Books like Till Death Us Do Part — picked by fans

A rising star in the American book scene of the 1960s, novelist Clifford Irving suddenly claimed his greatest fame in 1972 as a criminal who almost succeeded in the most brazen literary hoax of all time by selling rights to a bogus autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Exposed and convicted of fraud, Irving spent 16 months in federal prison and returned his $765,000 advance. But he may have had the last laugh with the 1981 publication of this raucous and hilarious inside account of the scam, removing all his skeletons from the closet and shaking them for everyone to see. A movie starring Richard Gere as Irving followed in 2006. Irving died at the age of 87 in 2017.

Vietnam vet William Queen was capping a 20-year law enforcement career in 1998 when the ATF agent wangled an invitation to join the San Fernando Valley chapter of the notorious Mongols motorcycle club under the code name Billy St. John. He spent the next 28 months rising undercover to the rank of treasurer and vice president, allowing him to provide documents for the arrest and indictment of 54 members by 700 officers in four different states. Queen’s 2005 bestselling true crime memoir of his Mongols days ranges from bone-chilling to side-splitting for terror and laughs. Although Mel Gibson reportedly bought the screen rights, a movie has yet to appear.

This was the first book I ever read from start to finish, and it opened my eyes to adventures beyond my own neighborhood. It also illuminated the complexities of human nature and how psychology influenced my mindset and outcomes.

This book inspired me to leave my job as a steelworker and take a leap into Hollywood, even though I didn’t know a single person there. Over the next two decades, I achieved what seemed impossible—thanks to this book!

Although presented as a novel, this book is a memoir of Brown’s life growing up as a Black boy in Harlem in the 1940s and 50s amid poverty, violence, and addiction.

Marlene was in Paris in the summer of 1969 when a young white American man gave her a book to read. Brown’s story smacked me in the face. He lived in an America that was foreign to me—poverty, addiction, violence, incarceration. His experiences growing up on the streets of Harlem were so different from mine in suburban New Jersey.

What I remember most is my wonder at Brown’s description of “conking” his hair—straightening it with chemical relaxers that damaged his hair and burned his scalp. His description has stayed with me for all these years as a reminder of how little I knew and know about the lives of Blacks and their position in a white world.

I’m fascinated by the Manson family; my big bad in my book is essentially doing a Charlie impression, so I’ve read a lot about America’s Boogeyman. This autobiography stands out from the crowd because of its absolutely bonkers voice. Every trigger warning in the world applies, but there are two worthwhile aspects to this lurid tale: one, how much institutional violence created Manson, who spent his adolescence and young adult life in the penal system (when they released him at 32 he begged to stay in jail.) And two, how the charismatic “family” could easily pass for some carefree Instagram influencers these days.  

Few scholars have done more to demystify the nature of crime in Mexico than Pablo Piccato. His book City of Suspects is a nuanced history that reveals that the very meaning of crime was contested in early twentieth-century Mexico City. While Mexican elites tried to define criminals as a social class, the urban poor, who experienced crime as a part of their everyday lives, saw crime as an individual phenomenon. This book, like the others on this list, is also a story about the ways people used and thought about public space. At a time when Mexico’s government sought to transform the capital into a modern metropolis along the lines of Paris or New York, the poor resisted efforts to exclude them from that future.

One of Algeria’s greatest writers, Assia Djebar, deserves far greater recognition in the English-speaking world.

Her book, Algerian White, gives a painful account of the loss of three important Algerian intellectuals, against the backdrop of the Black Decade, and offers an eloquent and moving account of Algeria’s trauma of the 1990s.

Her analysis of Algerian society, culture, and language offers us a powerful reflection on the difficulties of nation-building and identity, in the post-colonial period and in challenging times.  

Stagolee, the bad man who will not back down, is an icon of African American mythology. His defining moment, the Christmas night murder of Billy Lyons is the subject of folk and blues songs from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Though many know the story, before Cecil Brown’s book, most did not realize that the story was true. On Christmas night, 1895, in St. Louis, “Stack” Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons in a fight over a Stetson hat. Stagolee Shot Billy documents the events leading to the murder while shining a light on the culture, attitudes, and politics of the St. Louis black community in the 1890s. The shooting of Billy Lyons is a Gilded Age murder that continues to resonate.

In adapting Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 non-fiction Wiseguy for film, Martin Scorsese delivered a “staged documentary,” depicting a far more gritty and authentic account of organized crime than Mario Puzo’s Godfather trilogy.

Much of what makes Pileggi’s masterpiece work is how he captures South Brooklyn culture as it morphs from the 1950s through the 1980s. Pileggi’s tale of the tarnishing of the Golden Era of Italian American organized crime is recounted from the pedestrian perspective of un-makeable underling and ultimate-turncoat Henry Hill.

That bygone Brooklyn landscape leaps off the pages, from its gambling dens and gangster bars, to its corner cafes, criminal courts, and cab stands. BONUS: Pileggi’s no-nonsense non-fiction prose, peppered with Hill’s verbatim account, delivers even more days-in-the-lives of lowlifes than Scorsese could ever have packed into his classic film. 

Locations of interest: The Prospect Park Zoo (stand-in for The Tampa Zoo); Smith Street in Red Hook (Jimmy Conway’s… show more.

Having grown up in South Africa during apartheid and witnessed how the appalling regime destroyed so many lives, I was profoundly affected by this read. It takes place in the sprawling black township of Soweto at the height of apartheid, where survival was a daily battle for the oppressed and marginalised inhabitants. To this end, Tsoti, an apparently heartless young township thug, lives a life of brutal crime. That is until he unwittingly kidnaps a baby during a bungled carjacking. Forced to care for the infant, Tsotsi gradually rediscovers his own humanity. The reader can’t help but be moved from a place of horror to one of deep understanding and empathy for the main character – a remarkable feat for any author. A compelling story of hope.