Books like Stagolee Shot Billy — picked by fans

It is a book that deep dives into a historical event, in this case, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Check. It is a nonfiction book that reads like a gripping thriller, in this case, the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who built a three-story building featuring secret rooms, torture chambers, and a crematorium. Check. Chicago leaps off the page. By the end of the book, I was able to envision the massive exposition, its hundreds of temporary buildings, all white colored, interlaced with ponds and canals.

Much like that exposition helped raise Chicago up from its Great Fire, so I could see a Chicago of the past, in a glorious triumph of industry and innovation. Oh, and yeah, a serial killer constructing a horrific murder building.

Everyone knows who Lizzie Borden is, and everyone thinks they know whether or not she did it. But what few people know about is her trial. I have always been pretty obsessed with the Lizzie Borden story (hint: she’s totally guilty). But this book put a whole new spin on the country’s original true crime.

I loved reading about the legal proceedings that put Lizzie front and center of a violent crime (not a common place for a woman to be in Gilded Age America). It painted Lizzie in a more vulnerable light than the axe-wielding murderess I had always pictured her as. It also helped explain why she was acquitted.

Arsenic Under the Elms tells the story of two sensational but unrelated murders in New Haven, Connecticut, in the late 19th century. Mary Stannard a 22-year-old domestic servant was found stabbed and poisoned on a path near her home. The prime suspect was her pastor, former employer, and alleged seducer, Rev. Herbert H. Hayden. Jennie Cramer, a beautiful young woman from a poor family was also poisoned, her body found floating in the ocean. Suspicion fell on Jimmie and Walter Malley, nephew and son of the richest man in New Haven. In both cases, the disparity in social class between victim and suspect became the defining feature of the case and the greatest impediment in obtaining justice for the murdered woman.

Carlyle W. Harris was a promising young medical student in 1891 with an unfortunate obsession with sex. He would constantly regale his friends and associates with tales of his sexual conquests. When he failed to seduce 19-year-old Helen Potts, he convinced her to marry him but keep the marriage a secret. Six Capsules tells the story of Harris’s plot to murder Helen with a poisoned capsule to keep the secret from being revealed. The author, George R. Dekle Sr., a retired law professor and former prosecutor, provides a detailed analysis of Harris’s sensational trial for murder. The book’s vivid account of the murder and its consequences contrasts the moral and legal atmosphere of the 1890s with that of today.

A brilliant hypnotic novel that almost no one read. Albert French was the victim of a publishing nightmare—his editor and his publisher, both of whom had primed his novel for a major publicity push, left for new jobs before the pub date, after which his book was orphaned and abandoned. For anyone not in the book business, it might seem hard to believe that a terrific novel would be left to languish, but, sadly, such an event is not uncommon in American publishing.

Set in an African American section of Pittsburgh in 1950, I Can’t Wait on God evokes both the day-to-day lives of ordinary people and the striving and hopelessness of African Americans trying to escape the doomed existence to which so many are condemned.  French weaves a tale that is starkly realistic, yet with a mystical overtone that creates a sort of intoxicating haze. The narrative seems straightforward,… show more.

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.

In adapting Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 non-fiction Wiseguy for film, Martin Scorsese delivered a “staged documentary,” depicting a far more gritty and authentic account of organized crime than Mario Puzo’s Godfather trilogy.

Much of what makes Pileggi’s masterpiece work is how he captures South Brooklyn culture as it morphs from the 1950s through the 1980s. Pileggi’s tale of the tarnishing of the Golden Era of Italian American organized crime is recounted from the pedestrian perspective of un-makeable underling and ultimate-turncoat Henry Hill.

That bygone Brooklyn landscape leaps off the pages, from its gambling dens and gangster bars, to its corner cafes, criminal courts, and cab stands. BONUS: Pileggi’s no-nonsense non-fiction prose, peppered with Hill’s verbatim account, delivers even more days-in-the-lives of lowlifes than Scorsese could ever have packed into his classic film. 

Locations of interest: The Prospect Park Zoo (stand-in for The Tampa Zoo); Smith Street in Red Hook (Jimmy Conway’s… show more.

Richard Condon shows the mob as a family of degenerates, violent felons who are still human beings who also fall in love. The focus on the novel is how a hit man, looking to embellish his career, dates a big mob guy’s daughter, only to fall in love with another killer who is a woman. She has been hired to kill him but she also is in love with him. Published in 1982 , the novel captures the entanglements of a soap opera with real bite. The movie with Jack Nicholson is also top rate.

It wasn’t until I picked up this book that I realised how little I actually knew about Charles Manson and his followers.

Sure, it had filtered down to me – through a variety of popular culture – that he was a notorious murderer and that his female followers were truly brainwashed, but how had that come to be and was there any way of making sense of his seemingly senseless violence and crimes? Guinn’s meticulously-researched book has the answers. 

Best known for Helter Skelter--his classic 1975 true crime memoir on prosecuting the Manson family, former Los Angeles deputy DA Vincent Bugliosi wrote this book later about a complicated but lesser-known double-homicide case he tried in 1966, three years before the Manson murders occurred. As the prosecutor on these cases, Bugliosi boasted access to background details that only an insider can share, merging psychological analysis with trial strategy concerns. Echoing themes of the noir thriller Double Indemnity, this true account unveils the plot of two lovers to murder their respective spouses and explains the complex police work required to catch them.