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Pretty Boy Floyd

Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Live by Night

Dennis Lehane · 416 pages

Joe Coughlin is nineteen when he meets Emma Gould. A smalltime thief in 1920s Boston, his task is to tie her up while his accomplices loot the bank she works in. But Joe falls in love with Emma - and his life changes forever. That meeting is the beginning of Joe's journey to becoming one of the most feared and respected gangsters. It is a journey beset by violence, double-crossing, drama and pain.

Roaring TwentiesAnti-HeroCrimeHistorical Fiction
❤️

Complete Novels: Red Harvest / The Dain Curse / The Maltese Falcon / The Glass Key / The Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett · 967 pages

"In a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the modern American crime novel."--BOOK JACKET. "The five novels that Hammett published between 1929 and 1934, collected here in one volume, have become part of modern American culture, creating archetypal characters and establishing the ground rules for a whole tradition of hardboiled writing."--BOOK JACKET. "Each novel

Roaring TwentiesAnti-HeroCrimeProhibition Era
❤️

Native Son

Richard Wright · 398 pages

Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. ---------- Also contained in: [Early Works](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL506449W)

Anti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeFall From Grace
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No Beast So Fierce

Edward Bunker · 301 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistAnti-HeroCrimeViolent
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Black Hats: A Novel of Wyatt Earp and Al Capone

Patrick Culhane, Max Allan Collins · 304 pages

April 1920. The Prohibition era has just begun, and the Wild West is a fading memory. Legendary lawman Wyatt Earp is spending his golden years in Los Angeles as a private detective—and sometime consultant on cowboy movies. Bored and restless, he jumps at the chance to go east to help the son of his late friend Doc Holliday. The young man's mother fears her gambler son will lose everything, includi

Roaring TwentiesCrimeHistorical FictionViolent
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To Have and Have Not

Ernest Hemingway · 262 pages

This 1936 novel tells the story of an American fishing boat skipper who dabbles in a little smuggling to make ends meet. In need of money for his family the captain reluctantly becomes agrees to smuggle a group of Chinese immigrants from Cuba to Florida. This is Hemingway’s only novel to be set in the United States.

Anti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistProhibition EraCrime
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King of Ashes

S.A. Cosby · 352 pages

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortali

Anti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeFall From Grace
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The Black Dahlia

James Ellroy · 364 pages

The Black Dahlia is a roman noir on an epic scale: a classic period piece that provides a startling conclusion to America's most infamous unsolved murder mystery--the murder of the beautiful young woman known as The Black Dahlia.

Anti-HeroCrimeHistorical FictionFall From Grace
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Animal

K'wan · 416 pages

Tayshawn is one of the children the world throws away. The neighborhood kids give him the nickname "Animal." When his older brother, the only person in his life who shows him kindness, is taken away, Tayshawn will have to adapt to survive in the jungle.

Anti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeViolent
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Legs

William Kennedy · 317 pages

Anti-HeroCrimeHistorical FictionProhibition Era
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Oh, Play That Thing

Roddy Doyle · 377 pages

"Henry Smart is on the run. Fleeing from his Irish Republican paymasters, the men for whom he committed murder and mayhem, he has left behind his wife, Miss O'Shea, in a Dublin jail, and his infant daughter. When he lands in America, it's 1924, and New York is the center of the universe. Henry, ever resourceful, a pearl gray fedora parked on his head, has a sandwich board and a hidden stash of hoo

Roaring TwentiesProhibition EraCrimeHistorical Fiction
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Flood

Andrew Vachss · 341 pages

Anti-HeroCrimeWorking-Class ProtagonistViolent
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The Godfather

Mario Puzo · 447 pages

The Godfather is a crime novel by American author Mario Puzo. Originally published in 1969 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, the novel details the story of a fictional Mafia family in New York City (and Long Beach, New York), headed by Vito Corleone. Puzo's dedication for The Godfather is "For Anthony Cleri". The novel's epigraph is by the French author Honoré de Balzac: "Behind every great fortune there is

Anti-HeroCrimeFall From GraceMale Lead
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Pulp

Charles Bukowski · 192 pages

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on M

Working-Class ProtagonistAnti-HeroCrimeMale Lead
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True History of the Kelly Gang

Peter Carey · 372 pages

"True History of Kelly Gang is the song of Australia, and it sings its protest in a voice at once crude and delicate, menacing and heart-wrenching. Carey gives us Ned Kelly as orphan, as Oedipus, as horse thief, farmer, bushranger, reformer, bank-robber, police-killer and, finally, as his country's beloved Robin Hood.". "In 1878 Francis Harty, a poor farmer, said, 'Ned Kelly is the best bloody ma

Anti-HeroCrimeHistorical FictionViolent
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Richard Stark's Parker: Slayground

Darwyn Cooke · 96 pages

Parker is put to the test against crooked cops and sleazy gangsters after a heist goes south. He finds himself trapped in an amusement park closed for the winter and embroiled in a deadly game of cat and mouse...a game that slowly starts to favor the mouse.

Anti-HeroCrimeViolentHeist
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Ghostman

Roger Hobbs · 397 pages

Stunningly dark, hugely intelligent and thoroughly addictive, Ghostman announces the arrival of an exciting and highly distinctive novelist. When a casino robbery in Atlantic City goes horribly awry, the man who orchestrated it is obliged to call in a favor from someone who’s occasionally called Jack. While it’s doubtful that anyone knows his actual name or anything at all about his true identi

Anti-HeroCrimeViolentMale Lead
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Sutton

J.R. Moehringer · 380 pages

"Born in the squalid Irish slums of Brooklyn, in the first year of the twentieth century, Willie Sutton came of age at a time when banks were out of control. If they weren't taking brazen risks, causing millions to lose their jobs and homes, they were shamelessly seeking bailouts. Trapped in a cycle of bank panics, depressions and soaring unemployment, Sutton saw only one way out, only one way to

Anti-HeroCrimeHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Dead Man's Blues

Ray Celestin · 490 pages

Chicago, 1928. In the stifling summer heat three disturbing events take place. A clique of city leaders is poisoned in a fancy hotel. A white gangster is found mutilated in an alleyway in the Blackbelt. And a famous heiress vanishes without a trace. Pinkerton detectives Michael Talbot and Ida Davis are hired to find the missing heiress by the girl's troubled mother. But it proves harder than expec

Roaring TwentiesCrimeHistorical FictionProhibition Era
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Babylon Berlin

Volker Kutscher · 518 pages

Berlin, 1929. Detective Inspector Rath, was a successful career officer in the Cologne Homicide Division before a shooting incident in which he inadvertently killed a man. He has been transferred to the Vice Squad in Berlin, a job he detests, even though he finds a new friend in his boss, Chief Inspector Wolter. There is seething unrest in the city and the Commissioner of Police has ordered the Vi

Roaring TwentiesCrimeHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Devil in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley · 219 pages

In a Los Angeles bar, "Easy" Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job, wonders how he'll pay his mortgage. DeWitt Albright, a quietly vicious white man, walks in and offers Easy good money if he'll find Daphne Monet.

Working-Class ProtagonistCrimeViolentHistorical Fiction
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The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga · 304 pages

Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along.

Anti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeMale Lead
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Slayground

Richard Stark · 183 pages

A dark and memorable account of Parker trapped in a fenced-in amusement park that has closed for the winter.

Anti-HeroCrimeViolentHeist
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Whoreson

Donald Goines · 319 pages

Whoreson Jones, the novel's hero, is the son of a beautiful black prostitute and an unknown white john. By the age of sixteen, he is a full-fledged pimp, cold-blooded and ruthless.

Anti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistCrimeMale Lead

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