Charles Farrell’s Low(life) is a tour of the underworld from the 1960s through the 2010s told in a series of anecdotes and reflections that are sometimes entertaining, sometimes cringeworthy, sometimes enlightening and almost always fascinating.

In the 1960s and seventies, Farrell worked as a musician in mostly mob-run clubs in New England and New York. Later, he worked as a boxing manager and fight fixer. This isn’t a crime memoir, though those who are drawn to pulp fiction, classic crime novels and movies like Goodfellas will find plenty to like here.

James Ellroy’s Blood on the Moon introduces LAPD Detective Sargent Lloyd Hopkins, a “genius” homicide investigator with a reputation for solving tough cases. First published in 1984, the book contains what are now a set of common tropes.

Hopkins is a rogue cop working against the strictures of the department that employs him. His self-sworn duty to protect the innocent is born of his own childhood trauma. He can be as single-minded, violent, and relentless as the killers her pursues. He understands how they think because the traumas that distorted their minds are similar to the ones that shaped his own. Finally, as the author himself notes in his preface to the L.A. Noir trilogy, the final climax wherein the cop must fight the psychotic killer one-on-one has since become a cliché.

The Cocktail Waitress was the last book James M. Cain wrote before he died in 1977. Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai pieced it together from a number of manuscripts and published it in 2002.

The book, as Ardai says, “is a classic Cain femme fatale story that’s told for once from the femme fatale’s point of view.” And what a point of view it is.

Archivists preserve cultural artifacts and do their best to make them accessible to future generations. These artifacts traditionally included books, articles, images, music, legal documents, letters, and just about any other item that contains important or meaningful information.

Until a few decades ago, these artifacts were primarily physical. Preserving them required good storage conditions and good handling practices. Making them available meant providing an index, such as a card catalog, to tell people where they were stored, and a physical space, such as a library or museum where people could physically access the items. Most items also included some kind of metadata, such as the plaques beside museum paintings that tell you the artist’s name, the title and date, and a few sentences about the subject or style.

In The Hiding Girl, Dorian Box’s tough and resourceful young protagonist, Emily Calby, flees a horrific murder and spends months on the streets and on the run. Her survival depends on toughness and determination, and the help of a former gang member who recognizes in her shades of his own youth.

Edward Viljoen’s Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God Retold in Simplified English is sort of a CliffsNotes retelling of the Hindu classic. Viljoen paraphrases the story’s eighteen chapters in twenty-six pages of simple, straightforward English. The remaining seventy or so pages of the book are devoted to backstory about the main characters and definitions of some of Hinduism’s core concepts.

Viljoen understands that no simplified paraphrasing can do justice to the poetry of the original work. His purpose in writing this book, as he says in the introduction, is to provide an accessible introduction to the work for those who might wish to study it in more detail later.

Alan C. Logan’s The Greatest Hoax on Earth is a journalistic examination of the life of Frank Abagnale, the infamous con man immortalized in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 file Catch Me if You Can. That film, based on Abagnale’s autobiography of the same name, portrays a smooth charmer living a life of glamour and adventure.

The young Abegnale cons his way onto free flights around the world with beautiful women in tow. When he needs money, the master forger simply cuts himself a check at the expense of some international corporation so huge it will never notice the missing cash. When he needs a job, he becomes a doctor, a lawyer, a university professor. He has no training or experience in any of these fields, but he’s such a convincing impostor that no one notices. Except the FBI, who spends years pursuing him, and whom he repeatedly eludes.

The Troubled Man is the final installment in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, and the only one of the series I’ve read. I found the book in a Little Free Library in a park in Virginia. I picked it up, because I felt quite troubled at the time. I saw the title and thought, “That’s me.”

In this book, Wallander, a police officer in a small coastal town in Sweden, is sixty years old and spends a lot of time reflecting on his life. His daughter, Linda, also a police officer, has just had her first child with a man named Hans.

Dr. Eger gives a powerful and harrowing account of her youth, of being taken from her home in Hungary, herded into the cattle cars, separated from her parents at Auschwitz. She and her sister survived more than a year in the death camp, and for months more on the death marches that followed before an American GI lifted her from a pile of corpses. Hope and remembrance of the good in life sustained her through unspeakable horrors.

After the war, she came to the US and eventually became a psychologist, helping others through hardship and trauma. Her message is simple, though it’s a hard one for many people to realize, and requires vigilance and effort in practice. We don’t always have a choice about what happens to us, but we do always have a choice about how we respond.

Jean-Patrick Manchette’s No Room at the Morgue is the first book I’ve read from NYRB Classics that’s just flat out bad. The back cover includes a blurb from Kirkus Reviews that says, “If Marx, Freud, and Jim Thompson collaborated on a noir, this might be the result.”

Actually, if Marx, Freud, and Jim Thompson had had an editor, this book would never have been published.