The best books about broken heroes

Dashiell Hammett, more than any other author, created the hardboiled anti-hero. He’s also a damn fine prose writer. I re-read one of his books every year because of this, hoping perhaps to absorb his spare, elegant style. Each sentence is brutally trimmed of any excess and yet resonates with layered meaning. 

Dashiell Hammett himself was a broken hero. He fought in two World Wars for his country and yet was sent to jail by the committee for un-American activities for refusing to name names. He was a communist, who yet, as a young man, worked for the fascist, union-busting Pinkertons.

A complex, troubled individual who created dark and cynical worlds, and none more cynical than that of The Maltese Falcon. Here, we have a femme fatale, a hardboiled detective, gangsters, and conmen, all vying for the titular prize. It is a mean-streets masterpiece. 

The protagonist of this book is Takeshi Kovacs, a former UN elite soldier turned private investigator. He’s old, or, to be precise, his mind has been around for decades, kept in ‘storage,’ a form of virtual prison. He is ‘decanted’ from storage and put into a body–a ‘sleeve,’ a temporary residence that he may get to keep if he does this one job: solving a seemingly unsolvable murder. 

Fifteen years ago, when I first read it, Altered Carbon showed me cyberpunk still had something to say. I wasn’t a writer then and hadn’t even considered being a writer, but I did think to myself: were I ever to write, it would be in this genre. Fifteen years later, the very same author, Richard Morgan, provided the cover praise for my debut novel. Surreal.

Sometimes, I just want to read a good book. A safe pair of hands, immaculate world-building, a setup that pays off. Leviathan Wakes is one of those books. 

While there are several flawed heroes in the series, perhaps the most broken of all is Joe Miller. A detective for a private security company on a space station, he is laden with all the flaws you’d expect. He has a problem with the bottle and a problem with his boss.

With unconventional methods, a jarring personality, and an indifference to all forms of authority, Miller has the dogged (and often opaque) integrity of the hardboiled hero. He never gives up on a case, not even at the potential cost of his own life.

This book largely takes place over a three-day battle. It showcases the stupidity of war, the cowardice, the luck, the incompetence, and yes, sometimes even the breathtaking courage.

As you’d expect from Abercrombie–the so-called Lord of Grimdark–the ‘heroes’ are no such thing, but rather, flawed and broken individuals who go to war out of obligation or ambition or because they know no other way of life.

Joe Abercrombie writes superb action scenes. Visceral, urgent, bloody. He’s also particularly cruel to his characters. I’m not sure if he’s picking on me particularly or if it’s just the dark alchemy of his literary soul that makes him such a popular author, but he’s always a bit of a bastard to the characters I like the most.

Megan Abbott writes traditional, contemporary crime fiction, but also occasionally takes a deep and dark dive into the pulpy past. Of the latter, this is where I come in.

This book uses noirish tropes and writing traditions–whip-smart dialogue, 1940s American slang and settings, femmes fatale, gangsters, speakeasies, heists, double-crosses, all soaked through with hard liquor–but puts a twist on the old formula by having women as the central characters. 

In this, a young, unnamed ingenue is taken under the wing of Gloria Denton, a mob boss. The young woman wants to be somebody, and boy, Gloria Denton, is the somebody everyone wants to be: sexy, hard-as-nails, chic, smart, and feared. Everything goes swimmingly until a homme-fatale enters the scene, and well, things go downhill from there.