In honor of Father s Day, we asked three of the world s greatest authors to recommend three books they think you should read on Father's Day, and three of them did just that. Jennifer Egan, Jay McInerney, and David Gran each recommended a list of nine books that they think would make a great gift for your dad.
00:03:21.180So I went with a crime theme, and I'm going to actually go, as it happens, in chronological order, starting with Agatha Christie.
00:03:31.300Obviously, as we all know, Agatha Christie wrote many books, and this is, in my opinion, her best.
00:03:37.640I haven't read all of them, but I'm fascinated by whodunits and sort of what makes a whodunit work.
00:03:44.920And, in a way, it feels like there are many boxes that you need to check to have a successful whodunit.
00:03:51.680One is, you know, obviously, is the killer a surprise.
00:03:56.140But not just that, because ideally, before we get to that surprise, we fall through what I've sort of come to think of as a series of trap doors.
00:04:05.800People that we think are the killer, and then, boom, we fall through that.
00:04:09.180And then we think it's this one, and, boom, we fall through that.
00:04:11.640So achieving that and then the final surprise is really important.
00:04:15.640But, in a way, the even harder thing that I think is so rare for a whodunit to achieve is to have enough kind of psychological acuity that we actually want to reread it.
00:05:10.640I love that the complexity of the plot is now, these days, when half the shows I see on Netflix that are meant to be whodunit mysteries, I finish it.
00:05:17.680And I'm like, why did I just waste it?
00:05:19.260It feels like it was written in about a day.
00:05:24.800Well, the thing is that I think that can happen really easily because to find someone who hasn't been a suspect, someone that the reader hasn't thought of, you know, how do you hit that amazing mix of surprise and inevitability?
00:05:38.520And in a way, it's a challenge that I think one has with any work of fiction, but it is crystallized in the whodunit.
00:05:45.140Because if it's too far afield, you have surprise, but it's nonsense.
00:05:58.860Is this one of the ones where she uses the setting as kind of a device, you know, like the 10 little Indians are on an island or murder on the Orient Express, they're all on a train.
00:06:06.740She often puts them in a place where they are sort of trapped and it's all happening.
00:06:10.200It is in a stately home, but they are not entirely trapped.
00:06:13.560And I think that's one reason I really like it, because I find those those kind of entrapment settings to be a little too much like door A, door B or door C.
00:06:26.880And I think maybe actually I hadn't thought of it.
00:06:28.540That I think is why I like it better than a lot of those famous ones, which, of course, works so well for a movie because you've got everyone in one place.
00:06:36.640But to me, that insularity on the page often results in a kind of almost a mathematical kind of dryness.
00:06:45.080And this has more color to it and a lot of humor as well.
00:06:51.540So anyway, so that is I highly recommend.
00:06:55.920Number two is Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem.
00:07:16.560And in fact, he had been imprisoned for many years for a crime that he did commit.
00:07:23.520But he began writing in prison and became very successful after he got out.
00:07:27.960He has a pair of detective police officers who are African-American and working in Harlem.
00:07:35.460Their position is very tricky because they are policing their own community.
00:07:39.400What I love about A Rage in Harlem, I will also say for audio book lovers,
00:07:43.980Samuel Jackson is the narrator of the audio book of this, and he is dynamite.
00:07:49.760Um, this is actually a comic crime novel that also has elements of horror.
00:07:56.480It's it's it's quite grotesque in moments, sort of hilariously grotesque.
00:08:00.800And what I really love about it is that the grotesqueness is very unexpected, as is the comedy.
00:08:07.580So what Himes does is he sort of sets up a series of expectations, which are that this is going to be a kind of lighthearted book.
00:08:18.680It feels like it's it's sort of silly in a way because it involves a guy who is a very gullible protagonist who is immediately fleeced of money by people who tell him that they can turn $10 bills into $100 bills by putting them into an oven and sort of turning it on.
00:08:40.840And the idea and unfortunately, of course, what what ends up happening is that he loses all of his $10 bills and he works in a funeral parlor.
00:08:51.480So he in in his wild efforts to try to reclaim this money, he ends up stealing from his boss and sort of getting deeper.
00:09:01.800He gets deeper and deeper and deeper into trouble.
00:09:04.100And it feels as though, you know, nothing can really go wrong here because he's such a lovable figure.
00:09:11.800But he also has an identical twin brother who is a heroin addict who dresses up as a nun and raises money on the street for the Sisters of Mercy in drag.
00:09:23.580And so this he enlists his brother to help him and wildness ensues.
00:09:29.880It is I mean, it's a very short novel and it is a wonderful kind of wild ride.
