100 books like Murder on the Night Train to Paris

As anyone who has ever grown up in Glasgow will tell you, don't mess with short people. A short, angry Scottish woman can have your proverbial eye out when riled. Especially if they’re meant to be enjoying themselves at the seaside. And that's exactly the case with Lady Hardcastle’s loyal sidekick, Flo. Granted, Flo is Welsh, and the duo lives in Edwardian England rather than 20th-century Scotland, but this pair can sort matters out faster than my mother and her wee pal, Margaret. 

Elizabeth Knowelden brilliantly reads this rollicking romp about disappearances, espionage, ice cream, and donkey rides. I like any story with a fearsome female sidekick. Fearsome sidekicks have for too long been dominated by scary blokes with muscles.

I don't know if writer Clara Benson and narrator Gethyn Edwards are best pals, but they're matched so perfectly in this book; they should be. Anyway, here's a tip. If you're invited to a party in a rambling old country mansion with secret passages and dark histories, don't be a jerk. Because then you might find yourself dead in the library like Professor Coddington. Nobody is particularly upset at a killer being on the loose, except that sort of thing can ruin a party and a reputation.

Luckily, Freddie Pilkington Soames is on hand—the most ramshackle, thoroughly reprehensible, fabulous chap one could meet—to save the day. Clara Benson really knows how to write a great character. This book made me laugh out loud.  

When I was a kid, my Mum loved Upstairs Downstairs—a TV show about a household in Victorian England and the lives of the gentry upstairs and the servants downstairs. Nobody was allowed to even whisper when it was on. 

Well, the Mrs Jeffries Mysteries would have blown her mind. Because the servants in Detective Witherspoon’s household not only do regular servanting but also solve murders on the fly. 

There are loads of great characters: Mrs Goodge, the surly cook, Smythe, the fierce-looking coachman with a heart of gold, and of course Mrs Jeffries herself, who’s like a sherry-guzzling Sherlock Holmes who can tidy.

When Agatha Christie died, so did Miss Marple. It also meant the demise of the best wee-mustached Belgian detective ever. Except it didn't. The delectably smart Sophie Hannah has written a series of Poirot books from the point of view of Poirot’s sidekick, Edward Catchpool—best pronounced with a strong Belgian accent—and they’re so brilliant even Agatha herself would be impressed. 

Lady Athelinda Playford has invited Poirot to a party at her mansion, where she’s planning to announce changes to her will. So obviously, there’s going to be a murder, and Poirot and his little gray cells will solve it. It's a delicious book, read magnificently by Julian Rhind-Tutt. The only real mystery to be answered is when is Sophie Hannah writing more? 

Why did I first pick it up? Because of the cover. Why did I buy it? Because of the story promised on the cover flap. And it was a French, international, multi-translated mega-hit. What happened after I read it? I hunted down the author’s next 2 books and bought them, because holy smokes, this one blew me away. The crime scenes in this novel left absolutely nothing to the imagination, and once the pages started turning there was no stopping this deadly suspense train. Plus, Commandant Camille Verhoeven is about as uniquely cool as a protagonist can get.

When I was in middle school, middle-grade fiction didn’t really exist in the way it does now. There weren’t a ton of options for a young person who loved horror. So once I outgrew Goosebumps and Fear Street, I started reading adult horror. Stephen King. Dean Koontz. Anne Rice. I’ll never forget reading Interview with a Vampire for the first time. I had never been to New Orleans, but I was instantly transported. It was magical – electric. I could feel each word in my bones. Thus, you can only imagine my excitement discovering The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh. To that point, I hadn’t read anything that reminded me more of Anne Rice’s writing style. Just like the title, this book was beautiful. And haunting. With a New Orleans setting, a forbidden love trope, and lots of animated characters that I immediately fell in love with. If you… show more.

As the much-missed Karl Lagerfeld once said, “Fashion is a train that waits for nobody.” And that train comes whooshing through Paris quite a lot.

This book captures some of the inimitable energy and agitation of Paris Fashion Week, as self-taught photographer Meyabe covers six seasons—men’s, women’s, and couture—over a single year. It includes an introduction by local fashion hero Loïc Prigent and is published by my friends Alex and Marie from Ofr. (who also published Makers Paris #2).

Ofr. is an indie arts bookshop, gallery and publisher, always in the moment, that channels a certain bohemian spirit proper to Paris: “Open, Free and Ready”.

At long last the Vampire of Paris crawls from his crypt, a living legend emblazoned with magical sigils and muttering dire imprecations for 666 searing pages. A world-renowned artist and bold aesthete of the macabre, Nico Claux holds a Japanese cannibal as his role model and calls Satan his homeboy. This reclusive genius goes beyond the pale only to reveal himself as a regular bloke, albeit one with a taste for torture and blasphemy. Meant to be read in the darkest night!

Do you want the gritty, pungent beauty of Paris during the heyday of the Romantics—the 1830s? You want perversion, decadence, a crazy, kinky plot revolving around sex, dominance, Sapphic passion, murder, and intrigue, set in the Trocadero neighborhood? Only Honoré de Balzac could dream up something this wild and get away with it. One of the wonders of this short novel is how, through casual descriptions, Paris comes to life. It’s not a picture-postcard version of the city. Au contraire. It’s a seamy, real place I recognize after 35 years living there. While I was reading The Girl with the Golden Eyes, I actually went out and found the locations. The city has changed less than you’d think in 190 years. Above all, the seamy, perverse side remains.

When Bill (William John) Cunningham (1929-2016), son of an Irish Catholic family from Boston, moved to New York at the tender age of 19 in 1948, it became the life-defining step in his career as probably the most famous fashion photographer in the metropolis. He had been interested in fashion from an early age and sold his first hats. After returning from military service in Korea in 1953, he began photographing fashion and writing articles for Women's Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune.

It is no exaggeration to say that Cunningham's fashion sense and photography quickly shaped a new style of fashion journalism. His "street style" brought fashion, no matter how expensive or luxurious, into the world of everyday life. Cunningham made fashion interesting again only through his point of view and photographs. The quiet, always curious and meticulous Cunningham also became known for his commitment to the gay… show more.