Fans pick 39 books like The Long Fall

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. 

Street names, the Charles River, bridges, the Back Bay, the Public Gardens, actual hotels and restaurants—Robert B. Parker’s forty Spenser novels make Boston so much a character that Parker wrote Spenser’s Boston. The sixth novel in the series, published in 1980, has Spenser searching for a missing lesbian activist who’s been kidnapped by an anti-gay group. Like Buffalo, Boston sometimes gets a lot of snow. Unlike Buffalo, which is not the snowiest city in New York but is depicted as such, Boston is not known as a snow capital. That Spenser must search during a blizzard is a welcome dose of realism.

As someone who has never been to Chicago and knew nothing about the Great Lakes shipping industry, the book was fascinating in so many ways. Sara Paretsky has a compelling, strong female lead but also takes us places we never conceived of. Paretsky’s murder investigation is thrilling, and the characters are well crafted and ones that the reader will care about. It is an excellent book that has stayed in my memory for decades.

As much as I love this book’s hero, former television commercial star Dayna Anderson, her tight circle of got-your-back friends is what made this mystery really shine.

To say the cast has big personalities is like calling Hollywood’s Dolby Theater a quaint venue. I laughed out loud throughout and wished I could ride along with these ladies (there are some guys involved, a love interest in particular) as they doggedly unravel the deftly plotted mystery.

I am grateful to Garrett that there is a sequel to this first in the series, Hollywood Ending.

As a kid, I didn’t want to be a princess. I wanted to be Archie Goodwin.

Archie’s the legman to genius detective Nero Wolfe, and he’s the most self-possessed guy I know. “I’m always at home,” he says, “wherever I am.” I grew up wanting to be that go-to person, given the tough jobs because I’m capable, and trusted because I’m decent and fair. I wanted a boss who said things like “I can dodge folly without backing into fear.”

In my real life, I muddle and compromise and results are tough to parse. In this book, and any Nero Wolfe book, it’s a better world. Things don’t work out perfectly, but they do work out brilliantly and Archie knows his work has been, in Wolfe’s highest praise, “Satisfactory.”

This book is one of a series of Mathew Scudder stories by Block. I enjoy his books because his main character is as flawed as we are. Matt is a hard-drinking former cop who goes about helping friends out of their troubles. And his friends are in a lot of trouble. Action and close calls, as well as humor, abound in this well-crafted story.

I love both the Wolfe and Goodwin characters. The obese and brilliant Nero Wolfe reluctantly leaves his New York brownstone to join his leg man, Archie Goodwin, at a Montana dude ranch. They must catch the murderer to exonerate an innocent man. Wolfe, although apparently well out of his element in this rugged environment, succeeds in trapping the culprit.

Wolfe’s bombast and tetchiness are as legendary as his deductive brilliance. Goodwin’s active and intrepid sleuthing, as well as his street, or in this case range, smarts are always exciting.

This book grabbed me by the throat and threw me into a world I could literally feel spinning around me—a world in which good intentions don’t mean squat and random chance frequently outperforms the most carefully crafted of plans. Block always hits his target, but this one broke my heart along the way.

Really, almost anything in the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin series would fit here. A lazy, blustering, brilliant recluse, Nero Wolfe is perpetually badgered, kicking and grumbling, back toward humanity either by his passions—American cuisine, beer, books, orchids—or by Archie, his leg-man/lacky/surrogate son. I picked this specific novel because it involves a murder amid a gathering of world-class chefs; the cooking banter alone is worth the price of admission (which will be cheap; how and why have these books somehow fallen off our collective cultural radar??). None of Nero’s adventures among his fellow human beings make him want to venture out of the fortress he has made for himself inside his Manhattan brownstone. But they’ll make you want to hole up in his company. The man himself thinks he just wants to be left alone with his interests and comforts. But what he creates and relies on to sustain him feels pretty… show more.

Back in 2012, I had the honor of being a luncheon speaker at New York’s annual “Black Orchid Weekend” gathering of fans – and I mean fanatics – of Rex Stout’s iconic Nero Wolfe detective novels.  I was among my tribe, having cut my teeth on the Wolfe canon as a nerdy teenager to whom Stout’s books were a revelation: compact tales of crime and punishment starring a corpulent, agoraphobic gourmand and orchid fancier whose formidable (and unabashedly Sherlockian) powers of deduction were wielded from behind a desk in his brownstone on West 35th Street with the aid of a two-fisted Boswell named Archie Goodwin. While the yarns themselves are feasts, it’s Archie’s decidedly arch humor that provides the special sauce. Forced to choose, I’ll recommend Some Buried Caesar, Stout’s sixth Wolfe installment (of 33 novels and 39 novellas), originally published in 1939. It finds Wolfe in unfamiliar territory,… show more.