00:09:34.760The last thing I'll say about it and the really unexpected part of it is that in this kind of comic, crazy world, what ultimately emerges very unexpectedly is some pretty searing social commentary about life in Harlem.
00:09:52.060And so it's a kind of stealth, a stealth manifesto almost, which is which never appears as such, but leaves us with a really strong impression of racial injustice.
00:10:06.700But it's delivered with sheer delight.
00:10:31.660I think he really was a wonderful writer.
00:10:34.100This is also a crime novel of sorts, but Stone has a kind of approach that he uses in many of his books,
00:10:42.540which is that he follows several different points of view as various individuals converge in a kind of climactic, violent situation.
00:10:52.260And the setting for this is a fictional Latin American country on the verge of revolution.
00:10:58.980And we have gun runners approaching there with ammunition hidden in a shrimp boat.
00:11:06.040We've got a kind of psychotic Coast Guard service member who has resigned, killed his dogs and left his child.
00:11:17.420And we don't know what is going on with him.
00:11:19.600We've got a nun who is part of the revolutionary process and a sort of anthropologist who finds himself in the middle of all this.
00:11:30.560It feels, you know, it feels of its moment in the best way.
00:11:35.120So published in 81, what we really feel is the presence of the Vietnam War still in a way that we don't really feel the weight of that today in the same way.
00:11:44.500It certainly comes across as raising questions about American interventions.
00:11:52.840But finally, as with any really good book, it's just exciting and full of, I think, what I think of as Stone's signature element are just these wonderful set pieces.
00:12:06.300There's a there's a moment where the anthropologist dives under a coral reef and sort of feels the presence of some tremendous darkness, some sort of shadow of of of of danger or and we don't know if it's sort of natural or supernatural or just psychological.
00:12:26.320And the the scene of the the gun runners who end up employing the kind of psychopathic ex Coast Guard guy, very who and who ends up being very attracted to the wife of the couple and the gun runners.
00:15:01.300Well, I'm going to start with my crime thriller because I actually am not really a reader of crime fiction and suspense novels.
00:15:12.320But I think for Christmas, my friend Morgan Entrican, who's the publisher of Grove Atlantic, gave me this Len Dayton novel called Berlin Game.
00:15:25.720And of course, I'd heard of Len Dayton. He's one of the most successful novelists of all time.
00:15:31.580But I never read one. And I just found myself somewhere where that was the book I had in my hand.
00:15:38.060And once I started it, I couldn't put it down, as we often say, of very suspenseful books.
00:15:43.200But I was also I was so impressed with the writing because the one writer whose suspense writing I have read is John Le Carre.
00:15:51.040And and this this struck me as every bit as good as Le Carre's better work.
00:15:58.860And I mean, the the the granularity of the of the of the of the of the observation and the writing.
00:17:09.980I think this answers all of your your requirements.
00:17:13.760So it's a it's not it, meaning who's the but yeah, but it in the end, you say, oh, yeah, of course.
00:17:22.000But you don't say that in the beginning as to as to who the mole is.
00:17:25.160And it's really and it's also, you know, it's also set in that that I don't I don't want to say romantic, but that kind of storied period of Berlin or espionage in Berlin, where all the major powers were like early Cold War, early Cold War, where all the major powers are sort of fighting for turf and and spying on each other.
00:18:46.160It is a successful novel about a man realizing that he will never be a success, that he will never finish his novel and that he's a he's a miserable failure as a human being.
00:18:58.680And the title refers to the fact that one of his few passions is Frank Gifford in the New York Giants.
00:19:07.840And every weekend he goes, he drives an hour from his the town where he lives and teaches high school in order to drink all day at a bar and and watch the Giants play.
00:19:23.320He actually just quite coincidentally, he went to USC at the same time that Frank Gifford was a student there and an athlete and he becomes obsessed with Gifford.
00:19:35.080His own father was a student athlete in Watertown, New York, and it was it was locally famous.
00:19:43.080He was a big man around town and actually was obsessed with the idea of becoming famous, of somehow becoming like his father, Frank Gifford.
00:19:54.440And yet he he sabotages himself at every turn.
00:19:59.180You know, for one thing, he's he's a stone cold alcoholic and you'd think that would be very depressing.
00:21:04.460And there's something strangely exhilarating about watching this guy trip over his own feet and sabotage himself at every turn.
00:21:11.960And I suppose in part because it's it's so beautifully written.
00:21:15.600And I know, you know, I've sort of bonded with quite a few people over this book, including the man who became my editor, Gary Fiske, John.
00:21:30.100My last book is Light Years by James Salter and James, James Salter is, I think, one of the great, great stylists of of certainly my lifetime.