Looking for new author recommendation

[Onomea]

Walter Mosley's Easy Rollins series. Black unofficial private detective war vet in late forties, early fifties LA. Very atmospheric.

One of these was made into a movie with Denzel Washington, "Devil in a Blue Dress." Quite good.

Mosley has some other series, too, which are good.

 

[Marshwheeling]

Another vote for James Lee Burke. I met him once at a bookstore appearance in Saint Paul. Lady I was with asked him to marry her, to his great discomfiture. I used to have long discussions with the same lady and a buddy over who was the best sidekick, Burke's Clete Purcell or Crais' Joe Pike.
Ellroy is another fantastic writer. His short story "Dick Contino's Blues" is a wonderful portrait of LA hipster nightlife in the fifties. I assume it is fiction, although accordion player Dick Contino is (was) a real person. If "accordion player" conjures up images of Myron Floren for you, do some image searches on Dick Contino. Not NSFW or anything, but definitely not suited to Lawrence Welk.
I am glad Watchdog mentioned Raymond Chandler, a true old master of the genre.
"The car moved off with a sound like money folding."
"I was shaved, showered and sober, and I didn't care who knew it."

Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald were a couple more good ones from that period, along with James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, the legendary pulp writer.

 

[swsig]

Ivan Musicant has written two superb books that I can recommend. Divided Waters is a very thorough naval history of the Civil War. Battleship at War is a very readable history of the USS Washington during World War 2. The Washington is famous for its single-handed demolition of the Japanese battleship Kirishima in less than 10 minutes.

 

[Golddollar]

The Perry Mason series by Erle Stanley Gardner.

 

[Grayfox]

James Rollins : Sigma Force series.
Scientists with guns!

 

[Coot47]

Author Philip Kerr - Start with the 'Berlin Noir Trilogy'. An interesting twist on the old detective genre ala Sam Spade.

 

[rkittine]

I also do the Alex Cross Series from James Patterson, which seems to be the only series he currently actually authors. His Women's Murder Club, now with 20 volumes is also good. Maxien someone is the Co-Author.

I like David Morrell too and the original Rambo Series is better than the movies and his other books are better than Rambo.

Got sick of Clive Clussler except for his 1900s series and I love Caleb Carr. The Alienist etc.

John Rain series is also good. Forget the author's name at the moment.

I haven't seen anything new from Jack Higgins lately, but have read all of his books as well as all of Ken Follett's.

Those pictures do not cover what is on my Kindle either.

Just had cataract surgery completed in my left eye, right eye was done in November, so it is nicer to read again.

Bob

 

[mtgianni]

Another vote for James Lee Burke. I met him once at a bookstore appearance in Saint Paul. Lady I was with asked him to marry her, to his great discomfiture. I used to have long discussions with the same lady and a buddy over who was the best sidekick, Burke's Clete Purcell or Crais' Joe Pike.
Ellroy is another fantastic writer. His short story "Dick Contino's Blues" is a wonderful portrait of LA hipster nightlife in the fifties. I assume it is fiction, although accordion player Dick Contino is (was) a real person. If "accordion player" conjures up images of Myron Floren for you, do some image searches on Dick Contino. Not NSFW or anything, but definitely not suited to Lawrence Welk.
I am glad Watchdog mentioned Raymond Chandler, a true old master of the genre.
"The car moved off with a sound like money folding."
"I was shaved, showered and sober, and I didn't care who knew it."

Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald were a couple more good ones from that period, along with James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, the legendary pulp writer.

A friends wife worked at a church that James Lee Burke attended. He gave/gives a lot to charity with the only speculation that it be used on local needs. Good writer, though like most I prefer his early works. His daughter Allyson is a writer also though writing from a womens point of view, I tend miss a lot of her points.

 

[Marshwheeling]

Has anybody mentioned Cormac McCarthy? ("You have seen the movies, now read the books!")

Some have compared him to Faulkner, while others accuse him of overwriting. You decide:

"They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."
- from "All the Pretty Horses".

His most difficult, but also his best, is "Blood Meridian", but I wouldn't start there.

 

[johnt671]

James Lee Burke

 

[Onomea]

I like James Lee Burke, too, but.... at times I feel he kinda over does the southern gothic gothic part.

Say, you know who is terrific? Larry Brown. A Mississippi firefighter who struggled for years to be a novelist, and finally succeeded. Big time. He died young in 2004, unfortunately. Early fifties. An exemplar of the "grit lit" genre.

