I admit to, and beg pardon for, bias on behalf of hardboiled male private detectives. Also for leaning west coast. That’s where I grew up and still live, on a hill overlooking Mexico. I consider myself something of an expert on 20th-century crime novels, having written and published a dozen of them, most featuring PI Tom Hickey, and having read hundreds of all sorts, western, eastern, hardboiled, noir, legal, male, female, and even a few cozies. My current challenge is trying to learn calculus since my youngest daughter is a math whiz and I want to understand why.
Raymond Chandler mostly pioneered the modern P.I. novel. He taught us that nothing in life was simple, that one crime leads to another, to another, to another, that maybe all crime is part of one complex plot. Also, to read Chandler is to keep on the lookout for the next outrageous image, metaphor, or wisecrack such as “I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.”
Raymond Chandler's first three novels, published here in one volume, established his reputation as an unsurpassed master of hard-boiled detective fiction.
The Big Sleep, Chandler's first novel, introduces Philip Marlowe, a private detective inhabiting the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s, as he takes on a case involving a paralysed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail and murder.
In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe deals with the gambling circuit, a murder he stumbles upon, and three very beautiful but potentially deadly women.
In The High Window, Marlowe searches the California underworld for a priceless gold coin and finds himself…
Much likeChandler gave writers of PI novels a standard of wit and intricate plotting to aim for, Dashiell Hammett, with Sam Spade, sets the standard for the profile of the hard-boiled PI. He’s endowed with the flaws all men (or most of us) are heir to, but unlike most of us, he has principles and, quirky and self-defeating though they may be, he’ll hold to them no matter what paycheck, peril, or seductress attempts to lure him away. So many others have called The Maltese Falcon the best PI novel ever published, I won’t bother.
One of the greatest crime novels of the 20th century.
'His name remains one of the most important and recognisable in the crime fiction genre. Hammett set the standard for much of the work that would follow' Independent
Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a…
Book One of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer Series. Mr. Macdonald moved the PI novel into a whole new dimension. He probed the characters, particularly of perpetrator and victim, more deeply than any of his predecessors. When I taught in the English department at the University of Arizona, another prof commented that Ross Macdonald's were the only mysteries he would call literary. But this literary bent in no way lessens the suspense or drama. A reviewer famously commented “Macdonald doesn’t write about crime. He writes about sin.” Often, he shows us how the sins of the fathers and mothers are visited upon future generations.
The first book in Ross Macdonald's acclaimed Lew Archer series introduces the detective who redefined the role of the American private eye and gave the crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity only hinted at before.
Like many Southern California millionaires, Ralph Sampson keeps odd company. There's the sun-worshipping holy man whom Sampson once gave his very own mountain; the fading actress with sidelines in astrology and S&M. Now one of Sampson's friends may have arranged his kidnapping.
As Lew Archer follows the clues from the canyon sanctuaries of the megarich to jazz joints where you get beaten up…
Book One of the Dan Fortune series. In my opinion, Michael Collins never received the popularity he deserved, most likely because he was determined to write the truth about social and political issues and publishers are a timid gang. I think of Dennis Lynds (aka Michael Collins) as an old-fashioned liberal who leaned socialist whenever socialism was called for. I suspect he would’ve favored Bernie Sanders. And beyond all that, he was a masterful storyteller. What’s more, who can fail to love a one-armed PI?
Since fate forced him to go straight, he has become the resident private eye of this run-down part of Manhattan, chiseling out a career of divorce work and subpoena delivery. But a big case is coming his way. A beat cop is mugged in broad daylight and the only possible witness disappears the next morning. Unsure if he's looking for a witness or a perp, Fortune hunts for the kid, unearthing ugly secrets in a neighborhood he thought he knew well.
As a white boy from a mid -20th-century California suburb, I had often wondered how poor black folks endured the conditions of their lives without exploding into rage and violence. In the person of Easy Rawlins, Walter Mosley gave me valuable answers. Devil in a Blue Dress expertly integrates racial, class, and personal struggles. Also, and most importantly, the novel’s every character is truly human.
Devil in a Blue Dress honors the tradition of the classic American detective novel by bestowing on it a vivid social canvas and the freshest new voice in crime writing in years, mixing the hard-boiled poetry of Raymond Chandler with the racial realism of Richard Wright to explosive effect.
The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles tells a gripping story about memorable characters and resurrects a time and place that, perhaps more than any, created the modern world. Unless a famous evangelist will take agnostic Tom Hickey into her confidence, he may never learn if the Ku Klux Klan lynched his friend. San Diego Book Awards Best Mystery.
“Kuhlken mixes historical and fictional characters with an ease that will remind many of Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller series (True Crime, etc.). He’s equally adept at melding the murder inquiry with Hickey’s personal struggles.” - Publishers’ Weekly
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
