Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Adam Maxwell

I am assembling the Ultimate Library. I began this project back in January 2021 and the plan is to curate the best collection of books for readers. I only want the Library to feature the “best” reading sections, books that someone loves and would recommend any library visitor should read.

I could not possibly do this alone so I invite guests to join me and ai ask them to nominate which books get added to the Library shelves. I refer to my Library as the Decades Library and that’s because of the two rules I ask my guests to follow when making their selections:

1 – Choose ANY five books

2 – You can only select one book per decade from five consecutive decades

Sounds simple – until you try to make your own selections, finding five books from five consecutive decades does cause some angst apparently.

Now we know why we are here it’s time to pass control over to my guest curator – Adam Maxwell. I’m a huge fan of Adam’s Kilchester novels, good heist stories seem so rare these days but he’s delivering some belters – check out The Dali Deception and you’ll see what I mean.

Over to Adam…

What can you say about Adam Maxwell that he hasn’t already said about himself?

Crime writer – certainly.

Idiot – without doubt.

Genius – unlikely.

Liar – absolutely.

Having written is a variety of genres in the murky past, the days he dedicates himself to writing crime-comedy in his Kilchester series of books. Set in a fictional city in the North of England, Kilchester is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, the denizens of which he’ll have you cheering for by the end of the books…

Described variously as ‘Oceans 11 meets Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels… in book form’, ‘Glorious fun’ ‘If Hunter S Thompson wrote an Ealing comedy’ and ‘Joyous’ (the latter by the owner of this very blog). In Kilchester, Maxwell creates a fast-paced, darkly funny & effortlessly cool series of heist thrillers that you won’t be able to put down.

According to his LinkedIn profile Adam previously worked as a Private Detective and has spent many years hiding from the consequences of his actions in the wilds of Northumberland where he now lives with his wife and daughter.

If you want to find out more about him:

Amazon is a good place to start https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adam-Maxwell/e/B00EUAZN2Q

Or you can check out his website and get yourself a free ebook https://adammaxwell.com/

DECADES

Can I just start by saying aaaargh! Choosing books for Decades was a seemingly simple task that quickly descended into being dangerous overthunk by yours truly. I nearly started in the 1930’s just to ensure I could get Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse. But that meant I would have missed out on too many others so… a balance was struck. And that balance starts in the decade of my birth.

1970s

The Hot Rock – Donald Westlake

Crime and comedy. In the cinema audiences can’t get enough. In the book world… it’s readers who can’t get enough. Since it’s the genre I write in, it felt appropriate to include some of the cream of the crop of humorous crime and The Hot Rock doesn’t disappoint.

After Dortmunder is released from prison with nothing but ten dollars to his name he quickly becomes embroiled in a plan to steal a priceless emerald. The book somehow manages to achieve a perfect balance between hard-boiled and farce and, reader, that is no mean feat. As talented as the crew are, they just can’t seem to keep the damned rock in their dishonest mits without their plans unravelling in front of their eyes.

The book spawned a slew of sequels and was adapted for the big screen by none other than William Goldman in an adaptation that starred Robert Redford.

1980s

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul – Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams is remembered by most as having written the clatteringly marvellous ‘Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy’. This is not that book.

Featuring ‘holistic private detective’ Dirk Gently, this series inadvertently convinced me that not only was it possible to meld comedy and crime fiction but to make it a work of utter genius. The genius part is something I have yet to achieve but… crime and comedy… tick!

The story whirls around Thor (not the Marvel one), a supernatural deal with a green bug-eyed monster with a scythe, a Coca-Cola vending machine and a very, very angry eagle.

To say more would ruin it but if you’ve not dipped your reading toe into Adams’ Dirk Gently series then you really should remedy that. Quickly.

1990s

Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard

No… not the movie based on it with Danny DeVito. Not the TV show either… This is a library and we have no space for such frivolities.

Another hugely influential author for me, Elmore Leonard is the King of Criminals like Agatha Christie is the Queen of Crime. Only American. And more modern. Never mind, that’s a rubbish comparison. What was I talking about?

