91 Books Like Double Indemnity

Set in Mexico in the 1930s when the revolutionary government engaged in an active campaign against the Catholic Church, Greene’s hero, the so-called Whiskey Priest, is a drunk who has also failed to adhere to his vow of chastity, but his kindness and commitment to worshippers make him an intensely sympathetic figure, as he is hunted by the local police chief determined to put him behind bars.

The book was a revelation to me when I first read it in college. I did not realize that the Mexican government had engaged in this war against the Church so recently. Nor did I realize that a novel so gripping could be told with such literary grace. 

Everybody loves this book because it, of course, has become an international classic of literature and one of the best works F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, which takes the reader on a time-traveling secretive world of the upper-class set in New England life in the 1920s.

In F. Scott's work, we are casually and comfortably introduced to an America where new money met old money, and the tender tightrope one had to walk in order to vie for position, marriage, and peer acceptance in a world founded on wealth and prestige.    

I think The Hot Spot is perhaps the best of several noir novels by Charles Williams, a writer who deserves to be better known. 

Originally published as Hell Hath No Fury, The Hot Spot, well filmed under that title in 1990, chillingly illustrates the claimed truth of the proverb about a woman scorned. As readers, we cannot help but like Harry Madox, a clever but semi-sleazy used-car salesman who robs a bank in a small Texas town and sleeps with his boss’s boozy wife before falling in love with a younger, more innocent woman.

Then Harry learns to his dismay that the boss’s wife is determined to keep him from having the things he now realizes he really wants. Re-reading this novel, I always root for Harry to escape from the deep pit he has dug for himself, and I keep turning the pages, hoping he will.

When you turn the pages of this book, you feel you can see, smell, and hear the dark streets and alleys of Tudor London. This book inspired me to place my books in Tudor England and start The Tudor Rose Murders Series.

It is Tudor Crime at its best. I was so captivated by the characters, the detail, the pace, and the plotting that I could not put it down and felt wretched when I turned the last page. 

Mervyn Peake’s writing is unusual. In Gormenghast he creates a bizarre world of weird hierarchical rituals, peopled by eccentric characters, each one singular in a different way. What really brings this novel to life is Peake’s wonderfully rich prose, as he describes the destruction of an ancient social structure.

This book, about racism, among other matters, helped open my eyes to the humanity of all people and showed me, in particular, the ways that cruelty and racism exist in our cultures and subcultures. When I read this book, I was fresh out of five years in the Air Force (1971) and had just experienced the caste system of military life.

Prior to that, I'd lived, as a child and teenager, in a community in which racism and fundamentalist religion were taken for granted as givens of the universe. When I read this book, I realized the power of literature to open a person to meanings previously absent in their life.

Until I entered grad school for my Ph.D. in American literature, I had never heard the name Charles Brockden Brown and my guess is that few people alive today would recognize it. In his own time, however, he was an important literary figure. The author of a quartet of books composed in a yearlong creative frenzy at the close of the 18th century, he is regarded as "The Father of the American Novel." As the creator of our nation's first Gothic fiction, he was a major influence on writers like Poe and Hawthorne. His 1798 novel Wieland was inspired by a sensational crime that happened seventeen years earlier in upstate New York, when a farmer named James Yates, allegedly acting under orders from a divine voice, slaughtered his entire family. If by "best" we're talking about most enjoyably readable, then Wieland, like all Brown’s novels, doesn't exactly qualify. But it's… show more.

Also by Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925, is the slow-moving and heavy-handed but steadily engrossing and ultimately overwhelming account of a poor boy so bewitched by a beautiful rich girl that he commits literal murder and loses his own life in his struggle to have her.

I was and remain a big fan of Judith Rossner’s 1975 bestseller (the 1977 movie version starring Diane Keaton and Richard Gere, not so much). The book was inspired by a headline-making murder that took place in New York City two years before the book’s publication. Its victim was twenty-seven-year-old Roseann Quinn had rejected the traditional roles her parents expected of her. Though a quiet, sedate schoolteacher by day, she turned into a boisterous party girl at night, picking up disreputable-looking strangers at neighborhood bars and taking them back to her apartment for bouts of rough sex. One of those strangers was a deeply troubled drifter named John Wayne Wilson, who ended up killing her in a fit of frenzied savagery in early January 1973. What I admire about Rossner is the way that she takes an inherently sensational subject and turns it into a serious, very moving character study… show more.

Most people know this book due to its film adaptation, with Robert Mitchum in the title role. To me, it is a splendid book because, like all great fiction, it tells the truth. More than a great many nonfiction books, it tells the truth about the actual nature of organized crime.

It strips away the phony glamour and describes the actual nature of the mob—treacherous, violent, and unforgiving. And the dialogue is amazing! What you see in this book is not the Mafia but Irish gangsters, and they are tired blue-collar men who are just scraping by. That is what organized crime is all about today, just as it was in the 1970s.