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James Lasdun’s new book, The Family Man, reckons with the Alex Murdaugh murder case, which the poet, novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer covered for The New Yorker. Below, Lasdun names six great books about terrible happenings.
‘This House of Grief’ by Helen Garner (2014)
Garner’s life-affirming novels are rightly loved, but I have a special regard for her nonfiction account of the case of Robert Farquharson, who murdered his three young sons. Probing, self-searching, drily astute, it’s an extraordinary reckoning with the dark forces that erupt into ordinary lives. Buy it here.
‘Nada’ by Jean-Patrick Manchette (1972)
Manchette drew on pulp and noir to create vehicles for grappling with serious societal issues. The result was a set of riveting political thrillers. Nada, about a group of 1970s radical leftists who plot to kidnap a U.S. ambassador, is his cynical but mind-blowing masterpiece. Buy it here.
‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ by Janet Malcolm (1990)
In a sense, all of Janet Malcolm’s books are crime stories—needle-sharp forensic examinations of human folly—whether she’s writing about poets or psychologists or actual criminals. This one, a study of the treacherous relationship between a killer and the journalist he took into his confidence, is my favorite. Buy it here.
‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ by George V. Higgins (1970)
If this is the hardest of hard-boiled crime stories, it’s also one of the most unexpectedly moving. Higgins had a Dickensian eye and ear for the world he made his own—Boston’s seedy criminal underworld—and its denizens become tragic figures in his hands, none more so than the aging gun dealer Eddie Coyle. Buy it here.
‘The Vanishing’ by Tim Krabbé (1984)
I’m not a fan of horror, but this take on a venerable horror trope (I won’t give it away) rises to a Dostoyevskian philosophical brilliance as it entraps its two young innocents in the logic of pure evil. It was made into a very good Dutch film by George Sluizer (who remade it into a bad Hollywood film), but it is the short, utterly unsparing book that has always haunted me. Buy it here.
‘Demons’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1871–72)
The great novels of the master himself tower over just about everything else. I’m inclined to think that this tumultuous passion play, about idealists warped into murderous criminals by their own ideals, is the greatest of them all. Buy it here.
The novelist recommends works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Janet Malcolm, and George V. Higgins
