76 books like Easy Rawlins

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. 

If there is one central defining quality of noir crime fiction, it is the main character’s struggle to preserve his moral center in a fundamentally corrupt and evil world. The best P.I. novels are able to render this kind of character in brushstrokes that are both beautiful and subtle.

One of my favorites is Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, first introduced in this novel. When Archer is hired to find a missing rich guy in a tony, Southern California beach town, he finds himself knee-deep in violence, greed, and deceit, uncertain of who is guilty, who he can trust, and even who is worth saving. A moving target, indeed.

If Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade served as the model for most private detective protagonists in American books (and movies), Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe offered a fascinating, inside-out variation. Marlowe—especially in this book, which I love as Chandler’s best—seems more analytical than Spade, more passionate than Spade, but just not quite as cool by today’s standards. 

That little loss doesn’t hurt him or this classic, however, which provides the best plot with the most expressive prose of this top 5 private detective novels. Marlowe’s war-torn pal disappears, the guy’s oversexed wife gets murdered, and Marlowe naturally becomes police suspect number one. 

In between the developments, Marlowe makes light: “Mostly I just kill time, and it dies hard.” That’s a clever way to say so long to involvement, but the longest goodbye, the real and permanent one to which the book’s title refers and we sometimes call death—that’s the… show more.

Cynicism and fatalism drank heavily together in the hardboiled genre of the private detective novel, but no more so than in this mid-40s book. 

I think they even take refuge in the novel’s title: Build My Gallows High. It tells the embittered tale of Red Bailey, a guy in hiding from private detective work after being exploited by a powerful client and betrayed by the beautiful and manipulative woman Bailey loved. 

Bailey would never go back to those days—until he would. His ex-client finds him and blackmails him into searching for that woman, who was also once that powerful man’s lover.  

I love the way each of the three of them harbor conflicting ideas of how this story will end. That’s perfect—the book’s conflict and bile inspired the creation of what has long been one of the darkest and most celebrated of films noir, Out of the Past.

I really like Falconer’s works because they are historical novels involving tense mysteries of heroes overcoming dramatic odds to end as victorious models of perseverance, overcoming odds against them.

While enjoying a great read and being engulfed in the dangers the characters faced, I learned a lot about what was happening in the 200–300 AD period. The details that Falconer included were just fascinating to me.     

I really like Jack Higgins, a world-renowned author of mysteries and historical novels. As a history buff, I particularly liked this one because it is a thriller set during WW2, and I couldn’t put it down. WW2 was an amazing time filled with heroism, danger, and the constant threat of death, and Higgins makes me feel like I was there in the midst of it all.  

One thing I really like about this mystery novel is the way it is told from multiple points of view, which is a very unusual technique in mystery fiction. That’s one reason that it felt, to me, so much like a literary novel.

The first character is a brilliant, tortured artist named Margot, who is already dead at the start of the novel. The second character is Kate, an ex-cop turned P.I. who is hired to find Margot’s killer. 

Both women are compelling, interesting characters, but I especially liked the way Kenna renders the hero, Kate. She’s a single mom in recovery from a drug addiction. Her ex is a creep, and most of her old (male) cop colleagues are, too. Her struggle in solving the case felt completely real and human to me. And that’s the signature quality of literary fiction.

Anna Badkhen, a writer of creative non-fiction and fiction, publishes lyrical descriptions of people, place, and character. She has written about social life in Afghanistan as well as the challenging lifeways of people in Mali and Senegal. 

Fisherman’s Blues, which is situated in the artisan fishing village of Joal, Senegal, is an inspiring story that describes how Senegalese fishermen employ practical wisdom, passed down from generation to generation, to maintain their way of life in environmentally challenging times.

Simmons’ battered PI, Joe Kurtz, is released from a ten-year stint in Attica and storms through this novel to borrow a line from the late, great Roger Ebert, “like a violent unmade bed.”

Hardcase is uncompromising, terse, drenched in noir, and not for the squeamish. Kurtz is matched up against several worthy foes, including a couple of the most memorable heavies I’ve ever read about. And the ending, well, it more than justifies the title.

This book takes place in Boston during the broiling hot summer of ‘74. The protagonist of Lehane’s sublime novel is Mary Pat Fennessy, a hard-bitten mother from the Southie projects who took a look at this list of tough guys, chuckled, punched the #5 guy in the throat, and took over his spot.

Mary Pat’s teen daughter is missing, the Irish mob may know more about it than they’re letting on, and all the while, the desegregation of the public schools has turned the city into a violent racial hotbox. In Small Mercies, Mary Pat navigates searing issues of loyalty and justice. Race and grief, and as intense pressures converge on both her and the city, she responds the only way she knows how—by coming out swinging.