The Siege of Pleasure, the second book in Patrick Hamilton’s 1930’s London trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, picks up just days after the end of book one. Jenny Maple is walking the streets around the London Pavilion looking for a trick while trying to avoid a plainclothes cop who has recently arrested one of her friends.

A seedy-looking middle-aged man has his eye on her, but can’t quite pluck up the courage to approach. Desperate to get off the street, into a warm hotel and away from the threat of arrest, Jenny approaches him. The man is physically unattractive, sneaky, furtive, nervous and evasive. She takes the lead in negotiating a price for the night, and then they’re off–first to a pub, and then to a hotel.

Bob, a waiter at a London saloon called The Midnight Bell, leads a relatively simple life. He works the lunch shift from 11 to 3 and the evening shift from 5 till 10. In between, he reads in his room, wanders the streets, goes to movies. The son of an American man and an Irish woman, he has no living family, no clear path ahead, and only the vaguest of dreams.

The time is 1929 or thereabouts. After years of working at sea, Bob, now twenty-six, has landed in this saloon that serves an odd assortment of down-and-out regulars.

Ben Fox from Shepherd.com recently asked me to write about five of my favorite books in any genre. You can check out my list of the best books from the golden age of American crime and noir and perhaps discover something new.

Paul Bradley Carr’s 1414° is a satirical thriller that reads like Carl Hiaasen’s take on Silicon Valley, “An industry built on the promise of limitless memory, by people who can’t remember what happened last week.”

The book opens with former tech titan Joe Christian counting out his final hours in a filthy flophouse in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Someone, he is sure, has deliberately ruined his life. Someone he calls “Fate” has orchestrated his long descent from wealth and power to this sad, sordid end. But who is Fate?

[Note: This book’s preface claims it’s based on a true story. It’s not. If you read this novel as an accurate account of Aboriginal culture, you’ll be misled. It should be categorized as New Age Fantasy. The end of this review contains a link to a story in which the author retracts her claims to the book’s authenticity. As fantasy, though, it’s a pretty good read.]

Marlo Morgan, an American living in Australia, is invited by an Aboriginal group to what she thinks is an awards banquet. Her guide, Ooota, picks her up from her hotel in a beat up Jeep and drives her deep into the Outback to meet a waiting tribe whose members call themselves The Real People. The tribe burns her clothing, wallet, camera, passport and all other possessions and invites her on a walk across the continent.

Alexander Starritt’s We Germans tells the story of a small group of German soldiers retreating from the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1944. The German soldiers on the Eastern front know the war is lost. Pursued by the ruthless Red Army, they’ve retreated a thousand kilometers on foot and are crossing the Polish countryside they destroyed years earlier, when they looked and felt invincible.

The main character, Meissner, was drafted into the war at age nineteen as an artilleryman. He spent four years fighting in Russia before the tide turned decisively against the Germans. Retreating and in defeat, he begins to contemplate the atrocities of the war in which he’s participated.

Usually, when I finish reading a book, I write a thousand-word review. I can’t do that with a book as deep, thoughtful, and moving as this one. There’s just too much there. This will be one of those rare books I’m still digesting months or even years after finishing. This is also one of the few that will go onto my re-read list.

For the first 90 pages or so, I felt the book was going nowhere, and I would have given up if not for the many glowing reviews. The Door is a social study, a psychological study, a study in religion, a character study and a profound and visceral meditation on the meaning of existence. In a book like this, the character under the microscope has to be interesting. For the first 90 pages or so, Emerence just wasn’t interesting enough.

I finally got around to reading this, three years after it was recommended to me by a pair of retired federal agents who had spent much of their careers pursuing drug runners in South Texas.

No Country for Old Men opens with Anton Chigurh, one of the most pitiless and chilling figures in modern fiction, escaping a police station after his arrest. From the ease with which he kills the deputy, it’s clear that local law enforcement in South Texas in 1980 isn’t prepared to handle such ruthlessly efficient criminals. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the only first-person narrator in the book, spends a lot of time ruminating on what kind of world would produce this new breed of criminal, and on the destructive effect of having such evil at large in society.

Bob Hartley’s North and Central opens in a bar in a working neighborhood of Chicago in the late 1970s. Andy, the bartender/narrator serves a clientele of factory workers, drunks, neighborhood characters and cops, many of whom are as brazenly corrupt as the city’s infamous politicians.

From the opening chapter, which depicts the bar’s collection of oddball regulars exchanging crude insults, you might get the sense that this book is going to be something like Animal House meets Goodfellas. It’s not that at all. This is one of those rare volumes that deeply rewards a reader’s patience.

In the opening scene of Charles Willeford’s Pick Up, counterman Harry Jordan is wrapping up a long day’s work in a San Francisco diner in the early 1950s. One last customer straggles in around 1:00 a.m. Helen Meredith is drunk, seeking a cup of coffee. She’s well dressed and obviously better off than Harry, who lives in a boarding house and has trouble keeping a steady job.

When it’s time to pay for her coffee, Helen confesses she’s lost her purse and doesn’t have a dime. Harry pays for her coffee and the two leave together to retrace her steps through the bars in search of the lost purse. As they walk, Harry confides to himself, “Gin was my weakness, not women, but with a creature like her… well, it was enough to make a man think.”