Books like Real Tigers

No list of mine would be complete without a Graham Greene novel on it.

My favourite author, the one I return to time and again. I reread this novel while I was writing my book, and it had lost none of its power or, indeed, glory since the last time I read it.

The story of a whisky priest on the run in the anti-Catholic purges in South America, it’s about faith, hope, self-worth, and fear. And redemption? Maybe. Maybe not. No one writes tortured souls like Greene. No one makes you care for them more.

This is the novel, more than any other, that inspired me to write my book.

It’s the story of Pale Fire, the final poem of the murdered American poet John Shade. It’s put into an anthology, and his editor, Charles Kinbolt, is asked to provide a preface, commentary, and notes. As these notes get wildly out of hand, another narrative starts to emerge. Did Kinbolt murder Shade? And was he using Pale Fire to identify his murderer? A great book.

Nabokov is a modernist master, and in no way can I compete with him, so I didn’t try. But it’s kind of the first metathriller and should be read by anyone with an interest in great writing.

Or The Disappearance, as it was renamed to coincide with the Donald Sutherland film of the same name.

It’s the story of a hitman whose wife has disappeared while he’s given a new assignment. Instead of going after his target, he tries to find his wife. It’s a study of a man beyond cynicism, beyond despair, almost. Marlowe, who also wrote the brilliant A Dandy in Aspic.

I often think it’s my duty to keep the memories of forgotten writers alive because I’ll be there one day. An ex-agent of mine told me she thought I wouldn’t be famous until my breaks were rediscovered about a hundred years in the future. Which is nice, I suppose, but I can’t take that to the bank and ask for a mortgage with it.

Like Graham Greene, I could have picked just about any Leonard novel for this list.

Like the Greene Novel, I was reading it while writing my book, so it seeped into my writing DNA. Although, to be fair, Leonard’s been in my writing DNA since I first read him.

No one else could take the Southern Dixie Mafia, a high diver, an over-the-hill baseball player, and a smooth African American gangster transplanted from Detroit and turn it into both a fast-paced thriller, a laugh-out-loud comedy of manners (in which lots of people get shot), and elevate it into a kind of prose poetry that blows most Literary novels out of the water.

Leonard said it was one of his favourites of all of his novels. Mine too.

I picked this book up because it was super cheap in hardcover. It had an interesting premise with a suspense set in the business world between two competing companies. Not typically my thing, but I gave it a chance because of the price. Once I started to read it, Joseph Finder became one of my favorite authors. I could not put this down and read it in three days. It had me on the edge of my seat as the main character has to infiltrate another company, and OMG, the twist at the end! I loved this book so much that I decided to attend the Thrillerfest conference in Phoenix that year because Joseph Finder would be there. Yep, that’s how much I loved the book. I met him and gushed like a fool!

The second of The House at Baker Street series, this book solves the mystery of why a disproportionate number of patients are dying in a private ward at St. Barts hospital in London.

Atmospheric and engaging, Birkby’s writing develops Mrs. Hudson and Mary Watson in practical, unsentimental ways while not ignoring their emotions, or how those feelings motivate them. These are two adults with unique histories and strengths, and they develop a bond equivalent to an aunt and niece after Mary becomes Mrs. Watson, and joins the cast of characters that frequent Mrs. Hudson’s 221B home.

These women are not vehicles for a Holmes and Watson storyline—the men are almost completely absent. These ladies are two fully realized characters with their own cases to solve and innocents to save.

Along with Le Carre Adam Hall was my magical touchstone to understanding what being an exceptional thriller writer meant.

This book, the second in a long distinguished series, continued the crises dealt with by the British spy named Quiller. Hall had an idiosyncratic way of writing that taught me that style was as important as plot in a thriller – perhaps even more. For me, style is what grabs my attention as a reader.

Today, style is what draws me along, both as a reader and as a writer of thrillers. Style is the thread on which is built both plot and characters. It is also imperative when setting scenes in faraway places.

Expendable and incompetent Secret Service agents eventually wash up at Slough House, where they toil on pointless administrative tasks for a foul-mouthed, grubby boss called Jackson Lamb. Lamb is deliciously politically incorrect, offensive, and drinks and smokes to excess in his pit of an office. However he has a keen mind, is an experienced spy, and not afraid to act decisively to protect his employees and society. In this episode he unravels a nest of sleeper agents after an old Cold-War era colleague is found murdered on a coach. The book is well written and neatly plotted.

John Banville is a famously prolific author, but his 1997 novel, The Untouchable, is unique in that it’s based on a real-life figure.

Anthony Blunt—who would later be exposed as one of the notorious Cambridge spies—rose to become an art expert to the Queen, even as he funneled purloined secrets to the highest reaches of the Kremlin. 

In The Untouchable, we follow Blunt’s fictional counterpart, Victor Maskell, from his poor Irish upbringing and conversion to Marxism at Cambridge, to his efforts on behalf of the Soviet Union well into the Cold War.

Victor’s first-person account—a miracle of authorly ventriloquism for a character bordering on the sociopathic—is rendered in Banville’s silky prose, a pure delight to read. For me, The Untouchable is a novel for the ages.

A landmark espionage book about the Cambridge Spies, which has stood up surprisingly well though published almost forty years ago and before the release of Russian and British archives, and first made me interested in ‘The Climate of Treason’. It not only gives the historical background to their recruitment during the 1930s but, drawing on a deathbed confession from Goronwy Rees, named two new spies ‘Maurice’ and ‘Basil’. After leaks to the satirical magazine Private Eye , Margaret Thatcher confirmed that ‘Maurice’ was the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures Sir Anthony Blunt who had been granted immunity sixteen years earlier. ‘Basil’ was identified as an atomic scientist, serving in the Washington Embassy alongside Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, called Wilfrid Mann. Mann fended off the accusations at the time and the story died but subsequent research for my book has proved Mann was a spy.