The best true stories that read like police procedurals

Originally published in 1981 and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Kidder’s book takes readers on a journey into what was, for most of us, terra incognita: the race to design a new, cutting-edge minicomputer known as the Eclipse MV/8000. Given sustained access to the engineering and marketing teams at Data General, a now-defunct Massachusetts company, Kidder chronicles the challenges, rivalries, setbacks and triumphs that their formidable task entailed, in a lyrical narrative that makes the art of creating a small(ish) computer from scratch compulsively readable and propulsively accessible.

Kidder is—high praise—a process freak, and his books are the gold standard for nonfiction procedurals. In House (1985), the follow-up to The Soul of a New Machine, he documents one of the most fundamental processes of all: the building of a home. At the center of the narrative is a young professional couple, Judith and Jonathan Souweine, who have commissioned the design and building of a house in Amherst, Mass. Kidder follows their odyssey from groundbreaking to moving in, giving readers a behind-the-scenes look not only at his protagonists’ family life but also at the craft challenges that architects and builders face in conjuring a functional, beautiful and habitable building. The book is at the bottom a contrapuntal dance—at times dissonant, ultimately harmonious—as the Souweines, their brilliant young architect and a team of local builders learn to reconcile their sometimes competing visions.

Long before Dr. Gregory House, there were the real-life doctors and scientists who were Berton Roueché’s perennial subjects. Roueché, a writer for the New Yorker for many years, reported on their dazzling detective work in the magazine’s “Annals of Medicine” columns. This volume collects two dozen of his most elegant pieces, which follow step by step the unraveling of a spate of medical mysteries: identifying the bewildering illness that affected residents of a small South Dakota town, discovering why a patient suddenly lost his sense of taste, fingering the ordinary but unlikely culprit that made a man turn orange, and much else.

In January 1971, the Scotsman Dougal Robertson embarked with his wife and children on what was to be the dream of a lifetime: an extended sea voyage aboard their 43-foot wooden schooner, the Lucette. Eighteen months later, as she plied the Pacific some 200 miles west of the Galapagos, the Lucette was rammed by a pod of killer whales; the Robertsons had barely enough time to flee the ship before it sank. They spent the next 37 days adrift, first in the ship’s inflatable raft and later, after the raft gave out, in its tiny dinghy. They braved storms, sharks, and the perpetual lack of food and fresh water before they were rescued by a passing ship. First published in 1973, Robertson’s gripping, day-by-day account of their ingenious survival tactics is a classic of the castaway-narrative genre.

In 1942, Williams, a pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force, was shot down on a bombing mission over Germany. Taken prisoner, he was eventually sent to Stalag-Luft III, a high-security prison camp—considered escape-proof—in what is now Poland. Though The Wooden Horse, published in 1949, is sometimes described as a novel, it is a true-life account of his escape from the camp, with some names changed and some details lightly fictionalized. Working in secret and under constant surveillance, Williams and two fellow POWs constructed a 20th-century Trojan Horse that allowed them to tunnel out of camp under the noses of their formidable German captors. Williams’s book, and the 1950 film of the same name, are what first drew me to the crystalline procedural rigor of POW escape narratives. My love of the genre propelled me to write The Confidence Men, the story of the most unusual POW escape in history—involving no tunneling, no weapons, and no violence of any kind.