The best social thrillers about money, race, and power

Hammett is the great-grandaddy of hard-boiled crime fiction and I devoured The Maltese Falcon when I was still a middle schooler.

Only as a published author myself did I discover The Glass Key, this strange, complex thriller in which private perversity mirrors political corruption in an unnamed American city a brief train ride away from New York.

Ned Beaumont, a gambler and fixer, winds his way through a labyrinth of mixed motives, class conflicts, double crosses, and ambiguous bromance. Hammett's tight storytelling and lean, mean prose were a great inspiration for my book.

Only when I arrived in Paris did I discover the works of this major African American writer.

Back then, Himes—still under-recognized in the USA—was a long-time household name in France. Himes not only brought the American crime novel to the Black part of town, he did it with a satiric bite that is his distinguishing feature.

The Black police detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are at the center of the nine novels in Himes's Harlem Cycle, an epic achievement in crime fiction.

Himes's Harlem is a violent phantasmagoria where Digger and Ed—in order to protect the poor, ordinary working folk of the community—are forced to be the baddest of the bad.

Cotton Comes to Harlem is my favorite work in the collection. Published in 1965, it skewers both Black militants and white racists with wicked glee.

It's the 1990s. Not exactly morning in America for Burke Devore.

Getting the ax from his mid-level executive job, in middle age, with a house and cars and two kids to put through college, has rendered Burke a desperate man. And very bitter about the new capitalist logic.

Even "healthy companies, firmly in the black," downsize people like Burke to pander to "stockholders' drive for return on investment."

In this pitch black, gruesomely funny thriller, Burke decides to literally kill off the competition for a coveted job at a paper mill.

Westlake, an absolute master, has the reader both sickened by Burke's methodical murders and, at the same time, actually rooting for him to get the job, by any means necessary.

It opens with the most brilliant disclaimer I've ever seen: "Warning. This is a novel. Everything is true and everything is false."

Dominique Manotti is a grande dame of French crime fiction, and a friend and mentor to me. Lorraine Connection is widely considered her masterpiece.

It's a sweeping 21st-century epic that starts in what might be considered a French rust belt town, in the region called Lorraine, where the old steel and iron works have been bought by the Korean firm Daewoo and transformed into a cathode-ray factory.

An industrial accident is the triggering event in this novel that explores the murderous effects of the globalized economy on a universe of characters from different classes, ethnicities, and nationalities. Virtuoso writing.

This witty and suspenseful tour-de-force is set in a Paris most tourists never see: the Nineteenth Arrondissement, a sprawling, multicultural district where working-class grit coexists uneasily with encroaching gentrification.

The author, who doubles as a well-known documentary filmmaker, is also a friend of mine from the French noir world.

Arab Jazz, first published in 2012, sardonically explores the religious fanaticism of Jews, Muslims and evangelical Christians while weaving a thrilling intrigue that earned it France's top prize for crime fiction.