Today, Crime Fiction Lover is celebrating its fifth birthday. Yes, on 3 August 2011, we unveiled our website with the aim of bringing you the best crime fiction books from around the world. We had 40 visitors on that first day. Yesterday, we clocked 1,500 – so hopefully we’re doing something that crime fiction lovers everywhere will enjoy and appreciate.

Your favourites
Since we launched, we’ve written over 2,654 stories about crime books, authors, apps, TV shows and films, and these have been consumed by over one million people. It’s really exciting – and interesting – to look back and see what your favourite articles are, so here’s a top five…

1 – Five of the best crime and mystery apps
24 March 2013 | 186,217 page views
Here we rounded up some crime games for iPad, Android tablets and Kindle, and hopefully engaged gamers with our swathes of articles about crime books!

Breaking Bad – one of the best shows of all time.

2 – The 20 best crime shows of all time
9 March 2014 | 177,113 page views
Yes, and Sopranos fans are still berating us for not including their show, but as good as it may be, it just didn’t get enough votes from our team…

3 – Serial killer novels: 10 of the best
15 February 2013 | 57,914 page views
Whether the sub-genre is cosy, psychological thriller, noir or any other you care to mention, the serial killer is the favourite antagonist of our readership. Or, in Dexter’s case, protagonist.

4 – A guide to Harry Hole
9 March 2013 | 48,078 page views
From The Bat to Police, we charted the history of Jo Nesbo’s Oslo detective, Harry Hole. People seem intrigued by the troubled detective whose procedures are never textbook.

5 – A guide to Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer
10 July 2013 | 41,154 page views
This seems to suggest that we are the go-to site for Scandinavian crime fiction, or Norwegian crime fiction at least. And you’ve got to admit, Fossum is brilliant, isn’t she?

Our favourites
Over the last five years, the CFL team has included 26 different regular contributors based in five different countries. At the moment there are nine of us and I’m sending out a big thank-you to everyone past and present who has written for the site. Six of our writers are published crime authors including Eva Dolan, Luca Veste, R Thomas Brown, Andrew Nette, Vicki Weisfeld and Keith Nixon. We’ve got book editors on the team, and experts in Japanese, French, Scandinavian, pulp, noir, psychological, historical, mystery, thriller, cosy and any other type of crime fiction you care to mention. They’re a joy to work with and below some of our current writers point to their highlights from the last five years…

Louis Bravos, aka nagaisayonara – World Cup Special – The beautiful game in crime fiction
14 June 2014
Here we looked at soccer-related crime fiction from various footballing nations, such as Germany, Argentina and France, as well as England and Australia. Plenty of fun in 2014.

Emma Healey’s success has been followed on CFL.

Sandra Mangan, aka DeathBecomesHer – Interview: Emma Healey
9 July 2014
“It’s great to be in at the start of a huge success story and discover that your love of the book is shared by so many other people, as the awards it went on to win show,” explains Sandra.

Garrick Webster, aka CrimeFictionLover – Interview: Arnaldur Indridason
21 July 2015
A lot of our interviews are done on the phone or by email, but this was a face-to-face meeting with one of most thoughtful and poetic authors on the Scandinavian crime scene today.

Vicki Weisfeld – The diversity of the site
No particular article here, but Vicki says: “Left to my own devices, I’d read only political thrillers like The Cartel, Ghost Fleet, and whatnot. But the site has something for everyone and I don’t know if every reader is familiar with the richness of sub-genres in the crime/thriller/mystery field.”

Keith Nixon – Interview: Christopher Fowler
12 March 2015
Here, Keith quizzed one of the UK’s top authors whose Bryant & May series is both cleverly written and turns London into the third main character of the piece.

Mike Parker, aka RoughJustice – Interview: Ed Kurtz
30 November 2014
The author of Freight and Angel of the Abyss explained some of his influences as he twists crime and horror stories together to come up with a heady mix, leaving readers enthralled.

There’s so much else we’ve done – like our annual Classics in September and New Talent November events – that we could go on all day. But we won’t do that because there is cake to be eaten. What I will say as we sign off is: THANK YOU. Thank-you to our readers, to everyone who follows us on Twitter and Facebook, to all the authors, advertisers and publishers we’ve worked with, and anyone else who has supported us along the way. High fives!