Roderick Random

by Charles Dickens

Dickens captures that same picaresque energy where a well-meaning protagonist stumbles through a gallery of unforgettable rogues and con artists, but with considerably more warmth and humor than Smollett allows. Where Roderick is sharp-edged and often bitter about his misfortunes, Pickwick finds comedy in chaos—yet both authors use episodic encounters to build a portrait of society from the ground up.

by Daniel Defoe

This is the flip side of Roderick's coin—a protagonist equally resourceful and morally flexible, navigating poverty and London's underworld with cunning rather than violence. Defoe's matter-of-fact narration about survival, crime, and reinvention has that same unsentimental edge Smollett brings, but told from someone scrappier and more calculating than Roderick.

by Herman Melville

A century after Smollett, Melville takes the rogue-filled journey concept and makes it genuinely unsettling—a Mississippi riverboat becomes a floating con game where you're never sure who's deceiving whom. It has Roderick's fascination with how people exploit each other, but Melville strips away the adventure-story reassurance and leaves you in genuine moral fog.

by Robert Morace

Here's your surprise pick: Welsh writes about desperate young men in 1980s Edinburgh with the same unflinching eye Smollett brought to 18th-century London—brutal, darkly funny, and refusing to sentimentalize poverty or addiction. The dialect-heavy prose and rapid-fire character switching echo Smollett's cacophony, but Welsh updates it to a world where the violence is more internal and the rogues are self-destructing.

by Edward E. Ericson

Bulgakov weaves together a picaresque Moscow where a mysterious stranger encounters con artists, bureaucrats, and the desperate—but adds a supernatural layer that makes the whole thing feel like a fever dream. Like Smollett, he's fascinated by how people deceive and survive, but he uses that framework to ask bigger questions about art, power, and what's real.