The best thrillers with beautiful, unforgettable violence

This is the book that made me want to be a novelist. I stole it off my dad’s shelf when I was 11—way too young to be reading about the seedy, violent, sex-fueled underbelly of 1970s counterculture. It’s the story of the an American journalist covering the war in Vietnam who gets the bright idea to smuggle heroin to California. I read it at least once a year, and it gets better every time.

Near the end of the book, an ex-Marine named Ray Hicks flees into the desert with the heroin on his back, gut-shot and bleeding out. The scene, masterfully intercut with hallucinations and memories from Hicks’s childhood, was clearly the inspiration for Frank Semyon’s death in Season Two of True Detective. My advice? Read this book instead. 

I would rather (re)read this script than most contemporary thrillers. It feels like a novel, and the dialogue is masterful, but one of the most affecting scenes contains just 37 spoken words over three pages. It’s the murder of Arthur Edens, a brilliant and manic-depressive attorney.

He’s leaving his Tribeca loft when two slick corporate assassins appear. The killers are incredibly competent, but there’s nothing cool or sexy about them or the killing, which is a study in detached corporate efficiency. They’ve clearly done this a hundred times, there’s protocol to follow, and this untraceable murder is all in a day’s work. It’s a fresh and entirely believable take on the assassination scene, and every time I read it, I wonder how many “overdose” deaths were actually something else. 

I’ll never forget my first Jiu-Jitsu competition in front of a screaming crowd. I barely remember the actual fight, but what sticks in my head is the buildup to it—the warm-ups, the waiting, the bizarre cocktail of fear and boredom. It all felt weirdly familiar, thanks to the famous knife fight scene from this book, which I’ve read at least a dozen times.

The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is stuck in a Mexican prison when he learns that another prisoner is planning an attempt on his life. What follows is an excruciating waiting game. McCarthy nails the details—the sharpening of the senses, the undercurrent of dread, the way your perception of time slows and accelerates in unpredictable ways when the moment finally arrives. 

This book taught me that good writers describe the effects of violence, but great writers leave things to the imagination. Early in the novel, retired spymaster George Smiley is summoned to the scene of a murder. The corpse, lying facedown on Hampstead Heath, is one of Smiley’s former spies—shot in the face at very close range. But Le Carré, whose descriptive chops are second to none, never shows us the wound, relying instead on dialogue and reactions to convey the horror.

The constable who rolls the body over instantly throws up. And then there’s this chilling question from a police superintendent: “Did he have a moustache at all, sir? My sergeant fancied a trace of white whisker on the upper jaw.” Less is always more when describing you’re the unspeakable. 

Highsmith never fails to blow my mind, and this is her best work. The scene in which Tom Ripley (spoiler alert) kills his “friend” Dickie Greenleaf is a masterclass in writing a murder. The two men are in a tiny boat off the Italian coast. We have access to Tom’s thoughts right up until the actual killing when his internal monologue cuts out. I’ve always wondered: Does Tom’s mind go blank? Does he somehow will it to?

These are the kinds of questions that great writers raise—but don’t answer. And the writing is incredible. Here’s my nomination for Best Consecutive Use of the Same Word in Its Adjective and Verb Form: “Dickie was on the bottom of the boat, twisted, twisting.” That’s as good as it gets.