Yes! Elmore Leonard more often than not makes the criminal the protagonist and has you rooting for the bad guys from the outset. Get Shorty features Chili Palmer, a small-time loan shark from Miami who finds himself in Los Angeles. He soon comes to realise that the movie business is very much like the loan-sharking business and decides he wants a piece of the action.

The result is a laugh-out-loud explosion of petulant stars, terrified producers and drug deals gone bad all told with Leonard’s laconic style.

2000s

The Truth – Terry Pratchett

‘A lie can run around the world quicker than the truth can get its boots on…’

Any writer who puts humour in their books aspires to be as good as Terry Pratchett. And we all fail to be as good as he was. The Truth is the 25^th Discworld novel and a standalone making it all the more accessible.

It charts the Discworld’s first newspaper’s rise and fall and lights a fire in your belly about the importance of a free press while mixing it up with threats to life, a recovering vampire’s suicidal fascination for flash photography and a man who keeps begging the editor to publish pictures of his humorously-shaped potatoes.

One of the hardest things about choosing books for Decades is balancing which book from which decade but with Pratchett’s writing spanning four decades it was more ‘which Pratchett decade am I in love with currently?’

2010s

The Sacred Art of Stealing – Chris Brookmyre

I’ve talked about funny/crime books quite a bit so far but frankly, the biggest crime here is that no-one has chosen one of Chris Brookmyre’s books in any Decades selection so far. It is my utter pleasure to remedy that.

The Sacred Art of Stealing feels in the tradition of Elmore Leonard’s Out Of Sight as it features a burgeoning romance between a thief and a police officer. Brookmyre’s take on the situation is all his own and the black humour that courses through the novel’s veins balances perfectly with the violence while nodding to more literary fare along the way.

Since writing this I’ve discovered that The Sacred Art of Stealing was actually published in 2003… it was the audiobook that appeared in 2013 but such is my belief that it should be included in the Decades library that I will personally kill anyone who disagrees with my inclusion of this phenomenal tome*

*Killing will likely be in print rather than in person. Apologies to the suicidal, deranged and/or violent readers out there.

Pratchett and Douglas Adams in a single week with the added joy of Elmore Leonard and Chris Brookmyre – what a cracking mix! Huge thanks to Adam for making time to pick his five Decades selections.

DECADES WILL RETURN

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March 12

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Chris Lloyd

Decades is into its third month and my Library is growing. Library? What Library?

Late last year I pondered the dilemma a librarian may face if they were asked to create a new library. They have absolutely no books, none, a blank slate. Where would you start? From here my challenge began – compile the Ulimate Library, invite guests to join me in selecting the books they feel should be added to the shelves. But we must have rules to govern this venture or we risk anarchy.

Rule 1 – Guests can pick any five books.

Rule 2 – Only one book per decade for any five consecutive decades.

That’s it. Easy! Or seemingly not as when my guests try to make their five choices I am told there can be cussing and indecision.

Today I am thrilled to be joined by Chris Lloyd. When I compiled my favourite Audiobooks of 2020 there was never a doubt in my mind that The Unwanted Dead, published by Orion, would feature. Chris tells me that the paperback of The Unwanted Dead is out on March 18th so I could think of no better guest to invite to participate in my Decades challenge this week. Before I get Chris to introduce himself I would urge you to seek out The Unwanted Dead this week and when you have finished and enjoyed that one here are some of his other books to get your teeth into: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chris-Lloyd/e/B01GQH7Q5C?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1615537791&sr=8-1

Decades

My name’s Chris Lloyd and I have a tendency to go around in circles. I grew up in South Wales, where my parents moved from their native mid-Wales after more than a decade of living abroad, so when it came to my turn, I went and lived in Catalonia for twenty-four years. I lived in Girona and then Barcelona, where I taught English, worked in educational publishing, wrote guide books, almost appeared on TV three times and translated. Interspersed with this, I also lived in Bilbao and Madrid, and I spent six months as a student in Grenoble researching the French Resistance, even though I kept coming back to Catalonia. I told you I went around in circles. As yet more proof of that, I moved back to Wales a few years ago, where I live near enough to the Brecon Beacons to feel the cold, but not so close as to enjoy the scenery. But never mind that as I’m about to move with my wife to my childhood home by the sea, which we’ve been trying to do for years.

