100 books like Road to Perdition

The Godfather portrays the classic conflict between loyalty to a family and the desire to escape it for a better life.

Michael is a former marine who wants to stay out of the crime business and have a normal relationship with his girlfriend. But family loyalty trumps principle when his father is attacked, his brother killed, and his wife in Italy murdered. It wonderfully shows his slow fall to unfeeling coldness as the price for avenging his family and protecting their empire.

The book has great and colorful characters, especially Don Corleone. He is fascinating because he offsets his violence with principle and a love for his family.

Westlake gets into the head of a successful career criminal, making available the kind of attitude and thinking that most readers would normally abhor.

Somehow, we don’t in the Parker series. Even as the clever, convoluted plot unfolds, we never stop caring what happens to Parker and we root for him against creepier crooks.

I especially like the authentic feel of the techniques and procedures Parker employs. It’s almost as though Westlake was a criminal himself. His work inspired me to write about what I don’t think most authors have directly experienced—what happens in a therapist’s head.

So I think my books also feel real.

This book is Cormac McCarthy’s most accessible novel. It reads like a screenplay and hits all of the high spots with low blows and grit. It is political, involving drug deals gone wrong that involve Mexican cartels while also being absolutely lonely and isolated. This is noir in the bright desert daylight, mixed with some high-tech of modern criminals. Dark, terrible, and entertaining.

I regard The Friends of Eddie Coyle as the best American crime novel of the 20th century. 

This noir Friends is a fast-moving slither through Boston’s underworld with its colorful cast of bank robbers and victims, cops, and informers, and, above all, Eddie “Fingers” Coyle. Facing a long prison stretch, Coyle, a small-time gunrunner, is willing to do anything, including informing on a fellow armorer, to stay on the street. 

Told largely through realistic dialogue Higgins picked up as a federal prosecutor, Friends had huge influence, including on crime-novel master Elmore Leonard. I find that the novel passes the ultimate test of a great book: it not only bears but invites re-reading, rewarding me each time with something I had not previously seen in this short but beautifully layered novel.

I think that this novel is a must-read for aspiring writers of crime fiction.

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.

This is the story that inspired my novel. It takes place in a small Nebraska railroad town in the bitterly cold winter of 1898. My novel takes place in the bitterly cold winter of 1947, shortly after WW2, mostly in the same blue hotel in the same snowbound town as in Crane’s story.

Crane’s story “is one of the most well-known of the short stories in the collection The Monsters and Other Stories. Although it appears to be a reasonably simple tale about a man who encounters trouble following a stay at the Palace Hotel, several complex themes underpin the story and define many of the overarching themes in novels like Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and more generally, Crane’s corpus. Stylistically, the story breaks free from the norms of the period, often entering the realms of Expressionism, an unusual style to encounter in American literature.”

This is a portrait of Nebraska (and Nebraskans) where most of my own book takes place. It’s also the state where I went to high school. I like Hansen’s spare and precise writing style because it perfectly fits the time and place, as well as the characters themselves who are presented stripped of the conceits and pretensions. For me, it’s a style, though different from McCarthy’s, that creates the illusion of actual direct experience as opposed to something I happen to be reading about. His story “Wickedness” creates a powerful image of winter on the Great Plains and its effect on people.

I grew up in a small Montana town, so Watson’s novel has a special meaning for me. It is a vivid portrayal of small-town life on the Great Plains and takes place during the same time period as my own book. It tells of the corruption of a trusted official and its effect on his family, his victims, and the town itself. Watson’s novel allowed me to feel and understand the deep emotions, the pain, the anxiety, the love, and the disappointment that his characters were feeling.

Rereading this book, with its rhapsodic descriptions of some of the first jazz recordings, rekindles the excitement I was feeling about the early 1920s when I began writing my trilogy and researching the era. Kennedy chronicles the early Black and White jazz artists from New Orleans, who transplanted to Chicago, and the young Midwesterners who took up the mania for jazz. His enthusiasm for, and his devotion to the early development of jazz is infectious.

Every Father’s Day, someone or the other on my social media feed will post Robert Hayden’s wonderful poem “Those Winter Sundays.” The poem takes me back not only to the many acts of kindness and unheralded small sacrifices that my father made but also to the ambition and the anxiety of Seepersad Naipaul on behalf of his son away at Oxford and starting in life as a writer, a writer who later in life will win the Nobel Prize.

The poignant part of this drama is the father’s own ambition and anxiety about making it as a writer. It doesn’t happen. Instead, the son receives a telegram with some terrible news. He sends his family a telegram in return: “= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO”