100 Books Like The Mysteries of London

You may know this book as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but you probably don’t really know it. Films, most notably the Disney cartoon, have grossly distorted this novel, often having Esmeralda ride off into the sunset with Phoebus. But the novel is really a very dark, Gothic story of love and lust, and one of the first existential novels. Frollo and Quasimodo both love Esmeralda, but she loves Phoebus, and he only loves himself. In the end, everyone dies, allowing their lust to destroy their common sense. Hugo wrote it to help popularize and save Notre-Dame Cathedral from falling into further disrepair. It influenced British author William Harrison Ainsworth to write The Tower of London, thus revitalizing British Gothic in a new way just as it did French Gothic.

This little-known French vampire novel, published in 1825, includes the first fully realized female vampire. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, a young Hungarian woman, Alinska, mysteriously turns into a vampire after a French soldier pledges his love to her, then abandons her. After becoming a vampire, she travels to France where her husband Edouard is now remarried and has a family. Unable to stop herself, she preys upon Edouard’s family. The story is remarkable for creating the first sympathetic vampire and being the first to associate vampirism with Eastern Europe. Bram Stoker may have known it or similar French novels. I love the character development here and the possibility that this novel inspired the entire vampire tradition, including Dracula, yet has been largely ignored until recently.

This novel, published in 1879, is set in Romania at the time of the 1877-8 Russo-Turkish War. It is significant for its setting because it predates Dracula (1897) in being set in Romania (home of Transylvania). Nizet was a twenty-year-old Belgian woman who encountered Romanians in Paris who told her about how Russians had treated them during the war. Nizet created the character of Captain Vampire to represent how Russia acted like a vampire toward the Romanians, even though they were Russia’s allies. Captain Vampire’s behavior is shocking yet fascinating. As a critique of war, the novel is extremely relevant today given Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Personally, I am amazed by how a woman who never saw a battlefield could capture war’s essence so vividly.

This novel, published in 1869, is full of mystery. A young man disappears, apparently abducted by a beautiful woman. Upon hearing of the event, an elderly marquis recounts how the same thing happened to him in his youth. He soon realizes the present-day seductress is the same beautiful young woman he once loved. Determined to find the answers he failed to gain in his youth, he embarks on an adventure full of twists and turns to learn the true identity of the seemingly immortal woman. A mix of humor and romance, court intrigue, and revenge, The Immortal Woman will keep readers on the edges of their seats trying to guess how the novel’s mysterious events are possible and whether the marquis will survive.

The go-to book about voluntary homelessness, I always appreciate George Orwell’s amazing writing. It’s hard to put down.

The first half is about his time as a lowly kitchen assistant in the basement of a Parisian restaurant in the 1930s. The brutal divide between the rich and the destitute is better depicted here than in anything else I’ve ever read. The second half describes his time back in England and provides a heart-rending understanding of why homeless people are referred to as tramps and the ultimate emptiness of church-organized aid.

Although Orwell always had the option to opt out, his study of the lived experience of homelessness and the skill with which he captured it afterwards stand out as a colossus of the genre.

One of the great opening lines in fiction that begins with: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” Sydney Carton is a lawyer in London at the time of the French Revolution. He takes on the case of Doctor Manette, released from imprisonment at the Bastille to live in exile in London with his daughter Lucie.

Returning to France, Dr. Manette is subsequently accused of being a spy for the British government and is sentenced to death. Sydney’s love for Lucie causes him to make the ultimate sacrifice to save Lucie’s father from the guillotine.

A fun twist on one of my favorite historical tales, The Scarlet Pimpernel, this novel portrays the elusive hero as a brilliant, determined woman. The cast of characters is full and well-developed, including a dashing hero worthy of our heroine’s love. This story is beautifully written, has plenty of twists and turns, heart-melting romance, and a delightful happily ever after. 

Abandonment and the end of love terrify me. In The Woman Destroyed, the happy diary of a fifty-year-old woman turns into a descent into hell when Beauvoir's narrator finds out that her husband is having an affair and is actually leaving her. Beauvoir wrote it in order to send a feminist message to women in the fifties, to convince them to get a job and define their identity outside their family life. I wonder, however, whether the intensity of the grief we feel in that novella wasn't experienced by Beauvoir herself the summer when her American lover, the novelist Nelson Algren, broke up their transcontinental passion of four years. 

A dark psychological thriller, The Snakes is a study of greed, and how feelings of deprivation and jealousy can infect a family and destroy each of its members slowly and painfully, from the inside out. The novel is a slow-burn character portrait (versus, say, plot-driven adventure), but Sadie Jones does a terrific job of pulling you into the story and ratcheting up the tension. In the novel, a recently married couple rents out their London apartment to escape for a few months. Driving through France, they visit the wife’s brother at a hotel he runs. When their parents make a surprise visit, the story—and the family—unravels brilliantly until the final delicious, electrifying ending.

In 1812 Britain ruled the waves and Napoleon ruled everything else. We in the twenty-first century don’t realise how difficult and dangerous those times really were, how much of an analogy can be drawn with the dark days of World War II, when Britain stood alone against the forces in Europe. While the main plot line appears to be a simple romance, in fact Bennetts has gathered together strand after strand of conflict into a rich, absorbing tapestry. There's code-breaking, social mores, how to partake of snuff, politics, the assassination of the British PM. The story is utterly absorbing and very, very real.