Skilful criminals criming skilfully

January 30, 2023 2:53 PM

Donald Westlake/Parker fans, what have you found that scratches a similar itch? I'm looking for something where a criminal is at the center of the story: no cops, wannabe cops or vigilantes. Like a police procedural, but for the other side. A few dead bodies are fine but I'm mostly looking for property crimes or scams (would consider espionage), not serial killers or anything like that. As little moralizing or valorizing as possible.

I'd be especially interested in:

• Stories not originally in English
• Stories that have been widely translated, regardless of original language
• Stories in or adjacent to the Nordic noir tradition, if they have a criminal as the main character (I love e.g. Ragnar Jónasson's style but the content is a little too cop-centric)

posted by Not A Thing to Media & Arts (23 answers total)

Doesn’t match your bullet points, but I loved a recent novel called Portrait of a Thief, about a group of Asian-American Millenials stealing plundered ancient Chinese art from world museums and repatriating it to China.
posted by matildaben at 4:08 PM on January 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

OK this gets none of your bonus points, but The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 4:09 PM on January 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr series is about a Manhattan burglar.

Jo Nesbo's Headhunters is about a corporate headhunter who is also an art thief.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:16 PM on January 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm ignoring the Nordic part - I'd recommend the Ripley books by Patricia Highsmith (the movies are great), Dashiell Hammett's Glass Key and Red Harvest (or any of the Continental Op stories), James Cain's or Jim Thompson's work, or James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet.
posted by BReed at 4:33 PM on January 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

This does not really match your bullets, but it does match the headline.

If you don't mind a little romance/sexiness in the mix, I strongly recommend basically everything by Aya De Leon, maybe starting with Side Chick Nation even though it's a later book in a series with established characters. Her books are about a group of sex workers who are also organizers, and they use crime to equalize the playing field with the wealthy and powerful men who seek to exploit them or other women and communities of color. They are very satisfying books to read.

You might also like her newest, A Spy in the Struggle, but that is cop heavy since the main character is an FBI informant infiltrating a "radical" group, who starts to doubt the choices she has made.

All of these books include some romance and light sex but that adds to the fun.
posted by thelastpolarbear at 5:09 PM on January 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've only read a couple of them (though I plan to read more), but you might like Simenon's "hard novels"

A current writer who is working in this vein is S.A. Cosby; his two novels have gotten a lot of recognition and are fun reads.

Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a standalone book, not a series, but also overlaps with the style of book you are looking for, including both criminals and spies, and people making morally complex choices.

Cormac McCarthy has a number of books featuring flawed and amoral criminals, but he's a very different style of writer than Westlake/Stark and most of the Scandanavian noir, so they may or may not fit what you are looking for.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:33 PM on January 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Geoff Manaugh's, A Burglar's Guide to the City, isn't fiction, but ticks two of your boxes.
posted by dws at 5:37 PM on January 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ghostman, by Roger Hobbs. From the NYT review, "Jack is a career criminal, or more specifically, a “ghostman,” who’s helped maybe a hundred bank robbers escape over the years ... he too is a ghost who has no address, no phone number and likes to travel light — [also a descendant of sorts of] Richard Stark’s (Donald E. Westlake’s) coldblooded antihero Parker, an efficient, enigmatic professional thief with little inner life and even less family back story."

There's a sequel, Vanishing Games, but unfortunately the author passed away at age 28 after writing those two books.
posted by true at 5:56 PM on January 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I loved Peter Spiegelman's Thick as Thieves and although the author has written many books, there's no sequel to this tense thriller about the quiet, former-CIA leader of a group of thieves planning one last elaborate heist after their original boss was killed. It's been compared to Stark/Parker.

Not criminals criminaling but adjacent, the Jane Whitefield series by Thomas Perry. A Native American woman from upstate NY helps people caught in dangerous situations disappear. There is a lot of fascinating detail about the mechanics of escaping, avoiding detection, and creating a new life. The series began in the early 90s pre-internet so her techniques have evolved over the years.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 7:38 PM on January 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Some of Jay Cronley's stuff might fit your bill. Charles Willeford, perhaps.
posted by BWA at 7:57 PM on January 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Mortdecai series scratches this itch. Seconding the “hard” Simenon novels.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:48 AM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Jo Nesbo's Headhunters is about a corporate headhunter who is also an art thief.

It's also a good movie, co-starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of Game of Thrones/Jaime Lannister fame.
posted by fuse theorem at 6:00 AM on January 31, 2023

I've had the same itch. Nothing has really satisfied it but Thomas Perry's Butcher's Boy series comes close.
posted by charlesminus at 7:34 AM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hench might fit the bill.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 8:34 AM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not Nordic but MacDonald’s Travis Mcgee should fit
posted by ejrb at 3:38 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

What about Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin stories? They're not noir, more in the Sherlock Holmes style (at times, quite literally), but they're French, widely translated for over a century, and he's a gentleman thief so mostly avoids violence (although not adverse to it).
posted by GhostintheMachine at 3:26 AM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was coming here to mention the Lupin stories. If you do streaming, there's a really good English dub of a French series based on the books that is endlessly entertaining and full of brilliant "I'll fool 'em" heist sort of moments. It's a limited series, too, so it's not an eternal commitment.

I haven't read any of the books, but apparently there are many of them.
posted by hippybear at 1:00 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Raffles.
posted by clavdivs at 1:33 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Seconding Simenon. Also: Jean-Patrick Manchette, Fatale, or really any of his books.
Don't forget Elmore Leonard -- Swag(/Ryan's Rules) featuring a giant department store caper, and the sequel, Stick. But I think The Switch fits all your requirements (except for Nordic).
posted by CCBC at 2:50 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Michael Mann (and co-writer Meg Gardner) has just published Heat 2. Which... is not terrible but does seem bound for the big screen.

The Al Pacino cop, Hanna, plays a big role, but there's a lot of the (DeNiro=McCauley) robbers gang.
posted by pjenks at 3:12 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hong Gildong Jeon 홍길동전;-洪吉童傳
The Biography of Hong Gildong

Asphalt Jungle.

The screenplay to Rififi.

Artemis Fowl

For crime fiction in another genre as the story starts with planning a jewel Heist.
The Hobbit.
posted by clavdivs at 6:00 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

also doesn't match the bullet points but the Nick Mason series, starting with The Second Life of Nick Mason, by Steve Hamilton, sounds like it's along those lines.
posted by Arctan at 5:32 PM on February 7, 2023

It's been a minute since I read it so I can't remember how central the cops are to the story (although I do remember that they are more bumbling comic relief than anything), but Ballad of the Whiskey Robber (based on a true story!) might scratch this itch. Bonus: it's hilarious.
posted by mosst at 6:52 AM on February 8, 2023