Here are 100 books that Stagolee Shot Billy fans have personally recommended if you like
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Growing up in Indiana and Illinois meant that Chicago has always been, for me, the city—the place where people went to make a name for themselves and took the world by storm. From my local Carnegie Library, I read voraciously across genres—history, science, literature. They transported me out of my small town—across the universe sometimes. I learned that setting in fiction was for me a major feature of my enjoyment, and Chicago was where I set my own mystery series. These books, when I read them, explored that grand metropolis—and brought Chicago to life on and off the page. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have.
It is a book that deep dives into a historical event, in this case, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Check. It is a nonfiction book that reads like a gripping thriller, in this case, the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who built a three-story building featuring secret rooms, torture chambers, and a crematorium. Check. Chicago leaps off the page. By the end of the book, I was able to envision the massive exposition, its hundreds of temporary buildings, all white colored, interlaced with ponds and canals.
Much like that exposition helped raise Chicago up from its Great Fire, so I could see a Chicago of the past, in a glorious triumph of industry and innovation. Oh, and yeah, a serial killer constructing a horrific murder building.
The Chicago World Fair was the greatest fair in American history. This is the story of the men and women whose lives it irrevocably changed and of two men in particular- an architect and a serial killer. The architect is Daniel Burnham, a man of great integrity and depth. It was his vision of the fair that attracted the best minds and talents of the day. The killer is Henry H. Holmes. Intelligent as well as handsome and charming, Holmes opened a boarding house which he advertised as 'The World's Fair Hotel' Here in the neighbourhood where he was once…
I love history. I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid, listening to my dad’s history lectures. And in my history classes, I always tucked away stories about women. There weren’t many; most were trailblazers like Amelia Earhart or Susan B. Anthony. They were completely admirable, but I wanted to know about the women who had strayed from the straight and narrow: the murderers, the liars, and the thieves. Now, I write about women committing crimes throughout history. As a reader, I can never resist a story about a woman from the past doing things she shouldn’t. These books were endlessly entertaining and sometimes downright chilling to read.
Everyone knows who Lizzie Borden is, and everyone thinks they know whether or not she did it. But what few people know about is her trial. I have always been pretty obsessed with the Lizzie Borden story (hint: she’s totally guilty). But this book put a whole new spin on the country’s original true crime.
I loved reading about the legal proceedings that put Lizzie front and center of a violent crime (not a common place for a woman to be in Gilded Age America). It painted Lizzie in a more vulnerable light than the axe-wielding murderess I had always pictured her as. It also helped explain why she was acquitted.
In Cara Robertson’s “enthralling new book,” The Trial of Lizzie Borden, “the reader is to serve as judge and jury” (The New York Times). Based on twenty years of research and recently unearthed evidence, this true crime and legal history is the “definitive account to date of one of America’s most notorious and enduring murder mysteries” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and…
I have been researching and writing about 19th-century American murders since 2009, and my blog, Murder by Gaslight (murderbygaslight.com), includes illustrated stories of more than 500 murder cases. My book, The Bloody Century: True Tales of Murder in 19th Century America, compiled fifty of the most famous murders. In researching these stories, I prefer to use primary sources such as newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books from the time of the murder. They present the attitudes surrounding the crime without modern analysis and preserve details that tend to disappear over time. My latest book, So Far from Home: The Pearl Bryan Murder, draws almost exclusively from newspaper accounts in 1896 and 1897.
Arsenic Under the Elms tells the story of two sensational but unrelated murders in New Haven, Connecticut, in the late 19th century. Mary Stannard a 22-year-old domestic servant was found stabbed and poisoned on a path near her home. The prime suspect was her pastor, former employer, and alleged seducer, Rev. Herbert H. Hayden. Jennie Cramer, a beautiful young woman from a poor family was also poisoned, her body found floating in the ocean. Suspicion fell on Jimmie and Walter Malley, nephew and son of the richest man in New Haven. In both cases, the disparity in social class between victim and suspect became the defining feature of the case and the greatest impediment in obtaining justice for the murdered woman.
The attorney Virginia A. McConnell provides a riveting view of Connecticut in the late 1800s as revealed through the unrelated but disturbingly similar murders of two young women. The first, Mary Stannard, was an unmarried mother who worked as a domestic and believed herself to be pregnant for a second time. The man accused of her murder, Reverend Herbert Hayden, was a married lay minister whose seduction of Mary was common knowledge. Three years later, Jennie Cramer, another woman of low social status, was found floating facedown in Long Island Sound off West Haven. The characters involved in the commission,…
I have been researching and writing about 19th-century American murders since 2009, and my blog, Murder by Gaslight (murderbygaslight.com), includes illustrated stories of more than 500 murder cases. My book, The Bloody Century: True Tales of Murder in 19th Century America, compiled fifty of the most famous murders. In researching these stories, I prefer to use primary sources such as newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books from the time of the murder. They present the attitudes surrounding the crime without modern analysis and preserve details that tend to disappear over time. My latest book, So Far from Home: The Pearl Bryan Murder, draws almost exclusively from newspaper accounts in 1896 and 1897.
