100 Books Like The Narrows

Colin Dexter immediately pulls me into what reads as a real world.

The writing is so beautiful, I’m not aware of anything but the story. The chapters are delightfully short and tight, so much so that the pages absolutely flow past.

I prefer reading books that, even though they are clearly fiction, read as true crime stories. When I read a Colin Dexter Morse mystery, I am unaware of pages, chapters, sentences, punctuation. I am allowed to be totally immersed in the story. The casts of perfectly drawn characters in each story always intrigue me.

Morse is flawed, a quality he shares with the camera. He doesn’t mind being wrong, a rare quality in a human. 

I find it such a treat to eaves-drop on a real-life cop in that, unlike most detective fiction, which usually focuses on a single crime, the Frost stories allow me to walk in the shoes of a real detective and experience firsthand the truly multi-faceted work of an average detective.

I find the Wingfield books really difficult to put down once I start. Slowing them down to savor them at leisure is quickly kicked into touch in my desperation to discover what happens next.

I have found that Dick Francis stories (33 standalone and a series character for an additional 4 books and a second series with 2 books) have stood the test of time in that I read them all as they were published, and recently I am working my way through them again on Audible and I have found them to be even better the second time around.

I feel they are equally exciting, character-led, thrilling, and each title still kept me guessing right up to the end. I am in total in awe of Dick Francis' writing and storytelling. 

Each title deals with horses and horse racing as either the main theme or, in some of the titles, as the back story. I have selected Decider mainly because I found that he effortlessly incorporates the horse world with the “Succession syndrome” – that is to say, family life and entitled family… show more.

This time the detective whose shoes I am allowed to tread in are those of Cliff Janeway, a Denver Homicide detective, investigating the murder of a local rare books scout.

I grew to know what it feels like to be a detective. To someone like myself - who prefers to pick up my rare first editions, not on the internet but by rummaging around for hours in bookstores - this and the other titles in John Donning's atmospheric Janeway titles are pure mana from heaven.

The author ran the Old Algonquin Bookstore in Denver for a decade. Mr. Donning's writing voice is so authentic, I have to keep reminding myself that Janeway is the detective and not the author.

I like reading Mosley’s mystery novels because they are about people overcoming extreme difficulties, and this book is one of his best. I couldn’t put it down.

The main character is an African-American private detective working in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s, and Mosley paints a realistic picture of LA during that time.  There are always a few women in distress and white policemen who don’t like the black detective and constantly make his efforts more difficult. 

If Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade served as the model for most private detective protagonists in American books (and movies), Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe offered a fascinating, inside-out variation. Marlowe—especially in this book, which I love as Chandler’s best—seems more analytical than Spade, more passionate than Spade, but just not quite as cool by today’s standards. 

That little loss doesn’t hurt him or this classic, however, which provides the best plot with the most expressive prose of this top 5 private detective novels. Marlowe’s war-torn pal disappears, the guy’s oversexed wife gets murdered, and Marlowe naturally becomes police suspect number one. 

In between the developments, Marlowe makes light: “Mostly I just kill time, and it dies hard.” That’s a clever way to say so long to involvement, but the longest goodbye, the real and permanent one to which the book’s title refers and we sometimes call death—that’s the… show more.

I could have chosen any Raymond Chandler novel for this list; he is such a brilliant stylist, one of the best in the language.

His lugubrious, heavy-drinking, first-person detective Philip Marlowe is my kind of fictional hero, a genre-defining character, perpetually alone though he yearns for the glamorous women he meets.

Although many fans consider Crais’s preceding book, L.A. Requiem, to be his masterpiece, I’ve chosen this because it perfectly encapsulates the relationship between flamboyant Elvis Cole and his partner, the enigmatic Joe Pike.

Pike is the ultimate sidekick. He’s taciturn, monosyllabic, and extremely complex. Dangerous as hell and completely loyal to Cole and anyone in Cole’s life; he’s taken bullets, knives—a whole bunch of weapons during the nineteen-book series.

In The Last Detective, the son of Cole’s girlfriend gets kidnapped and the evidence points to Cole’s service in Vietnam. Cole’s first call isn’t to the LAPD, it’s to Joe Pike. His message: ‘Joe, I’m scared.’ Pike drops everything and together they start hunting...

Pike is the third sidekick on my list to get his own series.

Elvis Cole is the first-person narrator of a classic private eye series set in Los Angeles.

It is fun and unpretentious while being full of sociological truisms. The novels are first and foremost crime thrillers, but the comedic voice and observations make for a somewhat genre-bending experience every single read.  

There isn’t a Robert Crais novel I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed, but I especially like the ones featuring PI Elvis Cole and his no-nonsense, stoic buddy Joe Pike. What is especially good about this novel is the character development of the two antagonists. Their personalities, often clashing with each other, make them more than one-dimensional killers, adding spice to the story—something I try to do in my own books.