100 Books Like The Light of Day

I have a special fondness for 11 Harrowhouse, the 1973 thriller that spins the tale of a huge theft of rough diamonds from The System, a fictional London diamond powerhouse modeled on the real-life De Beers. When I started writing about diamonds, De Beers was still the Darth Vader of diamonds—all-powerful, feared, despotic. More than eighty percent of the world’s rough diamonds poured through its London headquarters at 17 Charterhouse Street. In the novel, thieves thread a hose from the roof into the diamond vault, and hoover up the loot. In reality, a different method was used to steal diamonds from De Beers’s London fortress, which I described in my non-fiction book, then re-tailored for my own purposes in The Russian Pink. 

Part of the value of diamonds comes from how avidly people steal them. The cat-burglar on the French Riviera. The miner swallowing a stone and trying to make it past the x-ray at the gate. Or the conquerors, snatching jewels from one turban after another as they ride through history. That last is the story of the Koh-i-Noor (Mountain of Light), told with his usual panache by William Dalrymple, the celebrated historian of Mughal India, in this non-fiction account. It falls to Dalrymple’s co-author, journalist Anita Anand, to track the jewel though it's last, decidedly inglorious change of ownership—stolen by the British from the Maharaja Duleep Singh, when imperial forces prevailed upon him not only to sign away the Punjab, but also to make a “gift” of his family’s famous diamond to Queen Victoria. Sure, the Maharaja did in fact sign the document. But he was 10 years old.

This is another great diamond yarn where the movie by Alfred Hitchcock is better known than the book. A series of high-end robberies is plaguing the French Riviera. Police suspect that retired jewel thief John “The Cat” Robie may not be as retired as he claims. They come to arrest him. Robie escapes. To prove his innocence, he persuades an insurance broker to give him a list of the wealthiest diamond owners on the Cote d’Azur, so he can intercept and apprehend the new “Cat” committing the robberies, and thus clear his name. On the list is a wealthy American, with whose daughter, played by Grace Kelly, Robie develops a romance. The plot plays out in the ravishing landscape, but the real message is the diamond industry’s favorite—that owning diamonds makes you part of a glamorous world.

Marian Fowler’s lavish non-fiction account tracks the storied diamond from its origins in India, where it was bought by the great French jewel merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who sold it to Louis XIV. Weighing 110 carats in the rough, the blue was eventually cut into a heart-shaped jewel of 67.13 carats, known to history as the French Blue. In the turbulent early days of the French Revolution, all the crown jewels were moved from the Palace of Versailles to the Garde-Meuble, a treasure house in central Paris. On the night of September 11, 1792, thieves broke in and stole the jewels. Many were recovered, but the French Blue vanished forever. Too famous to be sold as it was, the London jeweler who eventually bought it, cut it down to 44.5 carats—the jewel sold to Henry Philip Hope in 1830. The Hope diamond passed through many hands, leaving behind a trail of… show more.

Philip Kerr’s series of books about Berlin detective Bernie Gunther is a stunning achievement. The series weaves together the often disturbing history of the Third Reich, real-life characters such as Goebbels and Goering, and a sharp-minded and blunt-speaking detective everyman who is trying to survive the maelstrom around him with morals and life intact. Prague Fatale sets Gunther unto solve murders at a house party of high-ranking Nazis at Heydrich’s rural retreat. It’s a grim twist on cosy, country house murders.

I was utterly spellbound by this book, seduced by its atmosphere of excruciating dread. Its precocious teenage protagonist, Nathalie Waite, is a poster girl for the power of denial. She responds to a horrifying experience at a garden party by retreating into the safety of her own bizarre imagination. Her determination to reinvent herself is a clear product not only of the trauma that she has endured but also of her fear of enduring it again.

Terse, grim, and inscrutable, this novel is Jackson at her opaque best.

The first of Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen series is just a great story. One reason I read is to explore places, and one place I’m always happy to return to is Shanghai.

This book contains events and characters that can only be found in China, and yet the story itself is pure genre, a police procedural centered on a detective who really wishes he were a poet. 

Without the setting, it’s a great read. With the setting, it’s a chance to explore China.

Expendable and incompetent Secret Service agents eventually wash up at Slough House, where they toil on pointless administrative tasks for a foul-mouthed, grubby boss called Jackson Lamb. Lamb is deliciously politically incorrect, offensive, and drinks and smokes to excess in his pit of an office. However he has a keen mind, is an experienced spy, and not afraid to act decisively to protect his employees and society. In this episode he unravels a nest of sleeper agents after an old Cold-War era colleague is found murdered on a coach. The book is well written and neatly plotted.

This book, the first in Rachel Cusk’s famous trilogy, was a revelation to me because it feels so radically unstructured but at the same time is fascinating in its form.

The narrator travels to Athens to teach a summer writing course but the details about her are kept so sketchy that we only really get to know her through the way she receives what others tell her. Faye is brilliantly observant, and only gradually do you begin to realise, as a reader, that the author is subtly meditating on a series of themes through these conversations, mostly about disappointments and divorces.

It was exciting for me to read this book because the author is deeply committed to the view that Xenophon—and not Plato—is the most reliable and also most interesting source on the life and thought of Socrates. And what a different picture from Plato is given here!

Plato’s Socrates can be enigmatic, but Johnson’s review of the evidence in Xenophon gives a clear and robust portrait. But does this mean that Plato just lied?