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People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

To me, there’s almost nothing better than a good private eye or detective story. In fact, it’d be hard to find a genre this side of science fiction that’s more influential in literature, film, and television that the hard boiled detective novel. As a child, I used to love trying to figure out how Encyclopedia Brown was going to beat Bugs Meaney. As I grew older, I loved watching Jim Rockford, The Equalizer and even Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote (don’t laugh). You can even see the influences of the detective novel in books like Junky and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. So where did these stories come from and why have they held such a grip on our imaginations for so long?

Beginnings

Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes, even those who have never read any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels or short stories. Personally, I’ve never been that interested the pipe-smoking know-it-all. He’s always seemed like a bit of a pompous ass, as in the quote above where he basically mocks his biggest fan, Dr Watson. No detective library would be complete, however, without a copy of The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which contains most of the great detective’s shorter stories, including his famous battle with Professor Moriarty over Reichenbach Falls.

Before Sherlock, however, there were other detectives. Like a lot of good things, the genre could be said to have begun with Edgar Allen Poe and his Auguste Duipin series of three stories, especially Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter, which were published in the 1840s and are available in a single volume. Dickens’ fans point to inspector Bucket, the brilliant detective from Bleak House as the first of the great British detectives, but my favorite of the early detective novel is far and away The Moonstone written by Wilkie Collins in 1868. This is a book that has it all: International intrigue; a mysterious, cursed diamond; opium addiction; and, of course, a great detective, Sergeant Cuff. In addition to the usual trappings of a suspense novel, Collins also uses multiple narrators to push the intricate plot forward as well as entertain the reader, none more humorously than Mr. Betteridge, the butler who doesn’t make a move without consulting a well-worn copy of Robinson Crusoe. It is easily in my top-three “sick day” books.

The Golden Age of American Detective Fiction

Chandler and Hammett are synonymous with the golden age of detective fiction that came out of America in the 1930s through the 1950s. These hardboiled novels differed from their more staid predecessors in that the detectives were often as damaged as the criminals they chased and the criminals were often as interesting as the “good guys,” if not more so. Most importantly, Hammett’s novels from 1929-1934 (Red Harvest, The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key) are the building blocks of almost all American detective stories that would follow. Red Harvest, the first of Hammett’s books to feature the “Continental Op,” a nameless and nearly faceless detective, has inspired the films Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, but the book more than stands on its own. Likewise, though it is hard to divorce Humphrey Bogart’s performance as Sam Spade from the source material, The Maltese Falcon is one of the finest plotted works of American fiction of the time and should be picked up by everyone.

A decade after Hammett, Raymond Chandler’s series of Philip Marlowe novels once again breathed new life into the genre. Marlowe didn’t just use the characters or the crimes to tell his stories. In his novels, especially the classics The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely Chandler makes the city of Los Angeles another character, one even more compelling than the decaying families and down-and-outs who trust in Marlowe to solve their problems.

The third of the great American Detective novelists of the Golden Age is the least familiar to most people, but Ross MacDonald’s novels featuring the detective Lew Archer have long been revered as maybe the best of the trio by many readers. Like Chandler, MacDonald sets his novels in California during the fifties. This is a California populated by the usual con men, gun molls and thugs, but also by fake gurus and new age hucksters. The first of the books, The Moving Target, might also be the best. Not only must Archer search for the missing oil magnate of the title, but the closer he gets, the more the crimes and cons stack up, and Archer is not the sort of man who can let an injustice pass, no matter the risk to himself or his original case.

Two Other Voices

Now, you’ve probably heard of most of the authors I’ve mentioned above, and you’ve probably even read a couple of their books, so I had to give you two more writers that I just love, but are, unfortunately, relatively unknown. First up is James Crumley, who wrote two great detective stories in the seventies, The Wrong Case, and my favorite, The Last Good Kiss.

The Last Good Kiss moves the detective setting away from the big cities and out into the empty plains and never-ending highways of the North- and Mid-West. Sent to look for an alcoholic poet on a binge, the detective C.W. Sughrue winds up teaming up with his quarry (as well as an alcoholic dog) on a doomed mission to find a girl missing for ten years. It’s really one of the most surprising and enjoyable novels I’ve read recently.

Lastly, Chester Himes. Himes is (much like Jerry Lewis and snails) revered in France, but shamefully neglected in his native country. Himes’ crime novels feature the police detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Through nine novels, all set in Harlem in the 50s, Himes follows the criminals, pimps, hustlers, and preachers who live in a world almost surreal in its intensity. Sometimes the two detectives are the main characters, but mostly they lurk in the periphery, their macabre names a key to their function as both boogey men as well as judge, jury and executioners. Neither good police (they regularly beat suspects in violent crimes, while ignoring petty criminals) nor evildoers, they exist as almost mythic forces, implacable in their resolve to solve cases. One of the best of the Digger and Coffin-centric novels is The Real Cool Killers.

