Books like Under and Alone — 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.

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.

Best known for Helter Skelter--his classic 1975 true crime memoir on prosecuting the Manson family, former Los Angeles deputy DA Vincent Bugliosi wrote this book later about a complicated but lesser-known double-homicide case he tried in 1966, three years before the Manson murders occurred. As the prosecutor on these cases, Bugliosi boasted access to background details that only an insider can share, merging psychological analysis with trial strategy concerns. Echoing themes of the noir thriller Double Indemnity, this true account unveils the plot of two lovers to murder their respective spouses and explains the complex police work required to catch them.

Nothing beats an author willing to immerse himself into an outlaw world to get their perspective – until that world starts to literally beat the writer. Hunter Thompson’s first book is more of a journalistic work, examining the infamous biker gang from the inside than what would follow (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and so on.) He is very much part of the action at riotous parties, on bar stools, and alongside at motorcycle runs, but his first-person narration is an effective tool for revealing the Hell's Angels as independent people and as a fraternal organization. The writer and his subjects willingly project their images of unrepentant criminals. But when Thompson is on the receiving end of a gang beatdown, it’s a reminder that the line between outlaw and citizen can be hazy, and you might not know you’ve crossed it until blood’s being spilled.      

I found this telling of the Shedden massacre of eight Bandidos at the hands of a mix of club mates and deranged wannabes, including a one-time failed police officer who was looking to reinvent himself as an outlaw biker player, very affecting, reading as it does like an almost Shakespearian real-life tragedy.

Edwards, along with Jerry Langton one of the key chroniclers of the Canadian outlaw biker scene, tells the stories of the dead men, introducing a group ranging from established bikers to probationers, loners to family men, and petty criminals to ordinary working stiffs; laying out how they all came to be facing their death one after another in a Nazi fantasist’s barn.

One of my reasons for starting to write about the UK outlaw biker scene in particular was that no one else seemed to be treating it seriously. That all changed when Tony Thompson, a highly respected journalist with a track record of highly readable and successful books on the UK gangland and crime scene produced this.

This book is the biography of ex-Outlaws MC member Daniel "Snake Dog" Boone, but through it, Thompson tells the wider story of the development of the UK outlaw biker scene since the eighties and how it has been affected by international biker politics, up to and including the 2007 murder of Gerry Tobin. Thoroughly recommended and essential reading for anyone interested in the club scene in England. I’ve said that if this had come out before my first biker book, the chances are I’d have never finished writing it.

The books I’m recommending have all been key sources of insight in differing ways into the realities of the club worlds and cultures. This is a definite recommendation as one of the best “informed outsider’s” overviews I found.

It’s something of a rarity in the outlaw book world being a book by what seems to be a very well-informed and connected outsider (although I understand there has also been criticism of the content) which strives and manages to present a view that seems both balanced and nuanced. I like it because it doesn’t whitewash, nor does it condemn, instead it tries to show and explain.

Australia has a strong bikie culture that draws on a long tradition of ‘mateship’ and this book gives a glimpse behind the scenes of the rules and rituals of club membership, as well as the history of clubs in Australia.

When I’m reading about the biker scene what I’m looking for is the reality that underlies the public image and stereotypes. Jerry Langton doesn’t come across as a big fan of bikers but he’s well connected enough to speak to senior players and he’s a professional writer, so what he has to say is very readable, and to me, informative.

Through telling the extraordinary story of five foot four Walter "Nurget" Stadnick’s rise to criminally visionary national president of the Hell's Angels this book provides one of the best overviews of the development of the outlaw biker world in Canada, the Canadian biker wars, and the involvement of biker clubs in Canada in organised crime (although as a niggle it’s crying out for a map).

Painter screwed up. He made the wrong choice and he knew it. Melanie swore off bikers to protect her daughter. It didn’t matter that they still loved each other. They couldn’t be together. Until Melanie makes the wrong choice and violates their rules.

This second chance romance had hold of my emotions from page one. I went on a roller coaster with Painter and Melanie.