Fans pick 100 books like The Deadly Mystery of the Missing Diamonds

Did this book give birth to hardboiled literature? No, but I feel it mothered and fathered it. 

Did this book—when filmed in 1941—give rise to film noir? I would say yes or “oui.”

This book lives on in libraries and bookstores, in minds and memories, on screens big and small, as a cultural masterpiece. But please don’t get me wrong about masterpiece. Hammett’s existential story of antiheroic private detective Sam Spade wriggling out of death as he fends off the cagey but crazed pursuers of a worthless “jeweled” bird breathes more deeply, more compellingly every time I re-read it. Through the book, I face the dark—and find the gloom almost charming. 

This novel captivated me from the very first page. It masterfully blends historical figures and facts to create a gripping thriller. I was immediately drawn into New York City in 1896 and the groundbreaking investigation.

The alienist, which is what psychologists were at the turn of the century, uses a unique, untested, and ridiculed method to track down a serial killer: psychological profiling. The appearance of real historical figures, like Theodore Roosevelt, then police commissioner, and J.P. Morgan, added a rich layer of authenticity and intrigue to the story. For me, the meticulous details of the era made each twist in the investigation come to life.

Disfigured and jobless after a fire, Timothy Wilde takes a job with the newly formed NYPD. He is assigned to the Sixth Ward, right on the border of the Five Points, a ward notorious for the desperately poor who live there and the rampant crime. One night he finds a young girl running through the street in a nightgown soaked with blood. She tells an unbelievable story of bodies buried in a nearby woods. Wilde investigates and soon finds himself a target of the city’s wealthy, several of whom are guilty of the most heinous of crimes but feel entitled to escape any accountability. Written in the slang of the times, it reads with the immediacy and plausibility of a memoir. I loved this book because it treats such serious issues: income inequality and the lack of accountability for the rich and powerful—even when engaged in child prostitution and murder.

A retro pulp-fiction novel from one of the world’s best-selling authors, David Baldacci.

A Gambling Man is the second intriguing story in Baldacci’s Archer Series about a former WWII veteran working as a private detective. Archer is joined en route to Los Angeles by a beautiful young lady with ambitions in Hollywood who leads them into dangerous territory with murderous gangsters and politicians trying to improve the odds in their favour.

Baldacci’s Archer Series is modeled on the early detective stories of authors like Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. He creates a tough guy detective in the style of the early masters while making Archer more appealing to modern readers – less macho and more respectful of the independent women joining his fight to stop the death and destruction. 

Ellroy at his most avant-garde. The plot is familiar territory for Ellroy fans; murder and political corruption in 1950s LA. But the experimental prose style, including the most pared-down clipped sentences, started to alienate some of his readers. Personally, I regard the book as Ellroy’s masterpiece and the experimentation is justified as it helps to deliver a lightning-fast pace.

I came across this book when I decided to focus my graduate study on the history of jazz and was reading everything I could find. It’s a short book, full of incredible vintage photographs, and it taught me so much about what swing is, how music and dance are joined at the hip. How it’s all rooted in the blues. And about the link between the “Saturday Night Function” of celebrating life with music and dance, followed a few hours later by the “Sunday Morning Function,” singing and celebrating God and community in church. The two are not all that far apart. Along with Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray was probably the first author to write about jazz with a real sense of lyricism and poetry. In this book, the writing itself carries the energy and exuberance of jazz.

Right at the end of World War I, a shellshocked cop, a jazz trumpeter, and a Mafia doyenne find their paths cross with an ax murderer in Spanish flu-ravaged New Orleans in one of America’s first true serial killer cases.

A unique structure of interlocking POVs really made the narrative shine for me and straight up stole Rich’s structure for my book! Good writers copy, etc. 

Crouch (1945-2020) was many things: jazz drummer, poet, philosopher, novelist, biographer, critic. In that last role he was, as the publisher’s notes to this indispensable book of essays on jazz and related matters puts it, “the perennial bull in the china shop of African-American intelligentsia.” Crouch relished controversy — he hated fusion, the popular blend of jazz and rock that came along in the 1970s; he abhorred rap; he even had unkind words to say about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. He was passionately contrarian on racial matters, refusing to hew to any politically correct line. He detested simplistic thinking in any form. Calling Bird, Clint Eastwood’s widely praised 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker “very bad,” Crouch wrote of the “stack of glowing reviews… that reveal the extent to which many who would be sympathetic to Negroes are prone to an unintentional, liberal racism. That racism reduces the complexities of… show more.

I love this book because it showcases the history of jazz and how it began in New Orleans. But what I love most of all is that the sounds of jazz instruments are included in the book.

Push the buttons, and you will hear drums. Push another button, a tuba—another, a trumpet, etc. I also heard singers scatting and singers improvising. Hearing the sounds of jazz brings the music to life.

By the time he became a producer of reissues for Verve Records, Pullman had been immersed in Bud Powell's life and recordings for decades, and produced the best life we have of one of the most important and prodigiously talented pianists who ever lived, and who was one of the inventors of modern jazz. Powell led a chaotic life, complicated by what we would now call a bipolar personality as well as addictions and mistreatment by the law, but Pullman captures it almost day by day, including the club gigs and recording sessions, without ever bogging down in pathos.