It’s not so long ago that you knew where you were when it came to cities with more than their share of violence. A mystery novel set in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago could be as gritty as it wanted to be. Outside the United States, the best (or worst, if you want to look at it that way) was London.

If murders were committed elsewhere, they were few and far between – often with poison or a sudden cosh on the back of a skull. Those were always crimes that were comprehensible and allowed the entire police department to devote all its resources to the solution. Naturally, the police were seldom up to the job, requiring the assistance of a private detective, a meddling spinster, or a writer of detective stories to leap into the void and brilliantly deduce who the murderer was and why he (almost always a man) did it.

That was then. Now, virtually any modest-size city or rural region in the United States has a hard-working cop or flinty private eye to call its own. There are series protagonists in Boston (Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, Jeremiah Healy’s Cuddy), Detroit (Loren D. Estleman’s Amos Walker), South Florida (James W. Hall’s Thorn, Carl Hiaasen’s assorted loonies), New Orleans (James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux), New Jersey (Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum), and so many more you can play the game yourself (and probably will when you e-mail me to tell me whom I left out).

But here’s the weird part. There seems to be an undeclared war by British crime writers to identify their city as the most violent, drug-soaked, dark, filthy, dangerous, crime-ridden place on earth. Now, I admit, as an American (assuming it’s fair to count New York as America), that my vision of Scotland, aside from bagpipes, sheep, and kilts, is of a bucolic, craggy landscape filled with rosy-cheeked girls and giant men, tail-wagging dogs never far behind, with the friendliest people and worst food in Europe.

England is pretty much London, one of the world’s three great walking cities (along with Paris and New York), with both rough neighborhoods and elegant ones, and charming towns and villages dotting softly undulating mountains and endless fields of heather. Ireland, of course, with the most exquisite green grass on the planet, is home to a million Barry Fitzgeralds and shy red-haired girls with freckles – and if you ask for directions, you will get a half-hour history of the local farmers and their families plus an invitation to come to the pub for a wee nip.

This is as accurate as suggesting that rappers are influenced by the phrasing of Frank Sinatra, the melodies of Cole Porter, and the lyrics of Noel Coward.

Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh has nothing to do with friendly people. As the dust jackets and press releases say, the best-selling crime writer in Britain shines a light on the underbelly of this lovely city, turning over the metaphorical rocks to bare the drugs, depression, violence, and corruption that permeate a place much loved by tourists.

Other Scottish authors scoff at the notion that Edinburgh has much of a dark side at all. It’s Glasgow you want if you’re looking for serious brutality, real addiction, utter hopelessness. A major crime in Edinburgh, they claim, is a glass of chardonnay not properly chilled.

London? The major assault on human decency there is a weak cup of tea. You want tough? Go to John Harvey’s Nottingham, where he sets his brilliant and poetic novels about Charlie Resnick. Or go to Newcastle, where one of the hottest new British writers of noir fiction has set much of his latest novel. Martyn Waites has written six very raw novels, but the most recent, “The Mercy Seat” (Pegasus Books, 421 pages, $25) is, surprisingly, the first to be published in America. I say “surprisingly” because this young man can write!

The good news and the bad news: Because he is such a powerful writer, Mr. Waites has managed to create memorable characters who live in the memory as well as on the page. Although not a short book, “The Mercy Seat” flies, with no stop in the action and tension and a large cast, all of whom have something to lose, including several you want to see come out all right. The bad news, of course, is that they don’t all have happy endings. How could they? In the jagged landscape of the west end of Newcastle (“a land that spawned monsters”), there is little hope for redemption or joy.

When we meet the hero, Joe Donovan, he is in the process of drunkenly playing a game of Russian roulette. You can’t entirely blame him. He was with his 6-year-old son in a crowded department store when he just vanished. His marriage fails, his daughter thinks he loves his son more than her and hates him for it, and he loses his job as a top journalist.

When a former colleague seeks his help with a different story, another journalist gone missing, she and the newspaper’s lawyer promise to help him in the search for his missing boy, now gone for two years. Donovan does help and gets involved with a young teenager who sells himself and an array of some of the most despicable and frightening criminals you hope you will never meet.

The poignant hero, no superman but an honorable and righteous figure, is scheduled to be featured in another novel year, and I’m looking forward to it already. The skillful dialogue, at such perfect pitch that you can almost hear it said, reminds me of Ken Bruen, whose relentlessly bleak novels are set in Galway (and did you ever expect to see bleak and Galway in the same sentence?). With the new crop of British crime writers, it’s hard to tell which is darker and more horrific – their cities or their brains.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.