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5 Books to Read Instead of Watching True Detective’s Second Season
Season One of HBO’s True Detective was a huge hit and an incredible pop culture moment. Feeding off the remarkable (and completely unpredicted) phenomenon of career revival known as the “McConaissance,” the series took several improbable ingredients—including lead actors Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, the direction of Cary Fukunaga, and the trippy, overwrought dialogue of writer Nick Pizzolatto—and somehow stirred it into one of the most watchable, most-discussed TV series to hit in a long time. Time is a flat circle, indeed.
Season two has new actors, a new director, the same writer—but less success. While late-inning episodes have brought its overall score up, it’s still running a tepid 65% at Rotten Tomatoes. If the show’s not quite worth your time the way it was last year, what should you do instead? Well, read, of course—and here are five gritty noir novels that will give you the same thrills as True Detective at its best, without the awful Colin Farrell mustache.
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L.A. Confidential, by James Ellroy
Why bother with an imitation when you can go straight to the source? Set in 1950s California, this tale of a trio of detectives who slowly come together as allies to investigate a horrific killing that was made to look like a robbery gone wrong is gripping and white-knuckle tense. The cops are almost as bad as the criminals they’re set up against, and as they dig deeper they discover there really is no bottom to the corruption and rot all around them. Ellroy spins a complex tale masterfully, never confusing the reader even as he holds back clues and information for nasty surprises, and his dialogue is some of the best in the history of hard-boiled noir.
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Songs of a Dead Dreamer, by Thomas Ligotti
The first season of True Detective was so similar in tone, approach, and even details to the short stories of Thomas Ligotti, there was talk of plagiarism. While that was a stretch (the words homage or inspiration would be better), the fact is Ligotti’s horror has the same damp, rotten, ominous tone that made the first season of the show so incredibly addictive. But Ligotti ties off his stories with endings that truly satisfy and upset, instead of the more conventional conclusion the first season of the show wound down to.
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2666, by Roberto Bolaño
Bolaño’s last novel before his death in 2004, 2666 is a bit broader in scope than True Detective: it spans decades of time and jumps between different stories. But its tone of dread and atmosphere of corruption and futility in the face of multiple murders of women in a Mexican border town and the indifference (and perhaps active interference) of the authorities in charge of the investigation put it smack into the True Detective wheelhouse. At 900 pages in its English translation, this isn’t a fast read, but Bolaño expertly creates a real-feeling universe that’s just as creepy as Pizzolatto’s swampy Louisiana.
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Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn
Flynn doesn’t overstuff her settings with the sort of damp, gothic detail that would seem to be the True Detective brand, but in Dark Places she pulls together many of the elements that made the TV show so irresistible. It’s a mystery that pulls together satanic child abuse, devil worship, and dysfunctional families, spinning out ominous clues and red herrings at a steady pace, crafting a paranoid, uncomfortable story that starts surprising the reader until you can barely take it any more. While the story does lack professional detectives, the amateur sleuths who dragoon Libby—the surviving daughter of a massacre—into looking into her brother’s guilt or innocence decades later are as true a bunch of detectives as any book like this needs.
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Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
One of the greatest detective writers ever, Hammett’s story of the country’s most corrupt town is dark, funny, and tautly written. Like the current season of True Detective, the story concerns a community that’s not so much a town as a construct—a place owned and operated by corporate interests. The plot is complex, the protagonist not entirely likable, and as things spin out of anyone’s control, the body count becomes prodigious. Through it all, Hammett reminds you this is America—a truer America, in some ways, than any patriotic or family-oriented vision you might be offered. Red Harvest has served as an unspoken inspiration for countless films and other stories, and is a classic of American literature as well as a dark, grimy noir.