Carlyle W. Harris was a promising young medical student in 1891 with an unfortunate obsession with sex. He would constantly regale his friends and associates with tales of his sexual conquests. When he failed to seduce 19-year-old Helen Potts, he convinced her to marry him but keep the marriage a secret. Six Capsules tells the story of Harris’s plot to murder Helen with a poisoned capsule to keep the secret from being revealed. The author, George R. Dekle Sr., a retired law professor and former prosecutor, provides a detailed analysis of Harris’s sensational trial for murder. The book’s vivid account of the murder and its consequences contrasts the moral and legal atmosphere of the 1890s with that of today.
As Ted Bundy was to the 20th century, so Carlyle Harris was to the 19th. Harris was a charismatic, handsome young medical student with an insatiable appetite. His trail of debauched women ended with Helen Potts, a beautiful young woman of wealth and privilege who was determined to keep herself pure for marriage. Unable to conquer her by other means, Harris talked her into a secret marriage under assumed names, and when threatened with exposure, he poisoned her.
The resulting trial garnered national headlines and launched the careers of two of New York's most famous prosecutors, Francis L. Wellman and…
Richard Vetere’s screenplay Caravaggio won The Golden Palm for the Best Screenplay at the 2021 Beverly Hills Film Festival. He co-wroteThe Third Miraclescreenplay adaptation of his own novel. The movie was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Ed Harris and Anne Heche and directed by Agnieszka Holland released by Sony Pictures Classics. His teleplay adaptation of his stage playThe Marriage Foolstarring Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett is the most viewed CBS movie ever and is currently running on Amazon. He also wrote the cult classic film Vigilantecalled by BAM as one of the “best indies of the 1980s.”
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.
A darkly funny novel of mobsters, murder, and marriage: “The surprise ending will knock your reading glasses off.” —The New York Times
Charley Partanna works as a hitman for the Prizzis, New York’s most dangerous crime family. When he meets Irene Walker, an LA-based tax consultant, it’s pretty much love at first sight.
But Irene also moonlights as a hit woman—and had a hand in a big-money heist in Vegas. Now Charley has been told that she’s got to go. Faced with divided loyalties, he must make a choice—between the only family he’s ever known and the woman he loves.…
During my 45-year career as a newspaper and magazine journalist, I covered a wide range of events on a daily basis. As a police and courts reporter for two daily newspapers, I spent many hours researching and writing about crime and legal affairs. As a reader, I’ve enjoyed true crime. As the target of a true-crime myself in 1980, however, I became more fascinated with the sub-genre of the true-crime memoir in which a participant in a true-crime shares insider details of the story without seeking pity or glorification from the reader through objectivity and self-deprecating humor. It’s a fine line. When an author manages to walk it, however, the result proves inspirational.
Best known for Helter Skelter--his classic 1975 true crime memoir on prosecuting the Manson family, former Los Angeles deputy DA Vincent Bugliosi wrote this book later about a complicated but lesser-known double-homicide case he tried in 1966, three years before the Manson murders occurred. As the prosecutor on these cases, Bugliosi boasted access to background details that only an insider can share, merging psychological analysis with trial strategy concerns. Echoing themes of the noir thriller Double Indemnity, this true account unveils the plot of two lovers to murder their respective spouses and explains the complex police work required to catch them.
On December 11, 1966, a mysterious assassin shot Henry Stockton to death, set his house on fire, and left the scene without a trace. A year later, when a woman was found brutally killed, shreds of evidence suggested a connection between the two murders.
In the Palliko-Stockton trial, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi offered a brilliant summation that synthesized for the jury the many inferences and shades of meaning in the testimony, fitting all the pieces together in a mosaic of guilt. But will the jury be persuaded?
Growing up in a house filled with books – my father was a publisher – meant that I fell in love with the written word at an early age. Growing up in apartheid South Africa and witnessing the brutal regime at work meant that I was sensitised to issues of injustice and racial prejudice at an early age too, issues which would come to inform much of my writing. I’ve always been drawn to the underdog’s story and often write to shine a light on the lives of the marginalised. My first literary heroes were brave authors such as Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, and Alan Paton, who used their pens to provoke change.
Having grown up in South Africa during apartheid and witnessed how the appalling regime destroyed so many lives, I was profoundly affected by this read. It takes place in the sprawling black township of Soweto at the height of apartheid, where survival was a daily battle for the oppressed and marginalised inhabitants. To this end, Tsoti, an apparently heartless young township thug, lives a life of brutal crime. That is until he unwittingly kidnaps a baby during a bungled carjacking. Forced to care for the infant, Tsotsi gradually rediscovers his own humanity. The reader can’t help but be moved from a place of horror to one of deep understanding and empathy for the main character – a remarkable feat for any author. A compelling story of hope.
