I was doing a book signing not long ago when a person there asked me what other books I would recommend to people who liked the one I wrote. I told him there weren’t many books similar to mine, but I could tell him the novelists I like to read. As soon as I started listing authors and titles, almost everyone there grabbed pen and paper and began to furiously take notes.

Assuming that this was not an anomaly and there are other people out there who would like to check out the books I enjoy reading, what follows is a list of the authors I especially like, with comments about their work. In almost every case, I have read everything these authors have ever had in print, over 400 books and a bunch of short stories. The few exceptions are noted.

General Comments:

As you can see, I have read a lot of adventure/thriller/suspense/mystery fiction by a lot of different authors over the years. One complaint I have is that many novelists are skilled writers, but since they have no personal experience in the areas they write about (murder, extortion, espionage, terrorism, sniping, intimidation, etc.) they create unrealistic characters (especially protagonists) who appear to think like Suburban Little League Coaches (SLLCs) while in the midst of scary, violent lives. Generally I try to ignore this, unless it’s so blatant I can’t.

If this bothers you, too, be aware that a few authors are wonderful exceptions to this general observation. The one at the top of the list is James Ellroy, who has no SLLCs anywhere in any of his novels. If Ellroy ever wrote an actual Little League coach character into one of his books, the guy would be taking speed, stealing from the team uniform fund, and pimping out the worst hitters to a local pedophile, if Ellroy didn’t make the coach a pedophile himself.

Mickey Spillane can’t be grouped with any other author, but he has never written a character with a SLLC mentality.

Next would be John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard, two authors who frequently and unselfconsciously explore the dark side. They invent great antagonists. (Thomas Harris fits here, too, but he’s only written a few books, three of them with Hannibal Lecter).

Ken Follett, Stephen King, Joseph Wambaugh, John Sandford, and Chuck Logan are right behind these two.

Nelson DeMille, Thomas Perry, Frederick Forsyth, and Michael Crichton would be next.

Lawrence Block writes many different genres, and some of his novels have few if any SLLCs.

Donald Hamilton gets a special mention for displaying the best blend of competence and cynicism in his protagonists. He comes across to this reader as knowing more about his subject matter than any other author, quite a feat for a guy knocking out mostly secret agent paperbacks for 40 years. Hamilton doesn’t get into true evil nearly as much as his contemporary John D. MacDonald did.

Two final points: The authors that follow are not the only writers of popular fiction that I think are worth reading. These are the ones that are both prolific and consistent. There are many others with a smaller body of work. There are also ones I haven’t read, believe it or not. The second point is that what makes me qualified to comment and be critical is the fact that I am a reader. Many of the men here have published dozens of books and sold millions of copies. I am currently at one and 60,000, respectively. Demand by readers is the ultimate yardstick. That’s the true measure of your writing: Does anyone want to read it?

On to the authors, in alphabetical order:


Lawrence Block

I have a love/hate relationship with Lawrence Block. He’s a talented, prolific writer who has written many different series and genres (including books for aspiring writers) but is probably best known for his police and detective novels, often featuring the alcoholic unlicensed private eye Matt Scudder.

Block is also very obviously anti-gun. This is an extremely annoying trait for an author of detective fiction to have. Imagine a novelist whose main protagonist is a cancer doctor, but the novelist himself is opposed to using animals for medical research. Block would probably put my book aside after reading five pages. I still read everything he writes, but sometimes wait ‘til it gets remaindered.

Dale Brown

This retired Air Force Navigator started writing technothrillers with the excellent Flight of the Old Dog. In recent years, some of his "techno" has morphed into science fiction, a definite minus. His website is at http://www.megafortress.com/

James Lee Burke

Author of the series of novels featuring Cajun detective Dave Robichaux, Burke has recently developed another good series featuring former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland. Good characterizations, plots, and dialogue.

Tom Clancy

If you don’t know about Tom Clancy’s books, you must have stumbled onto this page by accident. Clancy applied the police procedural format to a story of modern military adventure and created the genre called the military technothriller.

I enjoy his books a great deal, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for two reasons: First, I used his success with Hunt for Red October and a publisher who’d never done fiction before (Naval Institute Press) to convince a local small press that I could do the same thing for them (which I did.) Second, when the feds were harassing me about the content of my book, my lawyer used Clancy and Debt of Honor as an example of another author who had killed off politicians (the President and both houses of Congress!) in a work of fiction. The feds backed off.

