Len Deighton (The Ipcress File) is the other cold war suspense master. This is the first of his Bernard Sampson trilogy, and it's as seedy and treacherous and wry and compelling as Le Carre's George Smiley Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy series. A welcome re-release of a classic trio.
Gary
A veritable intellectual historical thriller concerning the wire-thin survival into modern times of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things - an astonishingly humanist view arrived at centuries before the Enlightenment. It reads like a novel, and reminds us of how tenuous can be the survival of ideas - especially when a power structure like the Roman Church is trying to obliterate them.
Gary
Of our three favorite "Ancient Rome proto-detective" series, Steven Saylor has great historical figure portraits, Lindsay Davis has a bit o' the music hall and Ruth Downie has Tula - the Celt slave of the army doctor/investigator Gaius Ruso. Slave she may (start out to) be, but she causes no end of...complications for our hero. Medicus is the 1st book of the series, all of which are vastly satisfying.
Gary
Oh, the raw and wonderful goodies to be had in this social realist vaudeville! Algren's depression Texas & New Orleans was too harsh when it first appeared, but nowadays on the far side of McCarthy, Crews, Bukowski and any number of other poets of the demi-monde (and the weird South), the book stands as a vernacular classic.
Gary
Poleaxed by Blood Meridian? Outer Dark is from McCarthy's earlier Appalachian cycle (Suttree: the truly shocking Child of God), and there is already the strange integrity of animalistic primitives, prose you can roll around in and a near-mystic, received evil menacing everything. Possibly the closest of his works to approach Meridian.
Gary
An intelligent, exciting dual mystery, alternately unraveling in Belgium and Ireland, in World War 2 and 1976, ultimately meshing together in the denouement. Goddard is a most satisfying analog to Eric Ambler, Le Carre, Joseph Kanon.
Gary
Lizzie Borden? The Boston Strangler? Sid Vicious & Nancy Spungen? A glom of the table of contents reveals just how many actual murders are in the popular consciousness, and Bill James (yes - he of the Baseball Abstract) has been contemplating causes, solutions and meanings for years. Fans of true crime books (or regular mysteries for that matter) will find these articles enlightening, provocative and as grotesquely fascinating as their subjects.
Gary
Judt, the late great author of Postwar, Past Imperfect etc. had been thinking long and deeply about history, Europe, America, and the state and weal of the world when he became ill and could not physically write. He produced this remarkable dialogue/rumination with historian Timothy Snyder via a unique long-form interview format. Thought-provoking and full of intellectual pleasures.
Gary
Brideshead meets Sade, with a touch of Lord Henry Wotton, a bit of a Brit snob Trainspotting and even, within a carapace of disdain, heart. This quartet of short novels starts quietly, like a razor through silk, with 5-year-old Patrick an almost peripheral figure throwing into highlight his helplessly appalling aristo family. Things go deliciously, decadently downhill from there. Superb prose in service of an elegant black comedy bildungsroman.
Gary
Even if you'd assumed that ex-IRA hitman Jerry Fegan had nowhere to go but completely off the rails in Neville's excellent GHOSTS OF BELFAST, he shows up again in this equally superb sequel. And intense as he is, he's a supporting player - to a very intense situation. (By the way - this guy is one of the best crime writers I've ever read.)
Gary