I spend part of my day translating academic texts from Catalan and Spanish and another more fun part of the day writing crime fiction. I wrote a trilogy for Canelo set in Girona, featuring Elisenda Domènech, a detective with the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police force, which is about to come out in audiobook.

The result of my lifelong fascination with resistance and collaboration in Occupied France, I now write the Eddie Giral series, set in Paris in World War Two and featuring a Paris police detective forced to come to terms with the Nazi Occupation of the city. Seeking to negotiate a path between the occupier and the occupied, Eddie struggles to retain some semblance of humanity while walking a fine line between resistance and collaboration. The first book in the series, The Unwanted Dead, published by Orion, comes out in paperback on 18 March.

You can come and say hello on Twitter at https://twitter.com/chrislloydbcn or take a look at my website at https://chrislloydauthor.com/

I want to thank Gordon for inviting me to contribute to this brilliant idea, and also for setting me the completely impossible task of finding my favourite book from each decade over five decades – I felt actual pain every time I had to eliminate a book I loved from the list to arrive at the five below. I’ve gone for the 1950s to the 1990s, and even that decision was tough. I hope you like some of my choices.

1950s – The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey This is the perfect crime book, the Lord Reith of crime writing – it informs, educates and entertains. A story of a police detective confined to a hospital bed who decides to investigate the murder of the princes in the tower, it’s a textbook showcase of the limitless possibilities that crime fiction can offer. It not only contributed to the historical debate about the role of villain that history had assigned to Richard III, it’s also a powerful insight into character and, quite simply, a bloody good detective story

1960s – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré

The lesson this book taught us is that heroes can be amoral, unpalatable people, and you don’t have to root for them any the less because of it. Le Carré changed the rules with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and I firmly believe we as readers and writers have been benefiting from it ever since. He made it all right for main characters to be fundamentally flawed and unlikeable – even ordinary – and for the supposed good that they are striving for to be

achieved using methods that are no less morally reprehensible than the supposed evil they are fighting against. It was a sea change in depth and understanding of character and of heroes and villains.

1970s – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

From the very first line with its “unfashionable” end of the galaxy to Marvin the Paranoid Android with a brain the size of a small planet, The Hitchhiker’s Guide taught me that it was perfectly all right for a book to be both very intelligent and delightfully silly. In fact, the silliness is born out of the intelligence and really isn’t that silly anyway when you look close enough. Quite apart from that, it’s also a hymn to playfulness not just with story, but with language. Read this book and your view of the universe will be altered forever – in a good way.

1980s – The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

There are few books that can compare with The Name of the Rose when it comes to creating an unsettling atmosphere. The harshness of the setting and the description of the weather outside the confines of the monastery conjure up a sense of brooding malevolence that is both exacerbated and symbolised by one of the most bizarre casts of characters in any book. Also, I started reading it alone at night in a Spanish castle, which might not have been the best idea, but it certainly helped set the mood.

1990s – Fatherland – Robert Harris

I’m beginning and ending these decades by closing the circle with a celebration of just how far you can go with crime fiction. My favourite ‘What if…’ story, Fatherland takes place in a 1960s Berlin in a world where the Nazis won. A police detective is investigating a case that leads him to suspect a far greater crime, one that we all know with the hindsight of history but that he doesn’t. And that’s the power and brilliance of the book – to be able to take one of the most evil moments in history and reveal it once again with renewed horror as it becomes apparent to the protagonist.

My most sincere thanks to Chris for his excellent selections and for taking time to join my Decades challenge. The Unquiet Dead is released in paperback on 18th March – 1940, a Paris cop investigating murders while his city is taken under Nazi control…I don’t do it justice when I say I found it a brilliant read.

