30 books like The Long Fall

Dashiell Hammett, more than any other author, created the hardboiled anti-hero. He’s also a damn fine prose writer. I re-read one of his books every year because of this, hoping perhaps to absorb his spare, elegant style. Each sentence is brutally trimmed of any excess and yet resonates with layered meaning. 

Dashiell Hammett himself was a broken hero. He fought in two World Wars for his country and yet was sent to jail by the committee for un-American activities for refusing to name names. He was a communist, who yet, as a young man, worked for the fascist, union-busting Pinkertons.

A complex, troubled individual who created dark and cynical worlds, and none more cynical than that of The Maltese Falcon. Here, we have a femme fatale, a hardboiled detective, gangsters, and conmen, all vying for the titular prize. It is a mean-streets masterpiece. 

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.

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.

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.”

I discovered Lawrence Block at my local library when I was probably still too young to read his searing, heartbreaking stories about damaged men and women navigating lives rocked by trauma and tragedy.

But his books drew me in, especially this landmark story about an alcoholic ex-cop forced to come to terms with his addiction while working to solve a brutal crime.

The character has been played in movies by Liam Neeson and Jeff Bridges, but it’s on the page and in Block’s beautiful sentences that Matthew Scudder truly comes to life.

This is post-modern crime fiction thematically linked and all with increasingly unreliable characters—because they’re each going insane.

In City of Glass private investigator, Daniel Quinn, goes mad sinking deeper into an investigation about identity. Who is telling his story and can they be relied on? Is it any of these characters who appear: ‘the author,’ ‘Paul Auster the writer,’ ‘Paul Auster the detective’?  Whoosh.

I love this stuff but understand it’s an acquired taste!

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.

This is a classic detective story with his wife and dog as sidekicks. The mystery is great and a little levity in the form of banter between Nick and Nora are superb. That is why this book is considered a classic. Being from the upper crust of their time, Nick and Nora Charles invite the reader into their world. Their dog, Asta, adds a touch of “humanity” to an otherwise morbid subject.