The Sum of all Fears is a can’t-put-it-down novel that has tremendous relevance in the current era, and even more so post-9/11. The Hollywood fools who rewrote it for the screen and changed the bad guys from Islamic fundamentalists to neo-Nazis should all be fired and have their pension plans looted. Rainbow Six is based on a premise so ludicrous I couldn’t suspend my disbelief, but his other works have kept me riveted to the reading chair.

I wish Clancy’s protagonists had a few warts, but that’s just me (Without Remorse was a step in the right direction.) I do not read the "Op-Center" books or others that Clancy himself does not write.

Stephen Coonts

This retired Navy A6 pilot is maybe my favorite military technothriller writer, tied with Clancy. He also flies a Stearman biplane, which makes him a kindred spirit. With the slight exception of the silly "York robots" minor plot element in a recent book, all of his stuff is good, including his novel Saucer about a flying saucer (really!) I loved his nonfiction Cannibal Queen, about a summer-long journey around the U.S. in his Stearman. Go to his website at http://www.stephencoonts.com/

Michael Crichton

Crichton paid his way through medical school by writing thrillers under different names. One of them, A Case of Need, had many lightly disguised (and cutting) references to people at Harvard, and won the Edgar Award for the Best Mystery of the Year. Crichton quit medicine to write full-time, saying "To quit medicine to become a writer struck most people like quitting the Supreme Court to become a bail bondsman." Crichton writes interesting books, some bordering on science fiction, but the real science is almost there, which makes them work for me. Crichton probably invented the medical/science technothriller. A frequent theme is "Greedy people attempting to financially exploit a new technology that they haven’t mastered yet, with disastrous results." Jurassic Park blew me away. (The sequel Lost World was just a give-me-the-money autopilot rewrite of JP, but I can’t blame a guy with four ex-wives for that.) Rising Sun, Disclosure, Airframe, Timeline, and Prey are all worth reading, with the first two my favorites. Website at http://www.crichton.org/

Nelson DeMille

Starting with what I believe was his first novel By the Rivers of Babylon in the late 1970s, Nelson DeMille is one of the few adventure/thriller/suspense writers who has not yet written a substandard book. Good characterizations, interesting characters, great plots, all plausible. One of the best.

James Ellroy

Telling an author you are "a big fan of his early work" is one of the subtler insults in life. Unfortunately, that’s how I feel about James Ellroy. This crime writer astonished me with his first six or eight novels. I love his characters—everyone’s corrupt.

Starting with White Jazz, though, he adopted a so-called "spare" writing style that relies almost entirely on sentence fragments (many without verbs) to convey description, and after four books like this I still find it annoying. Read The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, and his other earlier books first. Be forewarned that these are very violent with some scenes that may make your skin crawl. (Critics who complain that UC was too graphic should read Ellroy, and then shut up.)

Ellroy’s gun facts are often utter fantasy, odd for a writer who actually owned a fairly sizable gun collection (the collection was sold recently in Kansas City, with the proceeds going to charity.) His autobiographical My Dark Places may give you some idea of where his ideas come from.

Vince Flynn

With his debut novel Term Limits, Flynn is one of the few novelists who has a book where the protagonist murders politicians for not following the Constitution. Flynn has other titles out now. An author to watch.

Ken Follett

If you like the "historic fiction" aspect of Unintended Consequences, read almost anything by Ken Follett from 1978 to the present. He is the author whose work gave me the inspiration to write UC, and everything he’s written for the last quarter-century is well worth reading. His first few books, published only in England (at first) were not very good, for reasons his agent Al Zuckerman describes in his excellent book Writing the Blockbuster Novel. Since 1978’s Eye of the Needle, Follett has been one of the most consistently compelling novelists in the world. (An oddity is The Third Twin, a novel he wrote with cloning as the central theme.) With his two most recent efforts, Hornet Flight and Jackdaws, both set during WWII, he is at the top of his game. His website is at http://www.ken-follett.com/home/index.html.

Frederick Forsyth

I was stunned when I read Day of the Jackal as a teenager. This was what a novel should be like! (Interestingly enough, Tom Clancy has said he had exactly the same reaction when he read this book.) Not nearly as prolific as many thriller writers, Forsyth has turned out some real powerhouses. The Fist of God provides a history-based fictional plotline during the first Gulf War. If Forsyth’s plotline had been fact, Saddam Hussein’s actual military actions during that campaign would have been absolutely brilliant, and he might have won the war. Like Ian Fleming, Forsyth’s ignorance of small arms is annoying, but that is a failing not limited to popular English spy novelists.

