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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August 28

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Jay Stringer

My guest this week once offered a Star Wars book to anyone at Noir at the Bar that would wail like a Wookie. To this day I still have that book. He is also the first guest to tell me they wanted to select five comic books for their Decades choices – I may need to invite him back just so I can see which books he would have selected.

Don’t mourn the loss of Jay’s comic book picks as he has selected five quality novels which I am delighted to add to my Decades Library.

For those not familiar with #Decades a quick recap. Each week I invite a guest to join me and select five unmissable or essential reads which they would want to see included in my Ultimate Library. When this project started back in January I had no books and a mountain to climb, week on week my guests have selected five books and my library is filling up. You can see all the previous selections (and buy any which catch your eye) here at Bookshop.org: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/GrabThisBookDecades

Choosing five books may be challenging but I add a second rule which my guests need to follow. They can only select one book per decade over five consecutive decades – so they have any fifty year publication span to select from.

This week I am delighted to welcome Jay Stringer to Grab This Book. As Jay is Glasgow based he is one of the few guests I have actually met and I was thrilled he was able to make time to take on the Decades challenge. Jay’s latest book Don’t Tell a Soul is my current read and it’s flipping brilliant, putting it down to prep this post was a wrench.

So I pass you over to Jay but before I do – here is how you get Don’t Tell a Soul: https://www.waterstones.com/book/dont-tell-a-soul/jay-stringer/9781916892309

Jay Stringer was born in 1980, and he’s not dead yet. His crime fiction has been nominated for both Anthony and Derringer awards, and shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize. His stand-up comedy has been laughed at by at least three people. He was born and raised in the Black Country, but has since adopted Glasgow as his hometown.

Jay’s newest book Don’t Tell a Soul was released on July 26^th.

Also, Jay’s birthday was July 26^th. You know what to do.

DECADES

One book from each decade? That’s a crazy rule. I hate rules. So the only way I’m going to get through this is imposing a few more on myself.

I can’t just pick an Elmore Leonard book for each decade (because, seriously, I could.)
No comic books. (Because once I open that door, I pick nothing but comic books.)

Okay. On with the list.

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

This decade was hard. So many great books. So many great Elmore Leonard books. But Douglas Adams was one of my gateway drugs to reading novels, as a struggling dyslexic teen, and it still holds up today. Funny. Satirical. Basically accurate and mostly harmless. One of the funniest books ever written.

1980’s. The Demon Headmaster – Gillian Cross

I was a child during the 80’s, and I can’t remove myself from that. This pick is all about memories. Again, as a dyslexic I didn’t read much prose early on. Choose Your Own Adventure books were pretty much my speed, and the rest was comic books. (The 80’s was a great decade for comics.) But I read the hell out of The Demon Headmaster. And had it read to me just as much.

1990’s. Stone Junction – Jim Dodge

Now then. We. Are. Talking. I love this book. I’d get an all-over body tattoo of this book if I could. What’s it about? No idea. There’s magic, gambling, revenge, and a big diamond. It’s sort of like what Harry Potter would be if he was a cool kid who drank a lot and wanted to be in a punk band. And it’s funny, moving, and occasionally deep. Jim Dodge’s writing is all about the journey, not so much about the destination. But it’s a great journey.

2000’s. Pagan Babies – Elmore Leonard

This isn’t Elmore’s best book. But it might be the one that stayed with me the longest after I read it. The key to understanding Leonard is that he was always writing about self-awareness. About characters becoming better or worse at being who they really are. And he often also explored the huge grey area between right/wrong and legal/illegal. Pagan Babies feels like the ultimate distillation of these themes into something simple and primal. And, placed where it is in his career, it feels like the summation of his themes, before he became a little more self-indulgent in his last few books.

2010’s. Recursion – Blake Crouch

It’s not often a book blows me away. I don’t just mean I enjoyed it. I enjoy a lot of books. But this one simply blew me away. It might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. Though to talk too much about it is to ruin the fun. It’s a sci-fi story at heart. But it also feels like it’s about fake news, and the way we’re all living in different realities right now. It’s about the way I can remember using the King Kong statue in Birmingham as a meeting point with friends, even though it left Birmingham four years before I was born. It’s a brilliant book. Go buy it.

Thanks again to Jay for these brilliant selections. If you want to know his comic book selections then tweet him @JayStringer and ask him to tell you what he would have picked! If you do happen to follow him over on Twitter it also helps to know Jay is a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan and this can result in some cryptic sounding tweets landing on your timeline most weekends.

DECADES WILL RETURN

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June 4

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Nick Quantrill

If you wanted to assemble a library of the very best books which have been published and you knew you would never be able to complete this mammoth task alone then you would get in touch with booklovers and ask them to help. Well you would do that if you were me because that’s what I have done.