Tsotsi is an angry young gang leader in the South African township of Sophiatown. A man without a past, he exists only to kill and steal. But when he captures a woman one night in a moonlit grove of bluegum trees, she shoves a shoebox into his arms: the box contains a baby and his life is inexorably changed. He begins to remember his childhood and rediscover the self he left behind.
Tsotsi's raw power and rare humanity show how decency and compassion can survive against the odds.
I began my freelance career as a travel writer, though I now also write about drinks. While living in London I worked for a while at the men’s magazine, Mayfair, and around that time went out for several months with a woman who was a stripper. I didn’t know that when we met, so judged her by her personality not her profession. One of the magazine’s models was murdered, and one of the staff questioned by police. He was totally innocent. I wanted to write the kind of book I like reading, bringing together those two storylines to create a fictional version of a very real part of London life.
I knew the author when I worked for his literary agent in London, and this is a fascinating and frightening look at the London crime world of the Kray Twins. They ruthlessly ruled parts of London, including the East End, and was an essential background re-read when I wrote my own London crime novel. I was trying to show behind the scenes of the world of striptease, but this book is a reminder of what’s behind even that behind-the-scenes world. I used to send a 6-monthly royalty cheque to their mother as their share for co-operating with the book, which is why it’s so authentic.
The classic, bestselling account of the infamous Kray twins, now a major film, starring Tom Hardy.
Reggie and Ronnie Kray ruled London's gangland during the 60s with a ruthlessness and viciousness that shocks even now. Building an empire of organised crime that has never been matched, the brothers swindled, extorted and terrorised - while enjoying a glittering celebrity status at the heart of the swinging 60s scene, until their downfall and imprisonment for life.
When I was eight, my mother was called in to see the principal…yet again. He pulled me out of class, stood me in the hall for maximum intimidation value, then said to my mom, “Your son has no respect for authority.” Mom asked, “What about that, Larry?” My reply—and this is totally true—was, “He doesn’t mean respect. He means courtesy. You can demand courtesy, but you have to earn respect.” Those sentiments have not changed, which is why, I suppose, I have an extremely critical eye for history, especially American history, that deifies the winners. I don’t think we make ourselves stronger as a nation by pretending our leaders were somehow not as human in their flaws as the rest of us. I prefer to look under what is called “conventional wisdom,” because that’s where the real story often lies.
A brilliant hypnotic novel that almost no one read. Albert French was the victim of a publishing nightmare—his editor and his publisher, both of whom had primed his novel for a major publicity push, left for new jobs before the pub date, after which his book was orphaned and abandoned. For anyone not in the book business, it might seem hard to believe that a terrific novel would be left to languish, but, sadly, such an event is not uncommon in American publishing.
Set in an African American section of Pittsburgh in 1950,I Can’t Wait on God evokes both the day-to-day lives of ordinary people and the striving and hopelessness of African Americans trying to escape the doomed existence to which so many are condemned. French weaves a tale that is starkly realistic, yet with a mystical overtone that creates a sort of intoxicating haze. The narrative seems straightforward,…
The crowded joys and familiar despair of poor, back-alley life in 1950 Pittsburgh have a hold on most people there, but there are those who need to escape. Jeremiah Henderson and his woman, Willet Mercer, set their sights on New York City - but making good is easier said than done. Left with no choice but to give in to the pimp who'd like to try Willet on for size before selling her to his clientele, Jeremiah and Willet try to focus on the future. But just before the pimp has his way with her, Willet balks, stabbing him to…
I first became fascinated by the portrayal of female criminals when I wrote a novel, The Ghost of Lily Painter, based on the first women to be executed at Holloway Prison in London in 1903. Holloway was the most infamous female jail in Europe and shortly before it closed down in 2016, I was given access to the prison archives. That led to Bad Girls, nominated for the Orwell Prize, and it also led to the discovery of a forgotten criminal aristocracy - the women who were once so notorious they were Public Enemy No.1.
This is a rollicking read about the criminal adventures of Doris Payne, jewel thief extraordinaire who started her career in the United States in the 1950s. She saw herself as a crusader, and stealing diamonds as an act of retribution against a racist world. Doris continued her career until 2017, often updating and refining the methods once used by her Victorian forebears.
"Doris Payne is an unapologetic badass." - Tessa Thompson, Actress
This is the sensational and compelling memoir of the world's most notorious jewel thief - a woman who defied society's prejudices and norms to carve her own path, and live out her dreams.
She stole diamonds from the people who underestimated her, she exploited the men who tried to domesticate her, and she consistently defied society's assumptions and prejudices to create a new life for herself. For fans of Catch Me If You Can, The Wolf of Wall Street and Molly's Game, this is the newest must-read crime autobiography.
