The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844). The reason most travellers know the name Château d'If. Edmond Dantès is falsely imprisoned on the island fortress and spends 14 years plotting his escape — the long opening section is set in Marseille, and the city's harbour and its rougher edges are vivid in the prose. Pulpy, page-turning, far longer than it needs to be, and the indispensable Marseille novel.
Total Chaos (and the rest of the Marseille trilogy) by Jean-Claude Izzo (1995). Izzo's noir crime novels, narrated by the ex-cop Fabio Montale, are a love letter to the working-class Marseille of the 1990s — the bars, the pastis, the bouillabaisse, the racism, the violence, and the soundtrack of jazz and Mediterranean rebetiko. Izzo died in 2000 but his books still define how the city sees itself.
My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle by Marcel Pagnol. Pagnol's autobiographical sketches of childhood holidays in the Garlaban hills above Aubagne, just east of Marseille, are gentle, funny, and perfectly evoke the Provençal interior. Both became charming films in the 1990s. Pair them with Pagnol's novels Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources for a slightly darker portrait of the same hills.
The Plague by Albert Camus (1947). Not set in Marseille — Camus's stricken city is the Algerian port of Oran — but the harbour atmosphere, the heat, the quarantine, and the existential weight all carry a clear Mediterranean charge that resonates with Marseille's own complicated relationship with North Africa.