In January I began to assemble the Decades Library. I invite a guest to join me and ask them to nominate five books which they think should be added to my Ultimate Library. I set just two rules which govern the choice of books (sometimes my guests follow the rules)

Rule 1: Choose ANY five books
Rule 2: You can only choose one book per decade over five consecutive decades

This week I am delighted to be joined by Nick Quantrill. I am hugely grateful to Nick for finding time to consider which books should be added to my Library and I was itching to see which books he selected. Nick always lights up my Twitter feed with a combination of his contributions to some amazing interview panels and also his Hull City football tweets – both brighten my days considerably.

Decades

Nick Quantrill was born and raised in Hull, an isolated industrial city in East Yorkshire. His Private Investigator novels featuring Joe Geraghty are published by Fahrenheit Press with the latest being ‘Sound of the Sinners’. Nick is also the co-founder of the Hull Noir crime writing festival.

Nick is on Twitter: @NickQuantrill and online at https://www.nickquantrill.co.uk/

1970s – “Jack’s Return Home” by Ted Lewis

Maybe an obvious choice for a co-founder of Hull Noir, but I can’t ignore the credentials of one of our own. On one level, it’s a timeless tale of revenge told through the eyes of anti-hero, Jack Carter, as he leaves London and heads north to the Humber region to avenge the death of his brother. Of course, we know the tale well due to the film it created, ‘Get Carter’, but read the book and you get a sense of Lewis’s power as a writer. Much like William McIlvanney, Lewis was pioneering something new, something that would stand the test of time. It’s a powerful fusing of the hardboiled American style of crime writing with the social realities of northern England as it started a new decade. Lewis would go on to write a better novel in the form of “GBH”, but this one is undoubtedly a building block of modern British crime writing.

1980s – “Freaky Deaky” by Elmore Leonard

No library of crime writing is complete without some representation for Elmore Leonard, and although Dutch enjoyed a career spanning almost sixty years, the 1980s capture him at his peak. A high standard indeed. As ever, the focus is on the street and the characters you’re likely to meet. Abbot and Gibbs are fresh out of prison and have a score settle, as well as their services as bomb making experts to sell. Things never run smoothly in a Leonard caper, and so it transpires, as they’re tracked by a world-weary cop. Set in Detroit, the site of all his best work, it’s fast, fun and furious with dialogue that sizzles on the page. Often imitated, but never beaten, Elmore Leonard remains the greatest of the greats.

1990s – “Divorcing Jack” by Colin Bateman

I’d stopped reading as a teenager and only rediscovered my love of it in the mid-nineties as I left those years behind. Irvine Welsh was brilliant, as were Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle, but Colin Bateman was something else. I’d never really understand how edgy and dangerous writing could be, but still remain fun and playful. “Divorcing Jack” introduces us to journalist, Dan Starkey, Belfast his beat. Starkey’s a mess, and after being thrown out by his long-suffering wife, he sleeps with the daughter of an influential politician and opens up a whole can of worms that threaten his life. The start of a long-running series and the basis of a decent film starring David Thewlis, it shows how crime fiction can tackle serious issues from a left field perspective and use humour as its weapon.

2002s – “Exit Music” by Ian Rankin

No library is complete without at least one book by Ian Rankin in it, and such is the consistency of the DI Rebus series, it’s no exaggeration to say you can pretty much pick a personal favourite. Once Rankin and Rebus hit their stride with “Black and Blue”, it’s the gold standard. At the time, “Exit

Music”, was billed as the final Rebus novel, and no doubt genuinely so. As ever, Rebus is thrown into a complex murder investigation, possibly a mugging gone wrong, but it’s certainly no random attack. Whip smart with its social commentary, the city of Edinburgh is the quiet star of the show. And as we now know, there was to be a route back for Rebus.

2010s – “Weirdo” by Cathi Unsworth

Despite being longlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year, “Weirdo”, feels like the one that got away. Maybe it’s because it’s a rare contemporary crime novel from the writer, rather than the historical work that has made her name, but it’s the perfect meeting point of lived experience and imagination. Set in a fictionalised version of Cathi’s home town, the flashbacks to 1984 and the world of teenage Goths draws on her days as a music journalist. The contemporary time line arguably anticipates the current popularity of claustrophobic small town stories, but also features the chilling life-like characters that inhabit such places, showing how they maintain their grip and power by any means necessary. Throw in murder, corruption and a Private Investigator with something to prove, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a modern classic.

This seems an almost perfect mix of titles. We have new books by returning authors and some new authors who are joining the Library for the first time. My thanks to Nick for joining me and taking on the Decades challenge.

As ever you can visit the Library here on the blog and see all the books which have been selected thus far. The Library also allows you to see all my previous guests and visit their posts too. You can start that journey here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

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