Books like The Bloodied Ivy — picked by fans

As a kid, I didn’t want to be a princess. I wanted to be Archie Goodwin.

Archie’s the legman to genius detective Nero Wolfe, and he’s the most self-possessed guy I know. “I’m always at home,” he says, “wherever I am.” I grew up wanting to be that go-to person, given the tough jobs because I’m capable, and trusted because I’m decent and fair. I wanted a boss who said things like “I can dodge folly without backing into fear.”

In my real life, I muddle and compromise and results are tough to parse. In this book, and any Nero Wolfe book, it’s a better world. Things don’t work out perfectly, but they do work out brilliantly and Archie knows his work has been, in Wolfe’s highest praise, “Satisfactory.”

I love both the Wolfe and Goodwin characters. The obese and brilliant Nero Wolfe reluctantly leaves his New York brownstone to join his leg man, Archie Goodwin, at a Montana dude ranch. They must catch the murderer to exonerate an innocent man. Wolfe, although apparently well out of his element in this rugged environment, succeeds in trapping the culprit.

Wolfe’s bombast and tetchiness are as legendary as his deductive brilliance. Goodwin’s active and intrepid sleuthing, as well as his street, or in this case range, smarts are always exciting.

Really, almost anything in the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin series would fit here. A lazy, blustering, brilliant recluse, Nero Wolfe is perpetually badgered, kicking and grumbling, back toward humanity either by his passions—American cuisine, beer, books, orchids—or by Archie, his leg-man/lacky/surrogate son. I picked this specific novel because it involves a murder amid a gathering of world-class chefs; the cooking banter alone is worth the price of admission (which will be cheap; how and why have these books somehow fallen off our collective cultural radar??). None of Nero’s adventures among his fellow human beings make him want to venture out of the fortress he has made for himself inside his Manhattan brownstone. But they’ll make you want to hole up in his company. The man himself thinks he just wants to be left alone with his interests and comforts. But what he creates and relies on to sustain him feels pretty… show more.

Back in 2012, I had the honor of being a luncheon speaker at New York’s annual “Black Orchid Weekend” gathering of fans – and I mean fanatics – of Rex Stout’s iconic Nero Wolfe detective novels. I was among my tribe, having cut my teeth on the Wolfe canon as a nerdy teenager to whom Stout’s books were a revelation: compact tales of crime and punishment starring a corpulent, agoraphobic gourmand and orchid fancier whose formidable (and unabashedly Sherlockian) powers of deduction were wielded from behind a desk in his brownstone on West 35th Street with the aid of a two-fisted Boswell named Archie Goodwin. While the yarns themselves are feasts, it’s Archie’s decidedly arch humor that provides the special sauce. Forced to choose, I’ll recommend Some Buried Caesar, Stout’s sixth Wolfe installment (of 33 novels and 39 novellas), originally published in 1939. It finds Wolfe in… show more.

This book by sociologist Newman provides an ideal mix of statistical data with in-depth interviews with a group of low-wage workers, describing how their employment and life conditions changed over time.

We come to know these people, to understand what it is like to be employed in a low-wage job, and how it is possible but not easy for them to move up to better-paying jobs.

I was volunteering with the Appalachian Prison Book Project when Hugh Ryan’s book came out.

Suddenly, The Women’s House of Detention was everywhere—RuPaul’s Drag Race, Fresh Air, mainstream news—yet Hugh was willing to do a virtual book talk with volunteers in West Virginia who provide books to incarcerated people. The book tells the history of a prison 500 feet from the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, and the women and transgender individuals who were incarcerated there because of their gender performance and sexual orientation.

Hugh Ryan lays out how women were arrested for going out at night alone, wearing pants, accepting a date from a man, drunkenness, etc., if they were perceived as the “wrong kind of woman.” The prison stood in Greenwich Village from 1929 to 1974, and the experience of women incarcerated there drives home the point that incarceration and punishment of women is not… show more.

Lillian is an 84-years old woman walking around New York City on New Year’s Eve.

She loves the city, made her way there as a young woman in advertising in the 30s, became well-known as a poet of light verse. She alternately reminisces about her life and encounters people you would not expect.

She remembers her life in pieces, the way one does, so the reader puts together the mystery.

I found her to be a delightful and refreshing character. The book is a beautiful lacing of the past with the promise of unexpected things to come. 

Half the fun of reading a Detective John Corey novel is his smartass humor and snarky dialogue. The other half is watching his dogged pursuit of the bad guys. In Radiant Angel, he's working for the Diplomatic Surveillance Group in New York City. His assignment? Keep tabs on a Russian diplomat who may be an enemy agent on a deadly mission. 

The threat? A nuclear bomb—aka radiant angel—small enough to fit in a suitcase, big enough to blow New York City to smithereens, with enough radioactive fallout to cripple the US for years. The bonus is experiencing the action from the Russian agent's perspective, including his fear of failing to complete his mission. And the clock is ticking so John Corey must figure out how to stop him pronto.

The utopian dreams of the 60s died hard, and this beautiful novel captures the mood of the decade—and the forces that destroyed it. Set mostly in a back-to-the-land hippie community, the book centers on Bit, the first baby born to the settlers. It follows him through childhood and adolescence, and checks in on him on the cusp of middle age, a single father in New York City. Bit’s a sensitive soul, and I felt for him, especially when the story tracked his relationship with his first lover and later runaway wife, the self-destructive Helle. Groff’s expressive use of language, her feel for the natural world, and her deep sensitivity to the psychology of her characters marks this book as a classic not to be missed. 

Gage uses the story of the bomb explosion on Wall Street in September 1920 and the investigation that followed the most deadly terrorist attack in U.S. history at the time to sketch an era of escalating revolutionary activity and its policing. We meet revolutionaries, gain insight into their networks, and understand how both local and federal policing, the latter through the rise of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, responded. Gage deftly ties all of it to national debates over immigration and civil liberties in the era that resonate today.