Nightmare Alley
10 best books like Nightmare Alley (William Lindsay Gresham): The Day of the Owl, Equal Danger, Miami Blues, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Butcher's Crossing, Warlock, In a Lonely Place, The Big Clock, Fatale, Cockfighter
A man is shot dead as he runs to catch the bus in the piazza of a small Sicilian town. Captain Bellodi, the detective on the case, is new to his job and determined to prove himself. Bellodi suspects the Mafia, and his suspicions grow when he finds himself up against an apparently unbreachable wall of silence....
| Author | Leonardo Sciascia |
| ISBN | 1590170628 |
District Attorney Varga is shot dead. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Are these random murders, or part of a conspiracy? Inspector Rogas thinks he might know, but as soon as he makes progress he is transferred and encouraged to pin the crimes on the Left. And yet how committed are the cynical,...
| Author | Charles Willeford |
| ISBN | 1400032466 |
After a brutal day investigating a quadruple homicide, Detective Hoke Moseley settles into his room at the un-illustrious El Dorado Hotel and nurses a glass of brandy. With his guard down, he doesn’t think twice when he hears a knock on the door. The next day, he finds himself in the hospital, badly...
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? contains one of the bleakest lines in all of literature. It’s where Gloria, who dances in the marathon dance, asks without a trace of irony or black humor, ”Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying...
| Author | John Williams |
| ISBN | 1590171985 |
In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.
It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up...
| Author | Oakley Hall |
| ISBN | 1590171616 |
Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and...
| Author | Dorothy B. Hughes |
| ISBN | 1558614559 |
Postwar Los Angeles is a lonely place where the American Dream is showing its seamy underside—and a stranger is preying on young women. The suggestively named Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder about the opposite sex, is the LAPD's top suspect. Dix knows enough to watch his step, especially...
| Author | Kenneth Fearing |
| ISBN | 1590171810 |
George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate that bears a striking resemblance to Time, Inc. in the heyday of Henry Luce. One day, before heading home to his wife in the suburbs, Stroud has a drink with Pauline, the beautiful girlfriend...
| Author | Jean-Patrick Manchette |
| ISBN | 1590173813 |
An NYRB Classics Original
Whether you call her a coldhearted grifter or the soul of modern capitalism, there’s no question that Aimée is a killer and a more than professional one. Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous)...
| Author | Charles Willeford |
| ISBN | 1596542225 |
The sport is cockfighting and Frank Mansfield is the cockfighter - a silent and fiercely contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost everything. In this haunting, ribald, and percussively violent work, the author of Hoke Moseley detective novels yields a floodlit vision of the...
| Author | Dorothy B. Hughes |
| ISBN | 1903155584 |
The critic HRF Keating chose The Expendable Man as one of his Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books. ‘A late addition to the thirteen crime stories Dorothy B Hughes wrote with great success in one prolific spell between 1940 and 1952,’ it was, in his view, her best book. But it is far more than a crime...
| Author | Edward Anderson |
| ISBN | 1853753114 |
"One of the great forgotten novels of the 30s."
- Raymond Chandler
Somewhere between the hardboiled talk of Dashiell Hammett and the dustbowl poetry of John Steinbeck lies the doomed romanticism of Edward Anderson's 'Thieves Like Us'. When three small-time country gangsters break...
| Author | Elliott Chaze |
| ISBN | 1596542136 |
Chaze's long-lost noir classic, a legend among noir buffs, is back in print for the first time in nearly half a century. The one book Black Lizard never published, it's the dream-like tale of a man after a jailbreak, who meets up with the woman of his dreams... and his nightmares. Phenomenal work of the...
| Author | Nathalie Léger |
| ISBN | 0993009301 |
First published in France in 2012 to critical and popular acclaim, this is the first book about the remarkable American actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden. Loden’s 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinema vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt...
| Author | Jim Thompson |
| ISBN | 0316403784 |
Nick Corey is a terrible sheriff on purpose. He doesn't solve problems, enforce rules or arrest criminals. He knows that nobody in tiny Potts County actually wants to follow the law and he is perfectly content lazing about, eating five meals a day, and sleeping with all the eligible women.
Still,...