If you want to catch up on which books have already been added to my Library then you can visit it here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

Decades Will Return

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February 11

James Goss – Douglas Adams: City of Death

HOW DOUGLAS ADAMS WROTE THE MOST POPULAR DOCTOR WHO STORY IN A WEEKEND. (and other things to shame all other writers)

If you’re not a Doctor Who fan, the chances are you’ll have met one at a party. They’ll have backed you into a corner, saying “No, but seriously, have you seen City Of Death? It’s really, really good. I mean, it’s by Douglas Adams and it’s set in Paris and it has Tom Baker in it and…”

At that point you’ll either be excusing yourself to lunge at the guacamole, or you’ll be hooked. And City Of Death is well worth your time. True Doctor Who fans (especially the ones blocking your path to the ham and pineapple pizza) will perhaps opine that it’s not the best Doctor Who story ever, but it’s certainly the most popular. On its original broadcast it got the show’s highest audiences ever – thanks in part to ITV being on strike, but we prefer to ignore that and concentrate on how brilliant it is.

City Of Death is a breezy story about time travel, art theft and a villainous Parisian Countess. It’s also terribly, terribly annoying – because Douglas Adams wrote it in a weekend. You look at the hundreds of other Doctor Who stories out there – some dogged by the elaborate excuses of late authors, some rewritten on the studio floor, and some painstakingly developed over the course of years – and then there’s City Of Death. When the original script fell through, Adams was grabbed by the show’s producer and stuck behind a typewriter until it was done.

Could such a thing be done now? 1979 was such a primitive time for the internet that it had never even got cross about Katie Hopkins (imagine that). Without the distraction of emails, texts, and wikipediaing Paris’s geography, Adams was forced to rely on his wits and a lot of coffee. And he got through it, and produced something brilliant – a story that’s genuinely funny, and a fiendishly complicated time travel plot that just works.

That’s the real legacy of City Of Death – one that haunts the rest of us. Anyone who’s ever used the “#amwriting” hashtag; Anyone who’s ever handed in a first draft and said “It’s rough but we’ll get it right in a few goes”. Douglas Adams wrote City Of Death in a weekend, and they pretty much started filming that first draft on Monday. It’s a fact which haunts everyone.

In fact, next time a writer friend of yours Facebooks to say “Managed 2,000 words today and nearly reached the summit! #Phew #SmashedIt”, why not just reply “Douglas Adams wrote City Of Death in a weekend”? I’m sure they’ll thank you.

City Of Death – Douglas Adams & James Goss – BBC Books

The Doctor takes Romana for a holiday in Paris – a city which, like a fine wine, has a bouquet all its own. Especially if you visit during one of the vintage years. But the TARDIS takes them to 1979, a table-wine year, a year whose vintage is soured by cracks – not in their wine glasses but in the very fabric of time itself.

Soon the Time Lords are embroiled in an audacious alien scheme which encompasses home-made time machines, the theft of the Mona Lisa, the resurrection of the much-feared Jagaroth race, and the beginning (and quite possibly the end) of all life on Earth.

Aided by British private detective Duggan, whose speciality is thumping people, the Doctor and Romana must thwart the machinations of the suave, mysterious Count Scarlioni – all twelve of him – if the human race has any chance of survival.

But then, the Doctor’s holidays tend to turn out a bit like this.

City of Death is published by BBC Books and is available in paperback and digital format. You can order a copy here.

James Goss is the author of two Doctor who novels: The Blood Cell and Dead of Winter, as well as Summer Falls (on behalf of Any Pond). He is also the co-author, with Steve Tribe of The Doctor: His Lives and Times, The Dalek Handbook and Doctor Who; A History of the Universe in 100 Objects. While at the BBC James produced an adaptation of Shada, an unfinished Douglas Adams Doctor Who story, and Dirk is his award-winning stage adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. His Doctor Who audiobook Dead Air won Best Audiobook 2010 and his books Dead of Winter and First Born were nominated for the 2012 British Fantasy Society Awards. His new book, Haterz, is out now.

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