83 Books Like Every Man a King

Funny, clever, made me laugh. Dave Barry is always a good read, especially if you like books about whacky Florida, which I do because I live here and totally get it.

Fredric Brown was a well-known author in the 1950s. Stephen King attributed the scariest words ever written to him: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door." From Knock by Fredric Brown (1948). The talent of these writers from the past should not be forgotten. This was a great read.

In the dark world of hardboiled literature, anything can happen at any time for any reason—or no reason at all. In my view, that makes things easy for this debut novel about an unemployed LA factory worker named Easy Rawlins, and that makes things challenging for the story—for the character—as well. 

A man with money and power offers Easy a job looking for a missing blond-haired, white-skinned beauty. Rawlins faces only two problems: He has no experience as a private detective, and he needs to do the detecting with black skin in a segregated, remarkably unequal 1948 America. 

But I think Mosley has found the perfect genre for his character, one whose tough and humane and even psychologically insightful qualities have enabled him to adjust to, learn from, and survive in a place where laws can break out or disappear, depending on the color of his skin. Rawlins finds it… show more.

The Maltese Falcon is masterfully written (though dated in terms of certain stereotypes and attitudes to the extent that the edition I purchased contained a disclaimer from the publisher to that effect). It’s written in what has been called Third Person Cinematic point of view (POV), or Third Person Camera, or Over-the-Shoulder POV. This means that we rarely (almost never) have access to any of the characters’ thoughts or feelings, rather like watching a TV show or movie (one without narration).

I can’t recall ever having read another book from this point-of-view. It’s not one readers encounter often. We’re used to having access to the interior mental life of the characters we read about. Some people might be put off by the lack of access to the characters’ thoughts, but it didn’t bother me at all. Instead, it had the effect of drawing me deeper into the story.

Sam Spade… show more.

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.

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.

This is the book that made me want to be a novelist. I stole it off my dad’s shelf when I was 11—way too young to be reading about the seedy, violent, sex-fueled underbelly of 1970s counterculture. It’s the story of the an American journalist covering the war in Vietnam who gets the bright idea to smuggle heroin to California. I read it at least once a year, and it gets better every time.

Near the end of the book, an ex-Marine named Ray Hicks flees into the desert with the heroin on his back, gut-shot and bleeding out. The scene, masterfully intercut with hallucinations and memories from Hicks’s childhood, was clearly the inspiration for Frank Semyon’s death in Season Two of True Detective. My advice? Read this book instead. 

The book resonates with me on many levels. Firstly, of course, I’m a combat veteran, so the military and living through the hell of war are part of my identity. The author and I share an innate connection there.

But on a different level, it delves into the intangible burdens that resonate for years after the experience – the grief, the guilt, the terror, even the longing to return because it’s what you know.

The title is explicit, and I share the load with all my fellow veterans.

The Vulnerable Observer is a classic work in anthropology in which the author underscores the emotional impact of being a research anthropologist. 

Behar’s wonderfully crafted stories evoke the wisdom of others and demonstrate why it is important for anthropologists to describe the emotional impact of social being in the world. It is an important text for understanding the emotional contours of the human condition.

This is a classic collection about the lost souls of American society who have not only failed to realise the American Dream but have been wrecked by it. Outcasts, drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals, the desolate and the damned. These are stories told from the inside rather than with an anthropological observation; their narrators share the experience of those who live by different rules or no rules at all, their narrative frameworks are skewed towards the psychotic and surreal. But the language is what makes this collection exceptional. With the brilliance and sharpness of a diamond, Johnson’s prose tears his characters and narratives apart and puts them together again into something like poetry.