Criminal Minded: Polling Some Of Ian's Favorite Crime Novels

Great idea. There's some here I definitely need to get to.

A few comments:
- Love George V. Higgins. Cogan's Trade is my favorite but Eddie Coyle is great as well.
- I just read Cutter and Bone a couple of months ago, having never seen the movie. It's good but so downbeat it's made me hesitant to pull the trigger on the film version.
- Don Winslow might be talented but his Twitter presence is so annoying I can never read anything he's written, and I give a fair amount of leeway with stuff like that.

i read some dirty nypd cop novel by don winslow because my dad said he was good and i really did not like it. i just kept waiting for all the cops to either die or go to jail so that i could stop reading.

the only ones i've read are the getaway and the postman always rings twice. i've read every jim thompson because i'm a good gen x sonic youth fan or something like that. i still own them all though which must mean that i really liked them.

for me now at this time: i keep meaning to read the rest of those joe ide IQ books. i really liked the first one and i think i have the rest.

i've read megan abbott but not that one. is that her noir-ish one with the pulp cover?

someday i will read all those classic ones by chandler, hammett, goodis, willeford, etc.

Might use this as a shopping list for noirvember.

The first four Abbott novels are all noir historical, they’re great.

If I were to pick two of the lesser-known titles here, I would prob say Paradise Man by Charyn and The Goodbye Kiss by Carlotto.

Lawrence Block is a massively best-selling writer, for decades, and I'm always a little surprised that none of my peers talk about him. Some of my favorite writing about NYC, about collecting (his hit man character is a stamp collector) and about alcoholism that I have ever read.

Lawrence Block is probably one of those uber-prolific writers that people scan past on the shelves, he might seem like a Sandford or a Connelly or one of those guys who has fifty novels you've never read but always see. He's just a dark dude though, really great. Sins of the Fathers and A Walk Among the Tombstones are swell.

I love the the Matt Scudder books a ton - the first like, 7 or 8 are just superb. I have seen Block read a few times at the mystery bookstore here and he is a real treat.

American Tabloid seems like the right Ellroy choice tbh, either that or The Big Nowhere (which is just probably my favorite mix of his early noir, vast conspiracy, and police thriller interests)

I think American Tabloid is the one I got the most out of. I still have, sitting on my shelves taunting me, copies of Perfidia and This Storm (which I got signed, and he told me I looked like a hungry dog) that I will surely get to some day, but it seems like such a commitment to dive back into him.

think it was hungry dog; it was something kinda funny like that.

File under: a thread that's going to cost me a fortune.

Love the Derek Raymond Factory books (even if I needed a bottle by my side to get through Dora Suarez)
Similarly the Red Riding books. Not sure I could re-read those, tbh.
Yes, to Richard Stark, but only read the first two Parker books.
Love Elroy and Jim Thompson.
I loved The Power of the Dog and The Cartel by Don Winslow. I started The Border but found I'd had enough of the gruelling misery of it.
Found In A Lonely Place glorious; need to read more Dorothy Hughes.

Lots here to check out.

Rough count - at least ten of these have been made into films.

xp

Thanks for the comments everybody! Would love to hear favorites of everyone, too.

he told me I looked like a hungry dog

Truly the man is half chandler, half rickles

Being called a hungry dog by James Elroy feels like an 'end-of-level' endorsement to me!

My Hammett pick is the same as yours, it's just one of the best novels of all time. The sheer atmosphere and double crosses and various violent scenes are a cut above almost anything else.

My Leonard pick is maybe weirdly Road Dogs, absolute brilliance imo as far as revisiting old characters and giving Jack Foley the noble ending he deserved. My Thompson pick is South of Heaven, loved the whole story, like a low key Wages of Fear/Sorcerer.

Just remembered I have an autographed hardcover edition of Crumley's Dancing Bear.

need to read more Dorothy Hughes

The only one I've read is The Expendable Man, which I thought was very much worth the read.

Speaking of which; possible holiday gift material for noir/crime fiction fans:

https://www.loa.org/books/775-crime-novels-of-the-1960s-nine-classic-thrillers-boxed-set/

I love almost all of Hammett's novels, especially The Dain Curse, but Red Harvest is definitely the crown jewel.

