Here are 100 books that City of Devils fans have personally recommended if you like
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I fell in love with Asia as a young boy growing up in Phoenix, Arizona. Many of my playmates were Asian Americans, and I was fascinated by the photos of their ancestors who had immigrated to America. That curiosity grew to a passion—one that led me to a long career as an Asian expert in the US Government. My first visit to China in the early 1980s took me to Shanghai before its incredible transformation. I knew much of its history, but walking the streets, seeing the buildings, and encountering its citizens made it real and left me wanting more. The history of Shanghai became a hobby.
What Pan Ling does for the Chinese side of the story, Grescoe does for the Western expats living in 1930s Shanghai. I stayed in the Cathay in the 1980s long after it had been renamed Peace Hotel.
But the old glamour shined through and I wondered what incredible things the building had seen. Grescoe’s book took me back to its glory days and introduced me to the people—and some of their more notorious doings—who frequented its salons, bars, and restaurants.
On the eve of WWII, the foreign controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the twentieth century's most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the illustrious Sir Victor Sassoon. Emily Hahn was a legendary New Yorker writer who would cover China for nearly fifty years, playing an integral part in opening Asia up to the West. But at the height of the Depression, Emily "Mickey" Hahn, who had just arrived in Shanghai nursing a broken heart after a disappointing affair with an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter, was convinced she would never love again. When she enters Sassoon's glamorous…
I fell in love with Asia as a young boy growing up in Phoenix, Arizona. Many of my playmates were Asian Americans, and I was fascinated by the photos of their ancestors who had immigrated to America. That curiosity grew to a passion—one that led me to a long career as an Asian expert in the US Government. My first visit to China in the early 1980s took me to Shanghai before its incredible transformation. I knew much of its history, but walking the streets, seeing the buildings, and encountering its citizens made it real and left me wanting more. The history of Shanghai became a hobby.
I love history, especially of Asia and WWII, and Jordan’s intense and harrowing description of the “battle at the end of the street” in 1932 between the Chinese Nationalists and Japan moved me with its descriptions of the destruction and suffering it brought. Jordan is an academic, but this isn’t a stodgy history.
Jordan’s lively account covers not only the fighting, but the political maneuvering running up to it, efforts by the international community to control it, and the heroic stand by the Chinese Nineteen Route Army that gave the Japanese militarists all they could handle. I came away with not only a deeper understanding of WWII in China but greater respect for the Chinese soldier.
China's Trial by Firepresents the balanced history of how, ten years before Pearl Harbor, Japan tested modern China in a thirty-three-day war, now known as the Shanghai War of1932. Often obscured by the larger World War II, this history details how the Chinese fought from trenches against Japan's modern bombers and navy, and formed a defense that brought the country together for the first time. Unlike other histories' brief generalizations of the incident, this study traces the war from the initial January 28th Japanese marine raid on Chinese Shanghai. It also studies the roles played by the prevailing Japanese leaders,…
I fell in love with Asia as a young boy growing up in Phoenix, Arizona. Many of my playmates were Asian Americans, and I was fascinated by the photos of their ancestors who had immigrated to America. That curiosity grew to a passion—one that led me to a long career as an Asian expert in the US Government. My first visit to China in the early 1980s took me to Shanghai before its incredible transformation. I knew much of its history, but walking the streets, seeing the buildings, and encountering its citizens made it real and left me wanting more. The history of Shanghai became a hobby.
What a cast of characters Pan Ling introduced me to! There are Big Ears Du and Pockmarked Huang, notorious gangsters and leaders of the Green Gang; Wang Jingwei, the “Chinese Petain;” Dai Li, who headed the Chinese Nationalist secret police; and many others.
I love to read about faraway places in different times, and Pan Ling brought to life for me the incredibly complex and fascinating milieu of 1930s Shanghai through interlocking portraits of many key Chinese figures of the period. She made me want to meet these people—but preferably not in a dark alley.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
I fell in love with Asia as a young boy growing up in Phoenix, Arizona. Many of my playmates were Asian Americans, and I was fascinated by the photos of their ancestors who had immigrated to America. That curiosity grew to a passion—one that led me to a long career as an Asian expert in the US Government. My first visit to China in the early 1980s took me to Shanghai before its incredible transformation. I knew much of its history, but walking the streets, seeing the buildings, and encountering its citizens made it real and left me wanting more. The history of Shanghai became a hobby.
