71 Books Like Bad Penny Blues

This was the book that started my fascination with the Victorian era. From the first time the character of Sherlock Holmes was introduced, I was hooked. I first read it when I was nine. I remember sitting down with it and practically devouring it. I did not put it down until I had finished. I was enchanted by Sherlock Holmes and his mind. I still am.

I knew the author when I worked for his literary agent in London, and this is a fascinating and frightening look at the London crime world of the Kray Twins. They ruthlessly ruled parts of London, including the East End, and was an essential background re-read when I wrote my own London crime novel. I was trying to show behind the scenes of the world of striptease, but this book is a reminder of what’s behind even that behind-the-scenes world. I used to send a 6-monthly royalty cheque to their mother as their share for co-operating with the book, which is why it’s so authentic.

This is an obvious follow-on from my first choice, a gritty fictionalised version of the kind of world the Kray Brothers moved in. It features the gangster Harry Starks, who is both a porn king and a sociology graduate, and has one of those great openings that grips you from the start:

"You know the song, don’t you?" “There’s no business like show business.” Harry gets the Ethel Merman intonation just right as he heats up a poker in the gas burner.

How can you not read on, albeit a little nervously?

As a multi-genre author, I was interested to see how the creator of a world-famous boy wizard was going to change her name and turn her hand to crime writing. I relished the result: the first outing for a new private investigator, a character called Cormoran Strike.

Known simply as Strike, he is a P.I. with a handicap (aren’t they all?). Not just the common ones; excessive drinking, difficult relationships, and so on, Strike lost half his right leg whilst serving in Afghanistan. Retiring from service, the ex-MP becomes a private investigator. He has few clients, no money, and is scruffy and unkempt because he sleeps in his office. But he does have a motto, "Do the job and do it well."

In social relationships, Strike isn’t a likable character; demanding and sometimes just plain rude. He has lost his last assistant. I warmed to him the more his traits… show more.

Jarossi’s debut features deeply moving vignettes of young women with troubled early lives, who, in the West London of the 1960s, fell into the path of a still-unknown serial killer. He was heartlessly dubbed Jack The Stripper by the national newspapers. Jarossi vividly recreates the tawdry workings of the vice trade – the underbelly of Swinging London. He rightly focuses on the victims – and restores to them the dignity of which their killer (and those who covered the case originally) deprived them.

Michael Faber is one of my favorite writers of all time, and the same author of Under the Skin, another wonderful book with a female protagonist you’ll hate yourself for loving. Faber’s range as a storyteller is incredible, and along with his mastery of horror and science fiction, he shows that he can put together a Victorian epic that is gorgeously written, with a main character, Sugar, who is a complicated character—a sex worker by trade who sometimes makes bad choices but is admirable in how she has to navigate the world of pompous, detestable men to survive. 

The plot of this book seems simple enough. A guy goes to Vegas to drink himself to death, but whilst there, he develops a relationship with a prostitute. Now, if this were Hollywood, they’d end up eloping and starting a new life together. Yet, whilst there is indeed an excellent Hollywood adaptation of it starring Nicholas Cage, it is no less bleaker than the novel it is based on. A novel that was written by an alcoholic who killed himself and whose book was called a suicide note by his father.

Despite its sadness, however, the book is beautifully written. Aside from its doomed romance, it also has a romantic sense of being doomed, which I like.

I suspect one of the reasons I enjoy reading (and writing) about amateur detectives is that I’m instinctively drawn to stories of the dispossessed – those without a voice, forced to take matters into their own hands because the proper authorities won’t listen. Kirstin Innes’ debut novel, about a woman investigating the disappearance of her sex worker sister, is not for the fainthearted: a deep dive into a parallel world that foregrounds the voices of the women who inhabit it and challenges widely-held conceptions about them – namely that they’re all poor, pathetic victims in need of rescuing. Innes’ thorough research shines throughout, and the result is a compelling, informative, and thought-provoking novel that avoids the common tropes associated with the “dead hooker” subgenre of crime fiction.

I also write about this book in my work. I again have problems with it, but it gives a kind of slice-of-life snapshot of Cuban life at that moment (around 2005), and especially about jineteras, or “jockeys,” women who supplement their income by going out with wealthy foreigners. Doing research on that book gave me a look at Cuba that was invaluable. And it is sometimes funny. It serves as a kind of coda to my book in that it reproduces many of the rhetorical moves of other chica lit but in a completely different setting. 

Nell Kimball was the least educated of the prostitute authors I read but also the most colorful. And the only one who didn’t feel trapped in the profession. Like Josie Washburn, Nell couldn’t find a publisher for her memoir when she looked for one in 1932. She was 78 years old and reportedly in dire straits financially. Nell had started in the “trade” in St. Louis at the age of fifteen in 1867 and worked as a prostitute and then as a madam, lastly in New Orleans’s famed Storyville red-light district, until it was shut down in 1917. Nell died in 1934. Her book was finally published by Macmillan in 1970.

I’m grateful that Madeleine, Josie, and Nell were fortuitous enough to pen their stories, to record a first-hand account of an era that we otherwise would not be privy to in such a personal way.