If you’re like me, you’re a bit of a sucker for “top 10” or “10 best” lists — especially when it comes to books about topics that interest me. So here’s a good one.
Crime novelist Ron Reynolds has written an intelligent and entertaining piece for The Guardian on his top 10 books about gangsters. He begins, of course, with The Godfather, a book I read many years ago and a movie I’ve seen enough to have most of the lines memorized (much to the irritation of my wife).
Reynolds himself has a mea culpa:
I never set out to write about gangsters. My first novel, The Dark Inside, was based on the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, a 1946 serial-killing case. The sequel, Black Night Falling, saw my protagonist, Charlie Yates, drawn back to Arkansas, to the town of Hot Springs – a real-life mob town in the 1940s where illegal gambling and prostitution flourished. That’s when serendipity came into play . . . Source: Top 10 books about gangsters | Books | The Guardian
This is a good list and a good, short read.
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Tags: books, gangsters, Ron Reynolds, The Godfather, The Guardian