Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Diamond Bikini | 1956 | Charles Williams | Buy |
| 2 | Uncle Sagamore and His Girls | 1959 | Charles Williams | Buy |
Charles Williams spent most of his career writing some of the most accomplished noir fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, but the Uncle Sagamore books represent a deliberate detour into comedy. The Diamond Bikini (1956) and Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (1959) are set in a rural Southern American world and follow a boy narrator whose uncle Sagamore is a cheerfully unrepentant moonshiner with a gift for getting into trouble.
The books draw on a tradition of American rural humour that goes back to Mark Twain, and Williams handles the material with a light touch. The comedy comes from character and situation rather than jokes, and Sagamore himself is drawn with genuine affection. The boy narrator’s straight-faced reporting of his uncle’s chaos is a large part of what makes the books work.
Start with The Diamond Bikini, which introduces the characters and the world. Uncle Sagamore and His Girls follows on from the first book and is best read after it, though both are light enough in tone that the reading order matters less than it would in a serious crime series.