Voted for the Winslow, as I haven’t read any of the others.

(I really liked the film version of “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” though.)

Also I’m on a huge crime novel kick this year, so making a note of the contenders for future reference.

(And yes, unperson, I still need to buy your crime novel - and your jazz book!)

Ride the Pink Horse is not quite as intense as In a Lonely Place but still really good. Some might also be interested in Hughes' biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, which seems the best we are likely to get.

Is it possible that Cain is underrated? The film versions are so iconic they may have obscured the novels. I love Thompson and he's got his own uniquely sick thing going, but in form and style a lot of his books feel like he's trying to match what Cain achieves in Postman.

Macdonald and Chandler notable by their absence.

I prefer Macdonald to Chandler, and like them both fine, but neither of them has a particular book that sticks prominently in my mind. My wife loves Chandler. I was always more of a Hammett guy. Chandler would veer into writing in a style that felt a bit overworked to me. Hammett was more direct.

Yes, I think that comparison is spot on; Hammett was a master at economy of language. Chandler was nearly his opposite, but I never think of his prose as overworked. His sentences are gems.

The Long Goodbye is one of the greatest books ever by anybody IMO. The rest of Chandler I can take or leave. And with Macdonald, I have the Library of America set that compiles 11 of the Archer novels (there were 18) and they're all good to great, but they kinda blend together. He really only had one plot — young people ruined by their parents' perfidy — but some variations on it are better than others.

Agreed on The Long Goodbye. The last Chandler I read was The Lady in the Lake, which was quite good.

Macdonald was really good at capturing the "feel" of Southern California.

My copy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (which I voted for) has this quote from Norman Mailer, which always makes me LOL and actually seems pertinent to the recent discussion on the crime fiction thread:

'What I can't get over is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz."

Other contenders (for me): The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing, No Beast so Fierce by Edward Bunker, A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin, The Glitter Dome by Joseph Wambaugh (another problematic cop-author!), The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, and at least one comic Donald Westlake novel - let's go for Help I'm Being Held Prisoner, today.

My signed copy of LA Confidential has 'blood rage in a poodle's cage' scrawled in it.

Loving all the Block love, and agree that Sacred Ginmill is probably the best Scudder (though the much later Everybody Dies, hits pretty hard too). The Burglar books are charming, especially the first few.

Ian, do you not mess with the classical (mostly English) whodunnit at all?

I read a lot of Agatha Christie when I was young, but these days it's much more in the hardboiled or PI vein. The two big novels for me were Postman & Black Friday, when I was young, they just blew me away, realized I liked reading about criminals more than I liked most traditional mystery novels. BUT I'm up for some suggestions. A friend of mine is big on Josephine Tey.

Tana French is doing amazing work at the moment. She's got a new one coming out in March, I have just learned — a sequel to her last one.

I really really like Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels. His Leonid McGill serious, which I started last year, doesn't really work as well for me.

*series

Devil in a blue dress should prob be on the list tbh

I'll tell you another one that I really dig, is Fast One by Paul Cain. Just a bleak but fun noir going at a supercharged pace, per its title. Really really enjoy the specific descriptions of everybody zipping around Hollywood charted by noting the streets they're taking with great precision. Almost like The Californians or something as written by Raymond Chandler on amphetamines. The fact that it was written in the 1930s is wild, it's just very ahead of its time in a lot of ways.

