Fans pick 100 books like The Last Good Kiss

From the moment I began reading Blacktop Wasteland, I knew S.A. Cosby would become one of crime fiction's most notable authors. His protagonist, Beauregard “Bug” Montage, drew me in and still won't let me go. What I love most are the gray areas between right and wrong, good and bad. There are no easy answers or choices in this strikingly honest look at Black life in the rural South. The action sequences and fights wing as true as Cosby’s characters and dilemmas.

One of my favorite characters in this middle-grade mystery has always been Chris Theodorakis, the teen boy with an unnamed neurological condition that confines him to a wheelchair and, for the most part, to his house.

Even if he can’t leave home—and even if people often look away from him when he does—Chris plays a key role in solving the mystery at the heart of the book by being a keen observer of everything that passes in front of his window. I love how this novel depicts Chris’s inner world to young readers, including his awareness of how his condition affects others’ perceptions.

More importantly, it shows how much people with disabilities and illnesses still have to offer. 

In the dark world of hardboiled literature, anything can happen at any time for any reason—or no reason at all. In my view, that makes things easy for this debut novel about an unemployed LA factory worker named Easy Rawlins, and that makes things challenging for the story—for the character—as well. 

A man with money and power offers Easy a job looking for a missing blond-haired, white-skinned beauty. Rawlins faces only two problems: He has no experience as a private detective, and he needs to do the detecting with black skin in a segregated, remarkably unequal 1948 America. 

But I think Mosley has found the perfect genre for his character, one whose tough and humane and even psychologically insightful qualities have enabled him to adjust to, learn from, and survive in a place where laws can break out or disappear, depending on the color of his skin. Rawlins finds it… show more.

Many could argue that picking the most mind-bending Philip K. Dick book is an impossible task. His imagination spawned some of the best science fiction books of his era, which inspired several groundbreaking films (Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc.) I agree: it’s impossible to pick one.

But I love this book because it explores an intriguing idea from drug-induced psychosis—that of cross-chatter, or the notion that the brain’s two hemispheres can keep secrets from each other. The story follows the hapless Bob Arctor, an undercover narcotics agent trying to spy on himself and his junkie friends who are addicted to the mysterious Substance D. 

Dick conjures a mesmeric psychedelic tale, at turns hilarious, unnerving, and a poignant farewell to real-life addict friends who died too soon.  

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun.” The first line of one of the great Phillip Marlowe books that I fell in love with. 

As a young man, I often went to work with a Raymond Chandler paperback in my pocket. I couldn't put him down. I wanted to be Marlowe and talk like him. Chandler created a hero who taught me American slang language and how to talk the talk. The book follows Marlowe as he looks for the lost girlfriend of a guy just released from prison.

This is a wonderful noir work about a hard-boiled private detective. 

I love Elmore Leonard for the switches and the dialog. By switches I mean, you think it’s going one way, but it goes the other. Swag is great because it seems so plausible. From the meeting of the two protagonists to their bonding and then the events that follow—it all seems natural while you’re in it—but step back, take a birds-eye view, and you see instantly how wacky it is.

I love when authors mix genres. Dibdin’s Cosi Fan Tutti is a combination of mystery and a Mozart opera! 

Combining the farcical elements of corruption, romantic longing, and mistaken identity, Dibdin pulls us through the beautiful streets of Naples, Italy, where everyone is thoughtful and earnest, and still, somehow, nothing like they appear. 

His detective Aurelio Zen is supposed to be keeping the peace, but he’s not up for the job, much more interested in untying romantic entanglements and enjoying the countryside. A solid plan until the Italian sanitation department decides they’re going to clean up the streets for him.

Lighthearted and breezy but with a genuine emotional core, you’ll get through Cosi Fan Tutte in a single sitting and be happier for it. 

Everyone knows Agatha Christie’s most famous novels but when you dig a little deeper, you start to really uncover her genius. 

The Hollow is slow, careful, and spectacularly mature for a genre novel.  Legend has it that Christie didn’t like her detective, Hercule Poirot, so maybe that’s why she stuck him in such a difficult situation. A murder occurs right before his eyes, and the killer is there, holding a gun. 

The killer has motive, opportunity, and, of course, Poirot watched her do it.  But why is the gun the wrong caliber? And why is everyone except the murderer acting so suspicious?  

This one plays against convention, so even when you think you know what is going to happen next, you probably don’t.

Crime novels, like bars, live or die on their vibe. The plot may have rat-sized holes and the ending might spill into deux ex machina, but if you dig the atmosphere, you’ll forgive almost any narrative sin. Not that The Mexican Tree Duck commits any worthy of confession. You’re in safe hands with CW Sughrue, part-time PI and owner of the Hell Roaring Liquor Store and Lounge up in Montana. What I love about Crumley is the lovely, complex language that pours out like gin into a martini glass. “The first time I set foot in the Hell Roaring as the sixties drifted, late as usual and dying, into the seventies, I found that soft autumn light filling the magic afternoon easiness of the bar.” 

Crumley used his PI Milo Milodragovich to look at the state “with more guns than cows” in all its colorful insanity.

The search for a runaway pool shark wife puts Milo in the middle of plot involving firearms, drugs, and crimes in various forms as Crumley draws from two of his favorite writers, Raymond Chandler and Warren Zevon.

I got to know Jim near the end of his life and see his broad, loving, cynical personality, and the feelings of his birth state when I read this.