We all long for a cracking good thriller. But where to find them? Here are some classic thrillers, suggested by me and my friend Paul.
Classic thrillers wanted
Who doesn’t love a classic thriller?
I recently ran into my old friend Paul. I praised Ken Follett’s The Armour of Light, which I’d just finished. We chatted about our favourite classic thrillers. It turned out he’d read many authors I’d not come across. So I asked him if he’d like to write something for this website.
Thriller-writers mentioned in this post include George V Higgins, Elmore Leonard, John Sandford, Lawrence Block, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, John D Macdonald, Vince Flynn, Terry Hayes, Ian Fleming, John Connolly, Ken Follett and Bernard Cornwell. If you have favourite thriller writers you’d like to recommend, do mention them in the comments. Let your imagination rip!
Here’s Paul’s contribution.
Classic thrillers: Paul’s view
“For five or so years after the birth of our first child my brain was too zapped to read anything but detective stories. I liked American ones more than British.
(These days I like to read Nordic crime books, and I’ve always loved Simenon, but those are different stories than I was reading then.)
Over the years I’ve hung onto some of the books that I read in the late 80s and early 90s. Recently I’ve tried to reread four authors I enjoyed first time round.
George V Higgins
I looked first at George V Higgins‘ legal thrillers set in Boston – Wonderful years, wonderful years, for example. I tried a couple but couldn’t get past the first few pages. Overwritten, they seem to me now.
Elmore Leonard
Next I read some of Elmore Leonard’s early detective stories: The Big Bounce, Mr Majestyk (the best of them), $wag and The Hunted (mostly Detroit – he switched to Florida later in his career). They were good, but not as good (as complex, as funny) as his stuff, like Get Shorty, from the 90s. (In the 2000s he wrote stories set in new places, like Djibouti or among civil war reenactors, and his get-on-with-it style suffered from the time he had to spend establishing them.)
The protagonist of each of these early books seemed to be the same liberal good guy, without explicit motivation, under different names. I baulked at the next one chronologically, City Primeval, because the humour was absent and it was just a dark story of corruption. The following one was to be The Switch, one of my favourite books of all time, I think Leonard’s first with a female protagonist, but it seems that whoever I lent it to hasn’t given it back! Writing this reminds me to buy it again.
John Sandford
John Sandford (Minnesota and Washington DC) is the only one of these classic thriller authors still alive and writing, I thought. He’s still on top form – see Ocean Prey (2021). When I went back to his first books, Rules of Prey and Shadow Prey, they were fine, but the next two, Eyes of Prey and Silent Prey, depict a world that is so hard, and the rich sharply dressed protagonist Lucas Davenport hard within it, and he has a side hustle (wargame design) that I know something about and didn’t convince me – that I stopped wanting to spend time in this world. (Things perk up later in the series when Davenport’s long-haired, obscure-band-tshirt wearing sidekick Virgil Flowers (“that fuckin’ Flowers”) comes on the scene.)
Lawrence Block
Last I read the half dozen of Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr books (New York) that I have. They are all the same book and they all made me laugh, especially The burglar who traded Ted Williams (with a running joke about Sue Grafton book titles – G is for spot etc.) and The burglar in the rye. Apparently he’s still writing, I’ll have to get some of his more recent books.
Tentative conclusion – In crime fiction I like the writing to be simpler than I used to, I like the characters to be more complicated and I like the same jokes.”
More from Paul
If you’d like to read more recommendations from Paul, see the excellent post on his website, “The best books I read in 2025“.
My classic thrillers
I, too, love classic thrillers. I’ve written about them a bit on this website in the past. That includes my 2018 blog about hard-boiled thrillers, covering Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
I also greatly enjoyed John D Macdonald’s Travis McGee (a prototype for Lee Child’s Jack Reacher). There’s also Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp, with whom I’ve since got a bit bored but the early ones are great. Plus of course “I am Pilgrim” by Terry Hayes – one of my favourite thrillers. I haven’t yet read Hayes’ follow-up Year of the Locust, which received mixed reviews. But I’d welcome comments from those who have read it.
Opinions differ on Ian Fleming’s original James Bond books. They’re undoubtedly classic thrillers, of which I’ve read and reviewed quite a few. They haven’t aged well: the misogyny and homophobia is cringe-making. But the writing is crisp and the character of James Bond undoubtedly iconic.
I’m also a fan of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series. They, too, have elements of the classic thriller, with an exquisite blend of pace and humour. Some readers may find them a bit violent. There’s also an ambiguous element of paranormal activity which I enjoy but may be a matter of taste for some.
Historical thrillers
I hadn’t thought of historical thrillers as classic thrillers. But I’ve consistently found historical thrillers some of the most enjoyable books over the past few years.
Those include Ken Follett’s Kingsbridge series of historical thrillers of which Armour of Light is the fifth. That series starts with the wonderful 1989 Pillars of the Earth – about building a cathedral. It includes The Evening and the Morning, a fine prequel to Pillars. Follett has written dozens of books: his Wikipedia entry makes him appear a polymath and all-round nice guy. Most have tens of thousands of Amazon reviews, nearly all positive.
Follett also writes non-historical stuff. I enjoyed 2008’s The Third Twin. I recently read Follett’s dauntingly thick Never. Its tagline ‘The path to war begins with one false step’ strikes me as pretty accurate. The first 80% is slow, but it improves – grimly – thereafter.
An excellent tagline
I’ve immensely enjoyed many Bernard Cornwell books, such as the Sharpe series (27 books so far). I love the broad sweep of The Warlord Chronicles (links in bold italics are to other posts on this website). So, too, the passionate love affairs, mighty battles, and effortless epigrams Cornwell manufactures. These include the Wizard, Merlin, on soothsaying:
‘ It is always better not to know the future. Everything ends in tears, that’s all there is to it.’
Cornwell is even more prolific than Cornwell and also seems to be quite a character. Like Cornwell, he is an atheist, and allegedly believes that he is a descendant of Uhtred the Bold
Classic thrillers: final thoughts
To read more book reviews, check out my reading tips tag. This includes lots of non-thrillers, including PG Wodehouse (undoubtedly not thrillers), Trollope (ditto), four posts on Middlemarch (about as un-thriller as you can get), and much else. One can debate whether Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series are thrillers. They’re certainly thrilling, gory in parts, and a great read. But I fear they’re simply too dense to be considered thrillers in the usual sense.
For my own writing, see my books page.