Well, I hope that’s enough crime and revenge and sex and murder to keep you all up until next time, kiddos! Have a favorite detective story? Let me know!

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The Continental Op series is a favorite of mine. They are wonderful short stories, I recommend the collections titled "The Continental Op" and "The Dain Case."

I'm partial to Don Winslow's "A Cool Breeze on the Underground"

The movie version of the Maltese Falcon is good, but the book is truly great. And while I'm a fan of Bogart in general, I think he was horrendously miscast. To me Sam Spade is lithe and handsome(ish). In fact, Hammett says about him from the get-go: "He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan".

Bogart is awesome, but kind of bulgy and wrinkly and knobby and not at all blond or Satan-esque.

Ah well. I try to encourage people who haven't seen the film to read the book FIRST, but it almost never works. They're both enjoyable, in any case.

And Red Harvest is one of my favorite books of all time. I think we should start a book club.

Thanks for including the Chester Himes books........great stuff. A few guady but fun Black-sploitation films came from some of his works, and an early ninties danny Glover film as well. The later being better than the former by far. But......
His voice and the sheer impact of the times made his books unique and intensely vivid,

But when it comes to Crime novels, detective fiction and Noir in general nothing beats 1.) The collected works of Jim Thomspon. He made crime fiction deeper, darker, and infinatly more real.
2.) The Twisted Place by Mickey Spilane. You think you know the Mike Hammer stories, but this one is an undersung classic.
3.) American Tabloid and the Cold Six Thousand by Lames Elroy. Creepier and more complex than the L.A. trilogy, and spanning decades of crisis and conspiracy through the eyes of the most unforgettable characters you will see.

Get these books, read them, enjoy them.

I'm not really much for the mystery genre, as a whole. I find it absolutely rife with retreads of the same basic material, changing only a little in terms of characters and setting...but it takes a serious amount of skill, imho, to make a genuinely interesting diversion from standard for either of those categories. (I mean, yeah, SF and fantasy retread the same material a lot also, but the range of variations possible expand to virtual infinity. And there are slightly more basic plots....it's a rare mystery that's not about a murder or murders and finding out who committed them and nailing that killer or killers.)

But I make an occasional exception. I was on an Agatha Christie kick for a while as a kid but while the quality of her books is quite high, I don't think I'm likely to go back to any of them except Ten Little Indians (/ And Then There Were None), simply because it's such an intensely clever and out of the ordinary working of the usual murder mystery. And full of atmosphere, also.

I also make an exception for Ken Bruen, who writes two main series - one about a London police department, with a variety of corrupt and incompetent members, but in particular three main characters, an aging alcoholic whose name I forget, a thug named Brant who operates not unlike a mobster, but does generally like to get his man (or woman)...and then beat the tar out of them, and a young, pretty black PFC who's getting altogether too entangled in Brant's doings and his way of operating. That one's interesting for its vivid characters, its somewhat jaded view of the British police, and the way the main characters almost never seem to actually wind up doing much in the way of detective work or the like. Most of the time the main antagonist in the book winds up getting theirs only by accident, if at all.

The other series is about a man named Jack Taylor who was a garda, an Irish policeman, but got kicked out for (you guessed it) alcoholism - Bruen really likes the substance abusers as characters - and has sort of drifted into private eye work that he invariably botches due to his regular returns to the bottle and later, other forms of substance abuse.

They're both not exactly rosy in terms of their view of the human condition, but there are things to like about the characters in both series, despite their failings. Bruen's got an excellent writing style, and an abiding love of books that makes a regular appearance in his work. He seems especially fond of Ed McBain's novels.

Oh, and then of course there's Eric Garcia's "Rex" books. Those I read because they cater more to my usual line of interest. Y'see, in these books, dinosaurs have in fact survived into the present day and can be found all over the country. They're just disguised as humans by wearing rubber suits.

Yes. Really. They're classic detective stories, except with a velociraptor detective. With a basil habit. (Herbs get them high.) The sex scenes...

Yeah. Okay. I'm done snickering.

I actually did. I've never seen the movie (I have a really hard time going that far back, moviewise), but snagged and read the book in the interests of having at least sampled some of the classics. It's not like it's long.

It was certainly not at all what I was expecting.

Oh man, you have got to see that film. I promise you will like it. It's got this weird, dark atmosphere to it, it kind of sucks you into this world. It's beyond noir. Gotta check it out, trust me.