27 Books Like The Last Gunfight

I’ve always appreciated the way Rex Stout combined two different mystery traditions—the intricate puzzles of the English whodunnit and the wisecracking voice of the American gumshoe—in his Nero Wolfe series.

Nowhere do those two styles blend together more seamlessly than in this 1937 novel, which follows Wolfe and his sardonic leg man Archie Goodwin as they try to solve a murder in New York’s fashion world. The mystery is tricky but never inscrutable, and Archie’s quips are still funny nearly a century later.

If you think Rex Stout mixing Agatha Christie with Raymond Chandler sounds like fun, allow me to introduce you to A.J. Devlin.

His books feature a far wilder combo: private eyes and professional wrestling. I just read the first book in his “Hammerhead” Jed mystery series, Cobra Clutch, and it’s as hard-hitting as a piledriver…but fun, too! Washed-up wrestler Jed Ounstead has to delve deep into the shady world of small-time fight promoters and drug running to catch the men who killed his former tag-team partner.

To get to the truth, he has to face his own troubled past—and kick a lot of a**!

Here is another masterpiece.

It purports to be historical fiction set in the Old West, following one of the last great cattle drives. Yet within a few chapters, it begins to feel like a series of episodes from Grimm’s fairy tales.

I remember at UC Irvine, where I earned my Fiction MFA, several fellow writers were reading this novel alongside me. We kept stopping each other in the hall or at cocktail parties to relive this or that chapter, struggling to understand how it could be both so entertaining and so good.

The fact that it is long—a real doorstopper of a book—adds to its “too-big-for-one-genre” feel.

I love this book so much, I have read it at least three times. It is a classic gothic novel with an eerie setting and interesting characters, including those with psychosis that add to the mystery of he novel.

While the film version is undoubtedly a classic, the novel is by far better.

Raised in a survivalist family that rejected formal education and medical care, Westover never entered a classroom until age 17.

Her journey from rural Idaho to earning a PhD from Cambridge is a remarkable story of transformation through self-education, resilience, and the pursuit of truth, even when it means questioning your origins.

Like Westover’s father, my father held very strong beliefs separating us from others. But we both instinctively know there was more to life.

I shouldn't be recommending this book. Its sources are limited. Its psychological approach to its subject is outdated. Worst of all, its author earned degrees in literature, not history! (I'm a history professor.) But I don't care.

I find this book electrifying. It is the work of a dogged gumshoe investigator, a mother in her 20s, who relentlessly dug up the long-concealed secrets of one of America's most extraordinary national stories: the life and death of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-Day Saints movement.

This book shows the most thrilling part of being a historian: finding things out. "No man knows my history," Joseph Smith once claimed. The title of this book is a sly rejoinder: Maybe once, no man knew your history, but now, one woman does.

This remains one of the most haunting novels I have ever read. I cannot shake the character of Judge Holden, a formidable man both physically and intellectually, who deploys his insidious intellect to justify acts of abject violence seemingly only for the sake of violence itself. I was mesmerized by a world where “all covenants were brittle.” This was no straight-up Western as I had expected. It was something more.

McCarthy pushed the boundaries of the classic Western by challenging the notion that good will ultimately overcome evil and the hero will save the day. There was no hero here, and the day was truly lost to forces beyond the characters’ control, hallmarks of the Southern Gothic tradition. I was hooked on this curious blend of genres!

I love this book because I believe it to be the first popular novelization of the life of Santa Claus. It was written in 1902 by the venerable Frank Baum. Though mostly a children’s novel, the character of Santa is given some internal development. His thoughts, emotions, and motivations are shared as he grows from an orphaned child into a beloved legend.

As a cat lover, I adore how Santa’s first-ever toy is a carving he makes of his pet cat out of boredom… The theme of the book is simple but universal: “For a generous deed lives longer than a great battle or a king's decree or a scholar's essay because it spreads and leaves its mark on all nature and endures through many generations.”

This book has engendered controversy for almost forcefully bridging the gap between the 15th Century Wallachian Prince Vlad III or Vlad the Impaler or Dracula. Stoker had already constructed his character, called “Count Wampyr,” before he learned of his future namesake. However, he quite clearly establishes a connection between the two through an explanation provided by Abraham Van Helsing. The Dracula of the eponymous novel is a heavily fictionalized version of the real-life figure, but so are most similarly positioned characters in literature, film, and television. Florescu and McNally provide a cursory overview of Slavic and Balkan vampire folklore, a biographical sketch of Vlad the Impaler, and illuminate the process by which Stoker adapted this violent, cunning, and sometimes brilliant nationalist and military tactician into a fictional monster.

That this book even exists is amazing. By the end, it seems less like an exposé than an all-in wager on the power of truth. The final few chapters alone are worth the price of admission, and while Alex Gibney's documentary of the same name is well worth watching, Lawrence Wright's book is—for now, and perhaps for all time—the definitive look at a secretive world.