Dick Francis

A Champion English jockey who won more than 350 races, Francis retired from horse racing in 1957. Since 1962 he has written about 40 detective novels that are almost always set in England and usually involve (directly or indirectly) his former profession. Some are better than others; none are bad. He’s over 80 now, but still writing mysteries. I find it interesting that his protagonists are invariably in their early to mid-thirties, the age he was when he was National Champion. Part of the reason I like Francis’ books is they show me an interesting world of which I would otherwise have no knowledge.

Donald Hamilton

The author whose apparent mindset (and protagonists) most closely resembles my own, Donald Hamilton writes stories I love to read. He is (or was) an avid shooter and his firearms details are spot-on. His Matt Helm series was butchered by Hollywood in the 1960s with the awful films starring Dean Martin. Hamilton has never written anything I didn’t like. Recently he moved back to Scandinavia, where he was born. In 1997, when he was living in Connecticut, I sent him a copy of UC. He wrote to tell me he really liked it. I can’t tell you what that meant to me. He’s now over 85 and I think he’s done turning out new books, so the ones he gave us over a 50 year period will have to suffice.

Thomas Harris

Harris is best known for his Hannibal Lecter trilogy. Hannibal was so delicious, so over-the-top, avoiding all the PC touches I had feared it might contain, that I didn’t even notice the things other critics have whined about, like occasional sentence fragments or what voice the author used some of the time. Mickey Spillane said "I liked it, but I don’t see how they’re gonna make a movie out of it." They pulled it off, Mick, but the book was definitely better.

Stephen Hunter

Often mentioned in the same sentence as I am by people in the gun culture discussing what gun-related fiction to read, Hunter is a D.C. film critic for the Washington Post who has written several novels with Vietnam Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger (loosely patterned after the late Carlos Hathcock) as the protagonist. An earlier Hunter novel, The Master Sniper, featured a WWII German sniper as the antagonist. That book had too many historical errors and factual impossibilities for me to enjoy it.

Hunter’s first Swagger book, Point of Impact, has a ludicrous and impossible technical detail as the absolutely crucial plot element upon which the whole dramatic concept is based. Further, his protagonist Swagger is so turned off by the killings he did in Vietnam that he buries all his guns when he gets home, and has to dig them up when trouble comes.

This was crazy. Hunter gave his protagonist the mindset of a D.C. film critic, not a man with 100 confirmed enemy kills. A sniper this good might dislike killing people, but would definitely love to shoot fine guns. Swagger burying his guns would be like an ace fighter pilot burying his airplane. When I met Stephen Hunter, we talked about guns and shooting, but I cannot remember if I specifically said to him that this whole "sick of guns" thing was just not believable behavior for a champion sniper, or not. Maybe a bunch of other people told him the same thing. In any event, that mindset is now gone with recent Swagger books having "Bob the Nailer" thinking and acting in a manner consistent with being the finest sniper in the Marines. I like both Hunter and his books. His excellent Dirty White Boys has perhaps the most attention-getting opening two paragraphs of any novel I have ever read.

Dean Ing

Hard to categorize, Dean Ing is a lesser-known writer who has a bit of a cult following. Many of his books could be called technothrillers where the techno is in the future, but not so far as to be science fiction. I believe he has a solid science/engineering background, and it shows. The Ransom of Black Stealth One is one of his best. I enjoyed Spooker also, though this espionage-based story is not for the squeamish.

Jonathan Kellerman

Detective novels featuring the child psychologist Alex Delaware. If you like one, you’ll probably like them all. I do.

Stephen King

The only writer who can always make me fall into a story with a plotline I know to be impossible. When he’s "on," which is usually, there isn’t anybody in the world who is any better than King, in my opinion. I have not read his Dark Tower series (sci-fi/fantasy leaves me cold) but I think I’ve read almost everything else he’s written.

King is alleged to have said that he always wanted to write a book so scary he couldn’t finish writing it, and Pet Sematery came the closest. True story: In 1986 I had to make an emergency weekend trip to London as an underwriter for Lloyds. I decided to stay on Midwest time, staying up at night and sleeping during the day, since I’d be back home in two days. I bought a paperback to read in my hotel room. It was Pet Sematery. Reading that book at 4:00 AM in a strange hotel room in London was an experience I find difficult to put in words.

