possible. (Read the rest of my interview with Ray Banks at Hardboiled Wonderland)

With that criteria in mind here are Ray Banks' favorite short series:

1. The Hoke Moseley Quartet, Charles Willeford

(Miami Blues, New Hope for the Dead, Sideswipe, The Way We Die Now)

Right off the bat, I’m cheating, I know. The Moseleys aren’t strictly a limited series, given that Willeford had at least one more book planned (Nobody Walks, in which Hoke does some work for Internal Affairs) before his death in 1988. It isn’t even a quartet if you count the infamous Grimhaven. But the Hoke Moseley novels are among the best police “procedurals” ever written, precisely because there’s nothing else even remotely like them. There is very little police procedure, a whole lot of contradictions in Hoke, a brilliantly skewed portrait of mid-eighties Miami, and it’s a brave writer indeed that renders his series character catatonic at the start of the third book.

2. The Factory Quintet, Derek Raymond

(He Died with His Eyes Open, The Devil's Home on Leave, How the Dead Live, I Was Dora Suarez, Dead Man Upright)

Again, you could make a claim for the Factory novels as an ongoing series interrupted by its author’s untimely demise, but this is mitigated somewhat by the appearance of another, non-series, novel the year after (Not Till The Red Fog Rises). I’d also argue the case that Raymond exhausted the possibilities for the series as well as himself after the trauma of Dora Suarez. Either way, you’d be hard pressed to find a more devastating look at either the psychopathic mind or the damage done because of it.

3. The Bandini Quartet, John Fante

(Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Road to Los Angeles, Ask the Dust, Dreams from Bunker Hill)

Ask the Dust is the big boy here, one of the finest novels ever written about Los Angeles, but all of the Bandini novels have something to recommend them, chief among them the character of Arturo Bandini himself. Bandini was Fante’s alter-ego (in the same way Chinaski stood in for Bukowski), and is a warts-and-all portrait of a struggling, somewhat egotistical writer toiling under the twin pressures of art and commerce, whilst hanging out with the dreamers, immigrants and criminals of Bunker Hill.

4. The L.A. Quartet, James Ellroy

(The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz)

I could’ve had Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy here, or even David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, but neither are as accessible or as downright readable as the L.A. Quartet. These books conjure up a midnight reflection of film noir with a sprinkling of true crime, and chart Ellroy’s experiments with language from something relatively prosaic to the staccato-beat telegrams that would inform his later style. He effectively nailed 40s and 50s Los Angeles, and made it off-limits for everyone else. I can’t think of higher praise than that.

5. The Bayou Trilogy, Daniel Woodrell

(Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, The Ones You Do)

These novels are the closest Daniel Woodrell’s ever going to get to a straight crime story, and certainly a police procedural. The Bayou Trilogy’s protagonist is a French-Irish-American detective named Rene Shade, who’s based in swampy St Bruno, La., and features not only the themes that will define Woodrell’s later work (familial duty, moral relativity and economic marginalization), but also the lyrical bent that defines his style. Throw the kind of kineticism that’s missing from most of today’s self-proclaimed thrillers, and you’ve got some essential reading.

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.