37 books like Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars

While the Ripper was abroad in Yorkshire, New York was stalked by its own phantom killer, Son of Sam, while its rapidly diminishing police force were otherwise engaged giving out leaflets entitled Welcome To Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors.

Abe Beame was Mayor over a burned-out necropolis of demolished buildings, crumbling infrastructure and tripling crime rates, a city President Gerald Ford told to "drop dead". This was the stage on which Lydia Lunch began her assault on the senses and sensibilities of her nation, at the tender age of 16.

Her account of not only surviving but grabbing every last moment of fun to be had in Fear City is rivalled only by mentor Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn as the ultimate in New York stories.

I like books that take me via the scenic route. If I’m reading a history of folk music, I don’t just want dry old discographies and lists of bands and their lineups. I want a living, breathing account of where this all came from and what the modern era has inherited.

I want to know about the collectors and archivists and famous composers like Vaughan Williams and Holst who went from town to town and village to village getting information from people of my Grandad’s age about the songs that were passed down to them through the generations. I want a sense of how this stuff is in the very soil and landscape we inhabit.

This book does all that and more. 

Many children of my generation were turned to the dark side by their parents' collections of Dennis Wheatley's glamorously lurid Black Magic novels.

Key to their appeal was the author's assurance that the diabolical deeds described therein were actually being practised today – from the heart of power in London to the most remote village in the land. Phil Baker's enormously entertaining biography makes it clear that Dennis sincerely believed this, and consulted all the leading magicians of his age – including Aleister Crowley – to get the Goat-based goods from the gate.

Not only that, but his own life was steeped in just as much intrigue and danger as any of his novels, including stints as a WWI solider, peacetime purveyor of Napoleon's own brandy, and WWII member of Churchill's secret services.

No other book captures the darkness at the dawn of the Thatcher decade with such verisimilitude as David Peace's conjuring of its premier bogeyman, the Yorkshire Ripper, in the third of his Red Riding Quartet.

Perhaps that's because the author used his Goth record collection to transport him back to the places where these crimes were committed, at the time of his West Yorkshire youth. Songs like Siouxsie and the Banshees' 'Night Shift' and The Sisters of Mercy's 'Fix' summon back that fearful terrain, where 'cow' was a term of endearment for a woman and the use of hammers to the head a familiar sign of domestic abuse.

Detectives are revealed to be as deadly as their quarry, priests give benediction with nine-inch-nails and stone angels turn their heads away.

Maybe the last of the great Viennese-born classical composers, Korngold enjoyed enormous success in Europe in the 1920s.

Invited to Hollywood in 1934, he began writing film music for the swashbucklers, costume dramas, and historical pageants of Warner Bros., often starring the likes of Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, and Claude Rains: Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Kings Row, and others.

Korngold thought of movies as "operas without singing" and wrote lavish, richly orchestrated scores filled with memorable melodies. Fleeing the Nazi tyranny in 1938, he became one of the greatest composers in the Golden Age of movies.

Carroll spent decades researching his life, it's a thorough and compelling read, and it saddens me that the book is now long out of print.

This book helped me understand the lives of young male jazz musicians in the early 20th century. A wacky, ecstatic, fragmented, kaleidoscopic, memoir—nostalgic always for Bloomington, Indiana, and his college days in the early 1920s. There Carmichael met his pals Monk and Bix, both of whom died too young. He dedicates the book to them and remembers them fondly. Monk, a surrealistic poet, and Bix, a great musical genius, they understood each other immediately. Bix responded to one of Monk’s poems saying, “I am not a swan.” There is a Dadaist flavor to Monk’s writing, as well as some of Hoagy’s: “The years had pants.” Intertwined with these memories is the slow, jerky progress of Carmichael’s journey from a would-be composer to a famous songwriter.

Bernard Herrmann is revered as one of the movies' greatest composers.

Imagine starting your Hollywood career with music for Citizen Kane!

He enjoyed a very productive 10-year relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock, which produced such masterpieces as Vertigo, Psycho, and North by Northwest; he also worked with Francois Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, composed the original Twilight Zone theme, and capped his career with music for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Yet he could be cantankerous and difficult, antagonizing both friends and colleagues with his temperamental behavior and insistence upon the highest standards of music and drama.

I love the fact that Smith writes as well about the music as he does about the composer, and the reader walks away knowing lots about both.

Paganini is not one of the composers the author discusses. However, I consider Secret Lives an important book, simply because it “spills the beans” about a number of these giants.

Gioachino Rossini is portrayed with some of his numerous shortcomings (though Paganini’s dalliances achieved far more notoriety). I shall mention a few significant historical facts: (1) he and Paganini were very close friends, (2) Paganini wrote a set of brilliant variations, I Palpiti, based on an aria from Rossini’s opera, Tancredi, and (3) Paganini did indeed conduct the debut of another Rossini opera, Matilde di Shobran.

Secret Lives was also a source I tapped for some of the information I presented about composers (including, most notably, Richard Wagner)  in one of my own novels.

I love this energetic book about experimental composer Charles Ives for its liveliness, beautiful language, and glorious sounds! It’s also an important example of staying true to yourself and following your own path.

Before he became a composer, young Charles Ives’s life was full of noise–glorious noise! Influenced by his father, a music educator and bandleader, Ives experimented with sound. Like John Cage, he faced ridicule and criticism, and faced roadblocks to having his music performed.

I love this book because it shows how a musical icon discovered and developed his own personal style.

Juan García Esquivel had a passion for music but no formal training. Without knowing the typical ways of arranging notes, Esquivel was free to experiment–and that made his work so unique that anyone hearing his music knew right away that he was the composer.

I think this book is great for showing the value of thinking differently. I also love the joyful illustrations inspired by ancient Mexican art.