96 books like Boss

This masterful work helped me put context around music and musicians I already loved by fusing scholarly study and excellent biographical portraits of blues musicians, enlivened by vivid writing and a deep empathy for his subject matter. This is my own goal in everything I write, and this book has remained a touchstone throughout my career.

I went out of my way to hire Bob Palmer when I was Guitar World's managing editor, and getting to work with him remains a career highlight. I am not alone in my ardor for this book; it’s no coincidence that it appears on virtually every list created about blues or roots music on this site.

This originally came out in 1973 as Chicago Breakdown, and has probably never been out of print. Rowe is an English blues historian and record collector, and his obsessive fascination with the musicians, labels, and clubs that created the blues in Chicago’s golden years drips off every page, from Lester Melrose’s Bluebird label through to the Chess Records giants – Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin Wolf and “the last of the great blues poets”, Sonny Boy Williamson.  Much of Rowe’s work has no doubt been superseded by the veritable industry of blues research that has sprung up in the years since publication, but Chicago Blues was a major milestone, and remains the indispensable key to an understanding of the city’s music scene.

It began as a master’s thesis in the early Sixties, when the blues was still (just) alive and evolving, and still celebrated by its traditional black audiences. By the time the book was published in 1966, however, white fans had ‘discovered’ the music, and everything was changing. Pounding, repetitive tunes of the kind written by Willie Dixon at Chess and popularised by English R&B bands, became the canon. The blues, with a new rock audience unaware of its rich variety and deep hinterland, was reduced to a single rather tedious idea. It didn’t have to be like this. It’s not the fault of those white R&B bands, but if they had been less fixated on Chicago and opened themselves up to influences from Detroit, say, and Memphis, we might now be living in a different musical world. Keil provides a glimpse of it.

A series of profiles of the author’s musical heroes, along with erudite essays on blues, rock’n’roll, and Chess Records, this is an essential primer. You cannot understand the place of the blues in modern culture without also understanding Little Richard, Elvis Presley, the relationships between white label bosses and their black artists, and the ever-present, inescapable fact of musical cross-pollenation. Chess had Muddy Waters on its roster, and Howlin Wolf, but also Chuck Berry, Ramsey Lewis, and The Moonglows. Guralnick’s writing is elegant, informed, and self-aware, and from Skip James to Jerry Lee Lewis, in the 50 years since its publication, the reputations of his book’s iconic subjects have rocketed in value.

Elmore Leonard knew the vagaries of the movie business back to front, and he serves them up on a platter of delicious satire in this story about an East Coast loan shark, Chili Palmer, who comes to Los Angeles chasing a deadbeat debtor and winds up in his own fractured fairy tale version of the Hollywood dream.

Chili’s an endearing character, street smart with a unique blend of humility and self-confidence. When his collection job throws him into company with a group of movie people, he sees them and their milieu with clear-eyed objectivity.

Talking to an underworld associate, he says, “The movie business, you can do anything you want because there’s nobody in charge.” Leonard’s mastery of dialogue and character, along with his wit and sly affection for the industry he’s skewering combine to make this book a complete delight. 

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. 

This book is the biography of Henry Hill, who, at the age of eleven, began working as an assistant for a boss of the Lucchese crime family in Manhattan. The book was turned into the movie Goodfellas, with Ray Liotta playing the role of Hill.

Fast-paced and filled with brutally violent incidents, Wise Guy portrays Henry Hill’s involvement in the life of the crime organization. In 1980, twenty-five years after he began working with the Lucchese family, Hill was arrested for heroin trafficking. Knowing he would be convicted at trial and would receive a lengthy sentence, and understanding that members of the family would likely have him murdered in prison, Hill testified under oath to federal prosecutors in return for admission into the Witness Protection Program.

No one does Florida-Funny like Carl Hiaasen.

A long-time columnist for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen has written theme-based novels about the foibles of Florida living—the politics, the sugar industry, the plastic surgery industry, the lottery. I imagine him banging out these novels with sardonic ire, seething at what has happened to his beloved Florida. But his rants are so funny readers need to stop from choking and hold onto to their hats.

I’ve read all of his books, and Tourist Season is one of my favorites, hooking me on page one with that mysterious limb found on the beach, page one. Then the race is on to find the culprit—and the rest of the poor devil who’s missing a leg. When asked where he gets his ideas, Hiaasen once said, “The police blotter…You can’t make this stuff up.”

If screwball detective fiction intrigues you, you must read Craig Rice. Why not start with Eight Faces of Three, the mystery introducing the wacky, rye-soaked team of Jake Justus, Helene Brand, and John Joseph Malone?

Justus is a good-looking press agent and the book’s moral center; Brand is a gorgeous heiress and non-stop partier; and Malone is a stumpy lawyer-slash-PI with good instincts and better luck. Imagine Philip Marlowe meets the Marx Brothers.

In Eight Faces of Three, a young woman awakes to find her aunt murdered, all the house’s clocks set to 3 am, and herself the prime suspect.

Craig Rice was the first mystery writer to grace the cover of Time magazine. Her private life was strewn with ex-husbands and empty booze bottles, and she died way too young at 49.

However, her literary legacy—one critic dubbed her the “Dorothy Parker of detective fiction”—will keep her… show more.

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb set out to commit the perfect crime and ended up in newspapers as the perpetrators of “the crime of the century.” They kidnapped and murdered a teenage boy in Chicago in 1924, but both Leopold and Loeb were still considered boys themselves at the time. Clarence Darrow defended them at trial, arguing that they were guilty but that the situation had extenuating circumstances. Baatz’s book explores how two college students from good families ended up in prison for murder. Leopold’s family even came from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near where I currently live, so even though the case is almost 100 years old, it’s not as distant as it might seem.