Ristaino tells the story of one of the most remarkable men to ever live and work in Shanghai, Father Robert Jacquinot, a French Jesuit. I was deeply moved by his life’s story, one of great compassion for the Chinese and incredible courage. His story is known to very few outside China circles, but it is one that should be much better known. He saved literally thousands of Chinese lives through his work in disaster relief and standing up to the brutality of the Japanese military.
If you have ever been asked to name three or four people you would like to have dinner with…well Father Jacquinot is on my list.
When Japanese forces attacked Shanghai in 1937, a French Jesuit, Father Robert Jacquinot de Besange, S.J., heroically stood up for human life. Father Jacquinot, who spent twenty-seven years in China, was determined to provide safety and refuge to victims of modern warfare. Through relentless negotiations and deft diplomacy, Father Jacquinot convinced Japanese and Chinese military leaders to allow for the establishment of a safe zone in the midst of the ongoing war. Father Jacquinot's example was subsequently copied in other Chinese cities and saved the lives of more than half a million Chinese civilians over the course of the brutal…
What I look for in a book is something that triggers my serious side. So be it if that removes a whole range of fantasy books or those that merely titillate. Because I’ve traveled a lot, ‘feasible fiction’ is what I write and what I look for in other books. A story might be entirely fictitious, but as long as it’s not far-fetched, has a cast of realistic characters, an international or historic location, and keeps me on my toes to the very end, that’s great. If it’s got some politics and science thrown in, that’s even better. I hope my list lives up to expectations.
I like books from guys who’ve traveled and been around a while before sitting down to write them. I suppose I’m one, but Graham Greene remains a hero of mine even though he died over twenty years ago. In this book, Greene masterfully creates the atmosphere of dark, damp, smoky post-war side streets in post-war Vienna.
That the criminal element involves a crime syndicate selling diluted penicillin also appeals to me, as I’ve written three novels about fraud and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry.
Green’s book led to a series of films, and this book's signature tune still resonates with me.
Rollo Martins' usual line is the writing of cheap paperback Westerns under the name of Buck Dexter. But when his old friend Harry Lime invites him to Vienna, he jumps at the chance. With exactly five pounds in his pocket, he arrives only just in time to make it to his friend's funeral. The victim of an apparently banal street accident, the late Mr. Lime, it seems, had been the focus of a criminal investigation, suspected of nothing less than being "the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living in this city." Martins is determined to clear his friend's…
I have been writing for almost all of my adult life. In my previous role as a school administrator, I published more than a dozen articles for professional journals. Then, a few articles began appearing in popular magazines, both followed by speaking engagements across the country. When I retired from public school service, I took the leap to the novel. Fools and Children and Ticket to Oregon are the result.
One of the first novels using a picaresque story-telling technique, this novel set the standard for the style—one I soon adopted. Good stories, some spicy for the day, are told in a logical progression, which gave rise, methinks, to Twain and certainly me. Great vignettes told un-attached but somehow part of a progression.
Daniel Defoe's bawdy tale of a woman's struggle for independence and redemption, Moll Flanders is edited with an introduction and notes by David Blewett in Penguin Classics.
Born in Newgate prison and abandoned six months later, Moll Flanders' drive to find and hold on to a secure place in society propels her through incest, adultery, bigamy, prostitution and a resourceful career as a thief ('the greatest Artist of my time') before her crimes catche up with her, and she is transported to the colony of Virginia in the New World. If Moll Flanders is on one level a Puritan's tale…
We Had Fun and Nobody Died
by
Amy T. Waldman,
Peter Jest,
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
I grew up in Scotland, and from the moment I visited New York City as a tourist, I have been obsessed! I moved to NYC officially in 2000 and have been endlessly fascinated by its history. As a new immigrant who moved here knowing no one and having very little money, I struggled a lot in my initial years, and that left me wondering how people, particularly women, had survived being in the City in prior years, especially with less privileges than I had and so many more obstacles in their way to making a living. I hope these books give you the insight they gave me.