Voted Derek Raymond, but like the poster above, not sure I could ever face a re-read

had to vote the Demon Dog aka Ellroy
even though i should vote Jim Thompson

Oh yeah, Fast One is great. Much better IMO than his short stories, which are ok but not great. The street-level driving/precision thing is so much fun to me. Westlake does it a lot, and so does Frederick Nebel. Nebel's interesting - he replaced Hammett in Black Mask when Hammett stopped doing continental cop stories. It's specifically the stories about agency PI Donahue & the streets of new york, noting where the elevated track are, keeping adherence to the proper directionality of the streets etc. It's fun.

xpost - I'm at this very moment re-reading Raymond's "He Died With His Eyes Open" but I doubt I'll do the rest of them. This one is by far the least nauseating iirc.

xpost to myself, that should read "continental op"...

i love Thompson, i dunno if there’s another writer who does what he does, it’s like walking in someone else’s shoes while being held at gunpoint.

man i feel bad not voting for him now

but American Tabloid is my favorite Ellroy and still one of my favorite reading experiences

It's always fun playing the guessing game with those Ellroy novels where he features multiple protagonists. Which one is going to die, which one will be corrupted, which one will be the fucked up survivor?

fun factoid: Paul Cain, the author of Fast One, was also Peter Ruric, the screenwriter for the 1934 Karloff/Lugosi vehicle The Black Cat

holy shit

I like Thompson too, obviously. The Getaway is just soooo weird, especially the middle/end sections.
Other favorite Thompsons would be the classics, you know, The Grifters, Pop 1280, Killer Inside Me, Savage Night. Still a bunch of them I haven't read.

I voted for the Crumley. Lots of stuff to check out here. Do you like Chester Himes, ian?

I would be curious to hear your take on Tarantino's opinion on the novel of The Getaway versus the film. He has a whole chapter covering that topic in his book Cinema Speculation. When I recall off the top of my head is he's mostly pro on the film, but not particularly keen on How it ends and Al Lettieri's depiction of Rudy. Good actor/bad version the character was his general thought.

It's kinda crazy how many Thompson novels slide off the rails into surreal nightmare territory at the end — The Getaway is one, and I remember literally gasping at the end of A Hell Of A Woman, though I can't remember now exactly what happens.

I do like Chester Himes! A Rage In Harlem could have made the list. Sallis wrote a biography of Himes that I've wanted to read but never come across a copy.

I have only seen the Getaway once, certainly in an uncritical marijuana haze, so I'd have to revisit it. I remember thinking it was a fine enough ending? Or at least, that trying to film an ending like the one Thompson wrote would have been impossible/difficult. Cinema is something I am woefully under-educated about. Too much time with records and not enough enjoying the (frankly amazing) NYC film scene. But it gets back to one of my favorite bits from "He Died With His Eyes Open" -- a brief digression on how we struggle with wanting to know everything but are constantly struggling against time and our inevitable demise. Good stuff.

A kind of weird and obscure(?) one that could have made the list: The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin Bardin. Hallucinatory and mind-warping tale of leprechauns and gaslighting.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Voted “Sacred Ginmill”. Got the next one in the sequence to read next.

I remember hearing a lot of good things about Hughes’s “The Expendable Man“

The Expendable Man is great. If you don't want to spring for that Library of America 60s box, it's available standalone from NYRB Classics and totally worth it.

Edward Anderson is a somewhat interesting inclusion. Background in journalism, drifted around the Depression as a musician and boxer, wrote two amazing great novels Hungry Men and Thieves Like Us - before drifting back to Texas to become a professional alcoholic. Both of his novels are terrific.

Voted for Ellroy, I consider the American Tabloid trilogy as a masterpiece and the rest of his work.... enh. I would vote repeatedly for Thompson's Pop. 1280

Thieves Like Us, weirdly, I read before I saw either filmed version, and it was another that just blew me away. Like Black Friday, the core of that book IMO is the tension of people being cooped up together on the run. Great fucking stuff imo.

Voted “Sacred Ginmill”. Got the next one in the sequence to read next.

― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, September 18, 2023 12:37 AM (twelve hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I must've given away 5 copies of this book to various friends - I was finding it at thrift stores constantly for a while, when I was thrifting hard. It usually does the trick.

Simenon is a glaring omission my my part. Probably Dirty Snow. Obviously haven't read them all.

Xpost - I only found out about Ginmill from ILX - might have been from you! Wonderful book, I love how the seeming plotlessness (really nothing of the kind) comes together at the end

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Just started “Galveston” - it’s pretty good, I wind up just staying inside all day reading it (the rain is constant this weekend due to a nearby tropical storm).

I MAY wind up