Books like Case Histories

I’ve read this book multiple times over various stages of my life, and I find it funnier and funnier (and more and more impressive) the older I get.

This novel has so much going on: yes, technically it’s a Western, but it’s also a crime novel about the corrosive power of revenge, a buddy comedy about a fourteen-year-old girl and an over-the-hill U.S. Marshal, an oddball historical novel, and a meditation on youth and morality.

And more things, probably, that I’ll spot next time I inevitably pick it up again.

Everything Sarah Waters writes is great, but this one is my favorite.

Waters is highly literary—her command of language and vocabulary is impressive—yet she is not afraid to roll around in the mud as her characters engage in petty deception, then...larger crimes.

Set in the early 1920's, the story is as alive and real and immediate as if it were happening right now. I love the way Waters includes plenty of historical details, from language to furniture and architecture, but she never gets lost in it—her characters are real and nuanced and very human. They are driven by need, greed, lust, anger—the real emotions that often trigger violent crimes.

I love the opening of this novel: an offhand-feeling anecdote about Chili Palmer, the central character, getting his jacket stolen from a restaurant in Miami Beach. It feels breezy and inconsequential, but it does so much work to set the tone, establish the stakes, and introduce key characters.

I’m also a sucker for a fish-out-of-water comedy, although maybe this book is the opposite of that: tough-guy loan shark Chili Palmer falls in with a group of hapless Hollywood types and ends up thriving through the novel’s sometimes violent, sometimes funny twists and turns.

I remember summers growing up when we were out of the house seeking freedom from parents as we streamed toward our teenage years, so I can identify with this story’s start. We’d follow deer trails through brush and trees to spots up in the hills we’d claimed as our own. This book begins with a prologue made vivid with three children and Tana French’s gorgeous prose.

The children go up and over a rock wall and into “A summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silk skin blue…your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat…” “…long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways…” and the haunted last sentence, “These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer.”

This book is one of my favorite mysteries of all time. It addresses one of the great unsolved mysteries in English history: Did Richard III kill the princes in the tower? Tey’s sleuth, Alan Grant, is a dogged investigator, and, in the hospital with a broken leg, he treats this historical mystery like a contemporary murder. His step-by-step investigation pulled me in and convinced me that Richard Plantagenet has been mistreated by history.

Miss Tey is so convincing that she inspired me to write the (very innocent) ghost of Richard III into one of my own mystery novels after the monarch’s body was found under a Midlands car park in 2012.

I’ve always been fascinated by strange social enclaves and secretive, sealed-off, private worlds, and this book has both.

But in fact, the thing I admire most here is the sense of place and atmosphere. Tartt writes with a lush, immersive style which I found is increasingly compelling as the book went on.

Using a murder as the gateway drug to what’s really a literary fiction character study is both sneaky and brilliant: I was hooked by the story in the first chapter, but once I’d finished the book, it was Richard’s voice, those eerie characters, their strange insular co-dependency, and the biting Vermont winter landscape that really stayed with me.

Colson Whitehead always impresses me with his ability to make potentially tired genre elements feel fresh and vital.

Honestly, I enjoy even a workmanlike heist-gone-wrong story, but this one is firing on all cylinders. There’s a world-weary sense of humor suffusing all of it, coupled with complex, compelling characters that make this an irresistible read for me. 

I can’t even tell you how many times in many years working for newspapers that I rushed out after hearing a body had been found in an empty house or neglected alley. In almost every case, I would arrive to have police officers tell me, “No story here. No homicide. Just another overdose.” The newspaper didn’t tally overdose deaths as it did murders, even if many fatalities are linked to heroin that has been mixed with fentanyl without the users’ knowledge. It’s very rare for those who sell the killer substance to face homicide charges. 

The city is basically another character in this book. While the opioid epidemic had touched communities across the country, Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood is widely acknowledged as a disaster zone. A 2018 New York Times article called Kensington is the largest open-air narcotics market on the east coast. 

The plot centers on Philadelphia police officer Mickey… show more.

James Ellroy’s 1987 novel exploring the infamous unsolved and ghoulish murder of Elizabeth Short, the so-called “Black Dahlia,” gripped me with its chilling portrayal of two very different cops who become obsessed with solving the 1947 murder.

Although this is a relatively early work of Ellroy’s and extremely visceral owing to the nature of the historical crime, it’s arguably the author’s first mature novel, proved to be his breakout book, and pre-dates the rather alliterative, staccato prose style he would adopt not long after.

Post-war Los Angeles is seedily, disturbingly rendered in surreal and gothic relief, while Ellroy also masterfully portrays many of the haunted LAPD detectives who actually worked the case.

Being a New Yorker, I’m a sucker for any true New York books, and this one is as authentic as they come. I also really appreciated how believable Chiara Corelli is. She has all the right mix of ethical and tough, but she is also a fully realized person with both external and internal goals and needs. Really good police procedural with a healthy dose of humanity.