Nine great works of prison fiction

Nicci French is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French.

At CrimeReads, they tagged nine great works--films and books--of prison fiction, including:

Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler

One of the puzzles of Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s was why senior officials like Bukharin confessed to crimes against the Soviet system that they couldn’t possibly have committed. In his 1940 novel, Koestler (himself an ex-Communist) tried to account for this by narrating the interrogation of Rubashov an ex-Bolshevik modeled on Bukharin. Koestler’s account of the strange bond between prisoner and interrogator suggests that torture and threats aren’t necessary. Bukharin is so trapped by his own role as a revolutionary that he can’t turn against it even as a victim. This analysis was very influential—not least on George Orwell’s similar story in Nineteen Eighty-Four. As it happens, we now know that in reality the confessions were produced by brutal torture accompanied by threats against the victims’ families, but that’s another story.

Read about another entry on the list.

Darkness at Noon is among John Gray's five best books on atheism and faith, Joseph Epstein's five best revolutionaries in novels, Christopher Hitchens' six best books, and Ernest Lefever's five best Cold War classics.

--Marshal Zeringue