The best novels that capture the darkly insane world of NYC where cocaine and vicious gangsters defined the 1980s

Bright Lights, Big City published in 1984 written by Jay McInerney captures 80s NYC from an outsider who experiences it head-on. I was drawn to the novel because I lived the same world and went to the club Heartbreaks but as an insider. McInerney’s lead character is a copy editor for a reputable publishing house and he is madly in love with his wife who is now a hot model and no longer has any interest in him. On top of that his mother just died of cancer and his younger brother comes to NYC hoping he will be strong for him. But he has no strength at all turning to cocaine for solace. Good read that captures a time and place as I tried to do in my own novel. Unfortunately, the movie adaptation with Michael J. Fox is a disappointment.

Published in 1988, Detective Joe Pistone is ordered to go underground to pose as a criminal and infiltrate a mob family. With his new name, Donnie Brasco, and made-up background as a jewel thief, his behavior and style are so authentic to the small-time street thugs, he is accepted almost immediately. His life is always in jeopardy and his family suffers since he is away all the time, but he is so good at playing the bad guy, Pistone begins to feel sympathy for the mobsters he is looking to arrest. The book reveals how petty and incompetent mobsters are. I met Pistone years later and he still felt concerned about his life.

Richard Condon shows the mob as a family of degenerates, violent felons who are still human beings who also fall in love. The focus on the novel is how a hit man, looking to embellish his career, dates a big mob guy’s daughter, only to fall in love with another killer who is a woman. She has been hired to kill him but she also is in love with him. Published in 1982 , the novel captures the entanglements of a soap opera with real bite. The movie with Jack Nicholson is also top rate.

I read The Godfather with a bunch of working class co-workers as we unloaded trucks at UPS. Published in 1971, the novel is a page turner, the bible for all gangster novels, and a theme that still works—immigrants come to America to make the dream happen. Though it was not looked on as literature at first, the characters who inhabit the novel are more potent than perhaps any other American novel. The movies and the following sequels are perfection. Highly recommended.  

I highly recommend Requiem for a Dream, published in 1978, which pre-dates the timeline of my own book by a couple of years. Requiem shows the complete degradation of drug addiction to two different generations of people who live in New York City during the drug craze of heroin and other prescription drugs. The characters in Requiem don’t seem to care or even be aware of how devastating being addicted to their drugs really is. They live for the high the drugs bring to them and each suffers tremendously for the total annihilation. A tough book to read but worth it! PS: Also a terrific movie as well.