I had frequently heard stories through the New York City history grapevine about the 19th-century Jewish crime boss Mrs. Mandelbaum, but only in a shallow way. That’s why I found it a real treat to read a detailed book about her life and the extraordinary ways in which she pilfered diamonds, silk, and other sought-after Gilded Age goodies.
I was most fascinated by the way Margalit Fox laid out her gang’s intricate methods of robbing banks, including the diagrams that brought these actions to life. Mandelbaum’s demise at the end of the book is surprisingly touching.
America’s first great organized-crime lord was a lady—a nice Jewish mother named Mrs. Mandelbaum.
“A tour de force . . . With a pickpocket’s finesse, Margalit Fox lures us into the criminal underworld of Gilded Age New York.”—Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood
In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?
It’s all my father-in-law’s fault. Before I ran into him, I was a card-carrying “literary” high-brow. Shoot, I was reading Faulkner’s “The Bear” in high school and thought I would be the next generation Steinbeck if I ever got around to writing novels. But one weekend, while visiting my wife’s folks, I found myself with nothing to read—a problem solved by my father-in-law’s complete collection of Richard Stark novels. Those books knocked me head-over-heels, which is why when I did get around to writing novels, the first six were hard-edged crime fiction.
This book pulled me from classical American literature (think Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Hemingway) to hardboiled crime fiction, and I haven’t come up for air since.
I was captured by both the substance and the style—the rich possibilities of an antihero protagonist delivered in a prose as direct and compelling as a bullet to the brain. After this one, I couldn’t stop until I had devoured the entire series!
You probably haven't ever noticed them. But they've noticed you. They notice everything. That's their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers' work habits, the positions of the security guards. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack.They're thieves. Heisters, to be precise. They're pros, and Parker is far and away the best of them. If you're planning a job, you want him in. Tough, smart, hardworking, and relentlessly focused on his trade, he is…
Like many readers, I am drawn to stories of vengeance. Stories of someone seeking revenge have a built-in tension and narrative drive. But as the saying goes, when you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. Yes, these tales seldom go smoothly. The consequences of this and the violence that ensues are what I wanted to explore in my latest novel, but several books on my shelf make fascinating stories out of this desire for revenge.
Charlie Swift takes his criminal life seriously. It’s a job, and he wants to be the best at it. But he can step up and set things straight with the best of them when things go south. Pity the man who gets in his way. Charlie Swift is not someone you betray and get away with it.
This is a new crime classic filled with black humor and thrilling action, in a new edition under the title Fast Charlie (to coincide with the film adaptation). If you can get past the opening page without being hooked, something is wrong with you.
Charlie Swift is an old school kind of guy. Runs a tight ship. Respects his boss. Takes care of his mom and kid brother. And, he's a stone cold killer. When a fancy new-wave hood, hungry for the primo Orlando territory Charlie enforces, offs most of Charlie's boys in a bloody mob takeover, our man steps in to make things right. But when word gets out that his boss has gone missing and there's a traitor among his crew of gun monkeys, Charlie knows payback ain't gonna be easy. Shot up, boozed up, and beaten up, Charlie finds the toughest…
Secret St. Augustine
by
Elizabeth Randall,
William Randall,
Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!
I’ve always loved a good crime drama/suspense thriller novel–the way they keep you glued to the pages, and you think you’ll just sit down for a quick couple of chapters before dinner, and the next thing you realize, it's 12am, and you’re on the last chapter. The depth of the character studies that you get with this genre is the other reason I enjoy it so much, there’s nothing worse than having main characters that are one dimensional and unreachable as a reader. I have always tried to create this kind of character depth and gripping narrative in my own books.
I enjoy everything about this series, particularly the main protagonist and antagonist. However, the lines between the two are very blurred, and that’s another great thing about it.
I loved the way Light planned everything out meticulously and then the way L would counter—like a gripping game of chess almost.
That might sound a little boring, but this series is far from dull.
Light Yagami is an ace student with great prospects - and he's bored out of his mind. But all that changes when he finds the Death Note, a notebook dropped by a rogue Shinigami death god. Any human whose name is written in the notebook dies, and now Light has vowed to use the power of the Death Noteto rid the world of evil. But when criminals begin dropping dead, the authorities send the legendary detective L to track down the killer. With L hot on his heels, will Light lose sight of his noble goal...or his life?
