100 books like Uncommon Danger

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.

From the opening pages (where the heat of the desert seeps off the page), I was hooked by this mystery. And then, the fun and games began.

There I was, enjoying the superbly-paced plot, the psychological realism, the stark beauty of Hughes’ prose when – suddenly – the book leapt from being very, very good to being a work of genius. I won’t share the twist, but it’s a powerful, provocative one.

Hughes, like all the authors on my list, shows that pulp fiction can be truly great, game-changing literature.

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."

Rich in illustrations, ambitious in scope, and still relevant despite having been written in the pre-perestroika Soviet Union, Golomstock makes his four-way comparison accessible and convincing by insisting that “totalitarian art,” a distinct genre with its own aesthetics and style, organization, and ideology, emerged with the rise of the four regimes indicated in the title of his book. 

Slobodan Milosevic’s trial by the first post-Cold War international court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, required the creation of a whole new court and set of procedures, and established many of the current rules on trying war crimes and crimes against humanity. There’s a lot written on the ICTY, but I like Scharf’s book because he tells the backstories, explains the different choices that the court could have made, and makes for a fascinating read.

A remarkable novel about Truus Wijsmuller, a very brave woman in the Netherlands, resisting the Nazis by smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them. A very moving and true story. The role of women in the resistance movement in the Netherlands has been neglected or underrepresented for way too long, so this story helps to shed light on the active resistance women carried out in WWII. This is exactly what my platform ‘Sophie’s Women of War’ sheds light on. 

I found Ehrenfreund’s book compelling because he applied his legal expertise as a lawyer and judge to what he personally witnessed at the trial. His research included numerous conversations with Germans who lived through the Nazi regime. I also valued his insights as they were informed by his personal journey to learn his grandfather’s fate many years after he disappeared into the Holocaust. While Ehrenfreund reveals how U.S. law heavily influenced the law applied at Nuremberg, I found his analysis of the trial’s subsequent influence on U.S. law revealing. For example, Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at Nuremberg and U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was impacted by the racial hatred that underlies the crimes of the Holocaust in Brown v. Board of Education, The U.S. Court’s school desegregation decision.

The trials of Nazi war criminals are an important but subsidiary theme in Mary Fulbrook’s book. In Francine Hirsch’s study, the most significant trial of top-ranking German officials takes center stage, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Unlike most previous analyses of Nuremberg, which depict the Soviets as minor actors who, if anything, were impediments to the quest for justice, Hirsch insists that Soviet contributions were essential cornerstones of the trial’s success. This may seem an unlikely role for a totalitarian country already responsible for terror famines in Ukraine, the atrocious show trials of the 1930s, and the senseless murder of 20,000 Poles in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Nonetheless, as Hirsch cogently argues, without Soviet participation the trial may never have occurred. The glory of her book is its insistence on the counterintuitive and contradictory nature of reality, in which, against all expectations, an authoritarian regime led by a… show more.

I always wanted to learn more about the forgotten aspects of the history of the biological sciences, and Biologists Under Hitler did not disappoint in this regard.

Biologists in Nazi Germany were faced with some hard choices—did they adopt the pseudoscientific Nazi party line about racial disparities, or did they abandon their scientific posts? By the end of the war, the German natural sciences dwindled, and biology was particularly hard hit; could biologists who survived the Third Reich be trusted by their global colleagues?

In particular, I was interested in learning about scientific research conducted by the SS, which seems like an oxymoron but did indeed occur in a disordered way, guided by Heinrich Himmler's botanical and medical interests.