96 books like L.A. Confidential

The thought of walking around an occupied town in France during WWII terrifies me. The prospect of running into Nazis, looking for any excuse to arrest me, is the thing of nightmares.

But my fears shrink to nothing compared to the experience of blind sixteen-year-old Marie-Laure attempting to navigate war-torn Saint-Malo from the memory of a handmade tabletop model. The strength of courage she shows in this story has never left me.

If Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade served as the model for most private detective protagonists in American books (and movies), Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe offered a fascinating, inside-out variation. Marlowe—especially in this book, which I love as Chandler’s best—seems more analytical than Spade, more passionate than Spade, but just not quite as cool by today’s standards. 

That little loss doesn’t hurt him or this classic, however, which provides the best plot with the most expressive prose of this top 5 private detective novels. Marlowe’s war-torn pal disappears, the guy’s oversexed wife gets murdered, and Marlowe naturally becomes police suspect number one. 

In between the developments, Marlowe makes light: “Mostly I just kill time, and it dies hard.” That’s a clever way to say so long to involvement, but the longest goodbye, the real and permanent one to which the book’s title refers and we sometimes call death—that’s the… show more.

I struggled to put this book on a crime novel list, but this is one of my favorite books of all time. At its heart, it’s a spy novel. It makes the list because the main character hunts bad agents–the internal affairs of the CIA.

The book opens with a murder crime scene in New York. If you haven’t heard about this book, it’s a true phenomenon. Many times, during book signings, I’ve been asked by readers if I knew of this book and how much they absolutely loved it. More importantly, though, they wanted me to tell them when the sequel was coming out. This book came out in 2014, and the sequel came out this year, ten years later. It garners 95k reviews on Amazon, which alone tells you all you need to know.

This book is one of my favorite mysteries of all time. It addresses one of the great unsolved mysteries in English history: Did Richard III kill the princes in the tower? Tey’s sleuth, Alan Grant, is a dogged investigator, and, in the hospital with a broken leg, he treats this historical mystery like a contemporary murder. His step-by-step investigation pulled me in and convinced me that Richard Plantagenet has been mistreated by history.

Miss Tey is so convincing that she inspired me to write the (very innocent) ghost of Richard III into one of my own mystery novels after the monarch’s body was found under a Midlands car park in 2012.

O’Brien performed some sort of alchemy in turning a previously dry and underpopulated section of the historical fiction genre into literary gold, at once gripping and supremely well-written. One follows the adventures of a Royal Navy Commander and his Irish doctor friend–a man with a secret life–through the war at sea in the Napoleonic era, and I found the balance between naval exploits–Jack Aubrey being a swashbuckler of renown–and period history made for fascinating counter-points.

Over and above that, I loved the way O’Brien built an ensemble cast and proceeded to draw the reader into their lives, making the death of any one of them a personal loss. I know that I benefitted from learning this writing trick and used it myself in my Empire series, and I know at least one other Roman author who did much the same. Wonderful stories that kept me coming back, and this is… show more.

The Getaway by Jim Thompson and the film directed by Sam Peckinpah is a gritty slice of noir and the classic story of a bank heist gone wrong. It’s a beautifully pulpy showcase for the twisted marriage of Doc and Carol, played by Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw with perfection in the film. It plunges you into the very core of moral ambiguity and the ending of the book is unexpected, sublime, and a sledgehammer to the head. A great first book and film to introduce a reader to noir styles.

Another Jim Thompson classic, The Grifters is about a trio of con artists trying to move up from being small-time crooks. They add love and a mother/son relationship into the mix which only makes things worse. The film directed by Stephen Frears is a master-class in acting from Anjelica Huston, Annette Bening, and John Cusak. The scene at the end couldn’t be more shocking as a way to wrap up a noir film. Money is paramount in the world of the grifters, everything else secondary. What could be more noir than that?

In the dark world of hardboiled literature, anything can happen at any time for any reason—or no reason at all. In my view, that makes things easy for this debut novel about an unemployed LA factory worker named Easy Rawlins, and that makes things challenging for the story—for the character—as well. 

A man with money and power offers Easy a job looking for a missing blond-haired, white-skinned beauty. Rawlins faces only two problems: He has no experience as a private detective, and he needs to do the detecting with black skin in a segregated, remarkably unequal 1948 America. 

But I think Mosley has found the perfect genre for his character, one whose tough and humane and even psychologically insightful qualities have enabled him to adjust to, learn from, and survive in a place where laws can break out or disappear, depending on the color of his skin. Rawlins finds it… show more.

This may be one of my favorite mysteries; I could barely put the book down. Granted, this title is not full of examples of faith precisely, but Agatha Christy was a devout Anglican (like C.S. Lewis). If one is going to write mysteries, one must appreciate Agatha Christy. She was an incredibly prolific author of some truly high-quality fiction. 

This was the first title I read of hers, and it set me on a path to begin collecting her books. This tale has so many elements that build tension and create a great mystery—from the isolation of the setting to suspicion and general confusion. It is a masterpiece of a whodunit.

This is one of the few novels I’ve read twice for pleasure (rather than work). It’s a noirish novel that delves into the esoteric along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (which Kubrick allegedly considered adapting at one point but which I was unable to read twice!).

The book follows a film scholar who uncovers an incredible conspiracy around a fictional B-movie director called Max Castle, and the imperceptible images he placed in the gap between each of the twenty-four frames played every second in a movie: the so-called flicker of the title. Its author, Roszak, is better known for having coined the term "the counter-culture."