100 books like The Final Solution

As a mystery reader and writer, I idolize Agatha Christie, the bestselling fiction writer of all time. In her 60+ detective novels, the mystery is always solved, but she left behind an unsolved mystery about herself. In 1926, after Archie Christie asked for a divorce to marry his lover, Agatha vanished for eleven days. Found after a massive manhunt, she never revealed why or how she disappeared. The Christie Affair solves that mystery in an inventive way, narrated by Archie’s mistress, a character I didn’t expect to like but grew to understand. I love the novel’s intertwining of history and mystery. It explores the effect of war on the hearts and minds of the characters and includes a murder solution worthy of Dame Agatha.

This novel explores the mysteries of the heart, much as Jane Austen did. The book’s chapters correspond with Austen’s six novels and the six meetings of the book club focused on her. As five women of various ages and one man discuss each Austen novel, their witty sparring reveals the complexity of their own searches for love and meaning. By studying Austen’s novels, the book club members, all of them at a crossroads, understand themselves better and forge a path forward. Having read and re-read Austen for decades, I love this book for showing how Jane Austen speaks to us two centuries after she died.

This entertaining book about the man who invented the armchair detective is perfect for armchair travelers and for researchers. I pored over it for the 4th mystery in my series, with its cast of Poe fanatics. Poe-Land explores the life and legacy of Poe through the places where he lived and where museums and monuments now honor him. His best-known stories stem from his time in Philadelphia, home of the Poe National Historic Site. The Philadelphia Free Library’s collection of Poe-phernalia (Ocker’s word) includes Charles Dickens’s stuffed pet bird, the raven said to have inspired Poe’s famous poem. Ocker unravels the mystery of how the bird got there, but neither he nor anyone else can solve the puzzle of Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore.  

This novel is two books for the price of one. It contains the unfinished manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood that Dickens was writing when he died. Chapters from the Dickens book alternate with scenes from a conference in Rome devoted to unfinished works. The conference attendees who resemble fictional sleuths, including Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, and Hercule Poirot, look for clues in the Dickens text to deduce how he would have finished the story. The book also offers insights into the life and death of Charles Dickens and a stunning ending. I love the book for its unique combination of a mystery and a novel by a literary giant.  

The Cuban mystery writer Leonardo Padura offers an amazing presentation of Jewish history and the art of painting as they collide in modern Havana.

He weaves together three stories: the attempted escape from Hitler by Jews aboard a ship that is turned back from the Havana harbor in 1939; the aborted career of an imaginary Jewish disciple of Rembrandt, who defies the biblical prohibition against creating human likenesses; and a contemporary attempt by a Cuban Jew to track down his exterminated family’s Rembrandt masterpiece.

I love how the vastly different worlds of modern Havana and 17th-century Amsterdam embark on a conversation that reveals so much about Jewish history and art.

Eventually, my travels to understand and write about the times in which I had been born took me to the Auschwitz concentration camp near Krakow, then to its source in Berlin and some excellent walking tours into the heart of its lights and shadows – which is much of the world of Philip Kerr’s fictional Bernie Gunther. A 1930s Berlin detective, Bernie must navigate the attempt to maintain a humanity that is both moral and faulted in a time of brutality and absurdity over the course of fifteen novels that will puzzle through the human dilemma of World War II Europe. Field Gray, which ranges from the Spanish Flu epidemic of World War I to the corruption of 1950s Cuba is perhaps the most comprehensive of the series.

Another crime book that takes you places you never thought you’d venture into. Fesperman creates a sympathetic protagonist Vlado Petric. Vlado, a former homicide detective in Sarajevo, lives in exile but is recruited to return to the place of horrors that have haunted his life. His assignment: help capture an aging Nazi collaborator who has become a war profiteer, surrounded by a sympathetic population who will protect him with their lives. The story is dark and filled with suspense and dread. The Balkans were and are a very dangerous place. As a writer Fesperman creates suspense and fear in a very different place with very different people.

This is a noir-style detective novel set in Berlin in the 1930s. The protagonist, private detective Bernie Gunther, is a disaffected police officer who has left its service because of the Nazi takeover of public institutions - and all the corruption and brutality that come with it.

I loved the book, the first of a trilogy, and I immediately read the next two because of its main character, Berlin. I have been visiting Berlin for 40 years and am fascinated by its seedy, gritty, and tragic history and its resilience as a city. Berlin Noir evokes the Berlin of the 1930s in a way that only fiction can do. Brilliant.

Although not historical fiction per se, Sherlock Holmes is a strong product of his time. He embodies the revolutionary modernism of the late Victorian period and for this reason alone the famous fictional detective has become a real character himself embedded in history. The fact his home address half-exists in London makes him even more real. His stories were one of the sources to inspire me for the Wynnman. This idea of creating real characters in a real setting that share their way of thinking, their passions, their curious attitudes, without having to answer to the hard, crude boundaries of factual reality.

The Irene Adler books mirror the Holmes-Watson relationship—brilliant detective, adoring documenter—centering Holmes’s famously successful adversary.

This story builds a much more interesting narrative into the original Adler story, changing the way we understand the stakes and the outcome, and then continues, lifting Irene Adler into a fascinating character in her own right.