Fans pick 100 books like The Expendable Man

One of the best things about teaching English at Oxford University is that students sometimes get to choose their own topics. Years ago, one of those students introduced me to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and (to my shame) I didn’t even know the author. Yet Braddon sold more novels than Dickens in the nineteenth century.

Indeed, Lady Audley went head-to-head with Great Expectations, and Braddon won! On first reading, I loved the novel’s raw energy, its crazy plot twists, and its honesty: there’s little or no sentimentality in Braddon. On the second or third reading (yes, Lady Audley can cope with multiple reads even though it’s a murder mystery), I discovered complexities, contradictions, and challenges that just made me more intrigued.

Put simply, Victorian Braddon is the original and best Queen of Pulp.

I’d already read a couple of Fremlin’s "psycho-domestic noir" mysteries when I picked up this book, but nothing prepared me for the emotional and psychological punch packed by it.

One of the reasons I love genre fiction is that it is so obviously fiction. I enjoy entering another world, just for a while, taking an emotional rollercoaster ride, safely strapped in, and then stepping back into my life. Reading this book blew this cosy-crime-reading model out of the water, and I’m glad it did.

Specifically, Fremlin writes – from the inside, painfully honestly – about widowhood and, as a widow myself, there was something both comforting and uncanny in her insights.

Once I’d belatedly realised that women wrote noir, it was a short step to becoming obsessed with Margaret Millar, a Canadian/American counterpart to British Celia Fremlin.

This book kept me guessing right to the end. It has a psychological complexity that means the characters got under my skin, and it is crammed with razor-sharp insights into dysfunctional relationships. I just love Millar’s spare prose: "The smile meant nothing. It was one of habit. She put it on in the morning along with her lipstick and removed it at night when she washed her face. Jim liked this smile of Daisy’s…"

It is easy to see why Millar was celebrated in her own time – and, sadly, equally easy to guess the reasons she now needs "rediscovering."

While Eric is not a Queen, I think he is a Prince. 

Trains. Many trains. Rail travel has always been a crucial element in crime fiction–which works for me since I truly adore train journeys, real or imagined. Seriously though, there’s so much I love about Eric Ambler’s book.

Known as the creator of the modern thriller (just as Braddon created the murder mystery), Ambler – like all the authors I’ve chosen – offers a whole lot more than thrills. I’ve mentioned the trains, but I love the way in which his heroes are just ordinary guys who discover they can do extraordinary things while defeating Fascism.

I’m fascinated by Ambler’s unobtrusive but telling insights into some of the darkest moments in European history – this is writing that takes a popular genre and turns it into literary gold.

The author was one of a platoon of young, bicycle-riding male messengers that roamed the sprawling Warner Bros. studio in Burbank before World War II, delivering scripts and memos to directors, writers, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, and yes, Errol Flynn (who got a big thumbs-up from the messenger boys).

Jerome pulls no punches on the stars he liked and those he detested and provides graphic details to back up his rankings. This book shows the stars as real people, for better or worse, while also providing an invaluable look at the inner workings of one of the most successful studios of old Hollywood.

Novelist Peter Viertel, an uncredited screenplay contributor to three John Huston-directed movies, wrote one of the great Hollywood-adjacent novels in this 1953 classic backgrounded by the preproduction of a fictionalized film. Hint: it’s transparently Huston’s The African Queen and the "John Wilson" character is clearly John Huston himself. The book dramatizes the hell screenwriter Peter Verill (Viertel, of course) endures when the bigger-than-life director becomes more obsessed with hunting and killing a majestic elephant than in shooting the film he’s been sent to make. 

Funny, marvelously readable, it's also rich with wry and knowing portraits of characters based upon Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and producer Sam Spiegel, the latter of whom says of Wilson/Huston: “In a well-ordered society, he’d be in a straitjacket now.” Clint Eastwood directed and starred in a 1990 movie version. Skip that, watch The African Queen, then read this instead.

I love all aspects of Los Angeles from approximately 1911 to around 1950. This doesn’t just include the actors, directors, and studios but also those working behind the scenes who made the movies come to life. This book involves the writers who composed the scenarios (the early name for screenplays) that ended up becoming the films made by the studios. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald was most famous for his novels in the 1920s, but his personal problems (a wife committed to an expensive mental hospital and a daughter to raise) caused him to have to look for work as a writer for MGM, but he was not successful due to his drinking. 

O’Nan delves masterfully into Fitzgerald’s complicated relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and his alcoholism, and it addresses his multiple terrifying heart attacks.

This book truly belongs among the top picks for Hollywood literature. 

Smith’s comprehensive biography of one of film history’s most prolific composers is a must-read for anyone interested in golden-age Hollywood.

Steiner worked on a vast array of films, such as King Kong, Gone with the Wind, and The Big Sleep, and Smith goes through the production of all of them. He explores Steiner’s life in detail, as well as his production process with his collaborators. Reading this book provides not just the life story of one composer, but an understanding of how film music worked in Hollywood in the 1930s through ‘50s.

It doesn't matter that it was patently phony: The glamour that was Tinseltown in Hollywood's golden age was impossibly romantic and utterly irresistible. Much of it had to do with the social lives of movie stars, and in particular the shenanigans they got up to in swanky nightclubs where they danced, courted, and made merry. Jim Heimann is a superb chronicler of Los Angeles's architectural and cultural past, and this beautifully illustrated book is crammed with images of the likes of Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall patronizing such swell spots as Mocambo, the Trocadero, Ciro's, the Coconut Grove, the Player's Club, and many others. They're all gone now, but this collection of hundreds of photos of the clubs, inside and out, and the patrons, dressed as if for a royal wedding, brings them back to vibrant life.

A hypnotic, often troubling journey into the mind of a killer and the detective hunting him down are the reasons I return to this book time and again. They are both commonly found elements in crime thrillers today. But what Dorothy Hughes did in this book appealed to me personally, perhaps because of my own personal relationship with crime and trauma, physical as well as emotional.

I’m always fascinated by how intensely Hughes manages to immerse us in both viewpoints with only a few sentences, shifting viewpoints and playing with our conscience in subtle ways. I’ve seen enough violence and trauma to know that motivations are not always as simple as we’d like them to be, and people often do the most unexpected things for the least obvious reasons.