I liked all his stuff. Gave his autobiography, "On Fire," to my fireman brother. Maybe I'll give him a reread as it's been a while.

Here's about him: Larry Brown (author - Wikipedia)

 

[Texas Star]

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI9QWOhlsVI[/ame]

An interview with Wilbur Smith from his home near Cape Town. This is NOT the same interview as in my separate thread about Smith.

I suppose that some enthusiasts might say that if you haven't read Smith, you haven't really read good adventure fiction.

He's that good.

In this video, watch for the picture of him meeting Queen Elizabeth and the letter from John Major, then Prime Minister of the UK, as well as some of his writing awards.

 

[WR Moore]

Bruce Alexander had a series set in the middle/late 1700s starting with Blind Justice. Good reads.

Used to like WEB Griffin, but he was selling authenticity and then I started catching all the mistakes. The more recent works pretty much require you to send disbelief out for a long walk. Did used to do very good characters though.

 

[ACP230]

The late Ivan Doig did a couple of series about the mountain west, farming, forest fire fighting and dam building.
One is "Dancing At The Rascal Fair." I re-read it this fall.

And one book about a couple of men indentured to the Russians in Alaska
escaping by sea. Called "The Sea Runners" it was based on a
real escape from a Russian colony.

 

[Onomea]

Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series is quite good, about a hard drinking, anachronistic, recalcitrant cop in Edinburgh. It's a best selling series.

 

[hoosierone]

Anything by William Manchester.

 

[mtgianni]

Ivan Doigs trio about a Montana family is "Dancing at the Rascal Fair, English Creek and Ride with me, Mariah Montana". I like all his works but English Creek is one of my all-time favorites.
Earl W Emerson is another good writer. A Seattle Fire-Captain, now retired, he writes about fire and a fictional detective, [two separate genres]. His Mac Fontana series is outstanding as are the stand alone books about firemen.

 

[Watchdog]

I'll add one more recommendation. If you read these, you'll have to devote some serious time to it. And maybe read them more than once to really get it. And you gotta read them in order for it all to make sense.

These novels are often referred to as James Ellroy's "American Crime Trilogy" because it consists of three books...American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover.

I won't give away plots, but briefly:

American Tabloid details the forces behind the election of JFK and the plot that was conceived to assassinate him. The plot is remarkably believable and a lot of the characters in the book are real...JFK, Lee Oswald, Guy Bannister, Jimmy Hoffa, Bobby Kennedy, and on and on. Details of the Bay of Pigs sound as if they could have been lifted from government files.

The Cold Six Thousand gets into the post-JFK years and on into Vietnam and the CIA's role in drug smuggling. Again, lots of the characters are real people...Jack Ruby, J. D. Tippit, Allan Dulles, LBJ, etc., etc. This book picks up immediately after JFK's murder and the cover up surrounding it. J. Edgar Hoover is featured heavily in this book, and the book's portrayal of him is actually backed up in real life by historical documents and personal recollections of the man. It is not a flattering picture of him.

Blood's a Rover (in a nutshell) follows J. Edgar Hoover's mental unraveling and branches off into the anti-communist/anti-labor movements. I admit this was the hardest of the books for me to follow for some reason, so I can't really give a good synopsis of it. Might be because the Cold War and its events doesn't interest me all that much, I don't know. I can quote parts of the first two novels verbatim, but I can't do that with Blood's a Rover.

A warning here. If lots of profanity, extreme and graphic violence (think of Pacino's Scarface on speed and coke), strange sex, and reprehensible characters are a turn off for you, then disregard this recommendation. Really, just forget it.

These books are so strongly written, they make what we normally think of as hardboiled noir fiction (Chandler and Hammett for example) look like soft scrambled eggs.

 

[URIT]

I tend to favor action novels in series. Today, I'm reading a William Kent Krueger Cork O'Connor series novel and I've enjoy the 11 previous books in this series.

Thomas Perry's Jane Whitefield books are hard to put down. C.J.Box's Joe Pickett books, Lee Child's Jack Reacher, Ace Atkins' Quinn Colson, and Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp are all series worth reading. Even the Richard Marcinko series is enjoyable.

 

[Chino74]

Wilbur Smith for sure. I'd recommend starting with 'Shout at the Devil' then 'Dark of the Sun'. Both BTW made into films.

Also a strong recommendation for John D. MacDonald., amazing writer, his Travis McGee series & his early Americana Crime novels R Top Drawer.