100 Books Like The Undertaker at Work

These days, books about London are strewn about thicker than leaves in Vallombrosa, but this was the first definitive book. Writing about London as if it was indeed a legendary person plays to Ackroyd’s great strengths: a sense of history, of place or psychogeography, and a multi-disciplinary approach, incorporating the many voices and experiences of Londoners throughout the ages to capture the soul of this great city. 

By launching this genre, Ackroyd really showed me the way. When I was first commissioned to write Necropolis, I had some misgivings. Would anyone really want to read a book about London cemeteries? Then I went into Oxford Street Waterstones and saw an entire wall of London books, and realized that this was an entirely new genre and one which welcomed me in.

I was also extremely apprehensive when Ackroyd reviewed Necropolis for The Times. I spread the paper out over… show more.

I first encountered medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris when she published The Butchering Art, a biographer of pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister. This is another gore-flecked narrative that focuses on facial surgeon Harold Gillies’ pioneering work formulating ingenious surgical innovations and transforming the lives of patients disfigured fighting in WW1.

Plastic surgery has been around since the French Revolution, but attempts at facial reconstruction were limited. Gillies became fascinated by plastic surgery after watching French surgeon Hippolyte Morestin remove a cancer tumor from a patient’s face and cover it with a flap of skin taken from their own neck. In 1916, he requisitioned a ward at Cambridge Military Hospital, Aldershot, to cope with the grotesque procession of disfigured men disembarking from the hospital trains. He assembled a team of retired doctors, medical students, and even a vet to try to give these men their dignity back. A Daily Mail reporter at… show more.

Kate and I have both written about the history of sex work. While mine was confined to London, Kate has gone further afield and researched the hidden histories of sex workers across the globe, charting the lived experience of people who sold sex for a living from Storyville brothels to Chinese flower boats and royal bed chambers.

This authoritative and global history of sex work is enhanced by evocative paintings, archival photographs, and intriguing curios. It really is everything you ever wanted to know about the history of sex work but were afraid to ask! 

This beautifully illustrated book about the experience of death in Victorian Britain was a keynote publication in the emerging field of ‘death studies,’ once a niche interest and now an established academic discipline and popular historical topic. Curl’s scholarship is on display in this massive tome, but he wears his learning lightly, and it’s an entertaining read.

This book examines the background of the architecture and customs surrounding death in the 19th century, from the humble working class burial to the spectacular state funerals of the Duke of Wellington (who would have preferred something more low-key) and Queen Victoria herself, the doyenne of Victorian mourning. We learn about the founding of the great urban cemeteries, which were masterpieces of architecture and landscape gardening, and the inevitable development of cremation. In a style as ceremonial as a royal funeral, this book is by turns intriguing, poignant, and amusing. 

Why I love… show more.

This novel represents a sharp turn for me. Until I snapped up Zero History in an airport bookstore many years ago, the science fiction I’d read seemed like dry, intellectual exercises. The characters didn’t have depth. They never made me laugh (or cry). But Zero History unleashed a passion in me for speculative fiction, and eventually, it turned my own writing in that direction as well. To this day, it’s one of my all-time favorite novels. While it’s the third book in a William Gibson trilogy, it is entirely complete on its own. There’s a pop culture, cool vibe about it as the story taps into the lives of three people with unusual gifts – which a global marketing magnate dearly wants to use in various ways.

I came across Salt Lick when hunting for novels on the topic of climate breakdown.

I was looking for writers who go beyond the doom and gloom, to find either rays of hope or at the very least a story where life and love might survive. For me, hope was an essential element in Jessie Lamb’s story. And in Salt Lick, Allison does deliver a dogged kind of hope for her strange trio of wandering central characters.

Beyond that, she delivers bewitchingly beautiful prose; her first page is a masterclass in description.

I adore this entire series, and especially this third book. Maggie Hope, who started out as a typist for Winston Churchill is now a full-blown spy for MI-5 and is sent to Germany.

I love seeing Maggie’s development throughout the series. Even when faced with what seem like insurmountable odds, she doesn’t give up. Maggie is the epitome of a woman working not only in a job that was likely considered “man’s work” but doing it splendidly.

Blind Justice, set in 1768, is the first of Bruce Alexander’s 11 Sir John Fielding mysteries. Its hero is the famous blind magistrate of London’s Bow Street Court; its narrator is thirteen-year-old Jeremy Proctor, whom Fielding’s wisdom has saved from an unjust accusation of theft. The pair investigate the death of Sir Richard Goodhope, who has been discovered shot in his library, locked from the inside. Sir John assumes suicide, but Jeremy’s observation of a detail that the magistrate could not see suggests murder. Proof of murder involves following Goodhope’s history through London’s streets, gambling houses, coffee houses, and great houses—to Drury Lane theater and Newgate—in a compelling portrait of eighteenth-century London.

Captain Gronow shed some light on the darker aspects of the Regency period, which was a time before law enforcement as we know it. But it wasn’t all bad—the Bow Street Runners were the start of a new era of policing. I was fascinated by the story of how these first detectives came to be and how much truth was behind the myth, especially since the myth has become a popular one for fiction writers in recent years.

Peter Ackroyd has written several wonderful books about London, the Thames, and aspects of English life, but this six-volume series (the last to come in 2023) is the best and most comprehensive I’ve found. It’s a delightful trip through history, not only covering the politics of the times but giving insight into the daily lives of people from one era to the next, how towns became cities, infrastructure and the system of government developed. The page counts are daunting, but don’t be dissuaded—nobody can make history come alive better than Ackroyd.