Movies based on King’s books are much more varied in quality than the books themselves. Misery, The Running Man, Stand by Me and The Shining were excellent. Carrie was good. Firestarter, they ruined the ending. Some of the others are okay at best.

BTW one of best books for writers is King’s On Writing.

Elmore Leonard

My favorite writer, period. No one packs more and better description into fewer words than Elmore Leonard. Leonard is the best there is at using a small amount of description and dialogue to give the reader a huge understanding both of the setting and of the characters’ personalities, morals, goals, and foibles. He has never written a bad book. He has never written a book where I thought the basic storyline was not believable, a claim many other novelists cannot make. When he invents an evil character, it’s someone you never want to meet. He’s written 19th century westerns, modern crime novels, and stories set in between. Many of his books are very violent, and they don’t all have happy endings. Many of them have been made into movies, and usually pretty good ones, which is unusual for the genre. I thought 52 Pick-Up, with Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret, translated especially well to the screen.

Chuck Logan

A relative newcomer who writes books similar to John Sandford (see below). Like Sandford, Logan is from the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and his stories are set there, too. In fact, the two men are friends and hunting buddies. Logan is nipping at Sandford’s heels for quality. Absolute Zero and Vapor Trail are knockouts.

John D. MacDonald

A prolific adventure/thriller/crime writer (initially also writing science fiction) from the 1940s to the 1980s and creator of the Travis McGee series, the late John D. MacDonald was a Harvard MBA who served in the OSS in WWII. He turned out a huge volume of excellent work, over a hundred novels and hundreds of short stories. Few authors have ever been as skilled at creating venal, duplicitous characters, especially women. In John D. MacDonald’s world, true evil is often right below the surface of a calm, peaceful scene. Great stuff. Every now and then I run across something of his that’s out of print that I haven’t read before.

John J. Nance

This lawyer and aviation correspondent writes adventure novels centered around commercial aviation. He comes up with inventive plots and interesting twists despite the restrictive settings that his scenes impose.

Robert B. Parker

I started reading Parker 30 years ago in high school. Comments about "early work" (see Ellroy above) apply here. Parker is best known for creating the Spenser detective series (which became a TV series for a few seasons), featuring a "sensitive" tough-guy protagonist known for his cooking prowess, literary knowledge, and wise-ass dialogue. The dialogue is now sometimes too cute for its own good.

This series has become too predictable, and Spenser’s "code of honor" irritating. (Whenever there’s someone who needs killing, his black sidekick Hawk does the heavy lifting.) Spenser’s sixtysomething girlfriend Susan has become annoying as well, and Parker should kill her off and bring in some new talent. (There is apparently an active campaign among Spenser fans to get Robert Parker to do just this, but Parker’s wife Joan, the model for Susan, probably wouldn’t approve.) Trivia point: I know Barbara Stock, the actress who played Susan on Spenser: For Hire on TV. If Parker’s fictional Susan were like Barbara Stock, she’d be worth keeping.

Parker does more than Spenser. Gunman’s Rhapsody, a fictionalized retelling of the Earp story Parker wrote in 2001, was excellent. Parker has recently created a series around small town police chief (and former big-city drunk) Jesse Stone, and another series around a female detective named Sunny Randall. The Sunny Randall books are written in the first person, which is kind of odd.

Parker is knocking out two series books a year now; maybe Joan wields a mean credit card, and he needs the money. I still read all his stuff, but I don’t buy it in hardcover unless it’s remaindered, and sometimes I get it from the library. Wilderness (1978), a non-Spenser book, was one of my favorites.

Parker and his wife Joan have a nontraditional arrangement which has been the subject of media pieces, including an article in People. They are still married and claim to still be lovers, but live separately. You can judge how their relationship was going in any given year by the characters’ actions in the fiction Parker wrote at that time. Love and Glory, which is supposed to be a romance (his only one, thank God), was written in 1982 when Robert and Joan Parker first separated. It’s a story of obsessive love (a love without any sex, at that) that goes on for decades. Love and Glory is so embarrassingly awful that I’m surprised Parker hasn’t repurchased the rights, bought up all existing copies, and burned them.

Thomas Perry

An imaginative adventure/thriller writer who conceives plots unlike anyone else, Perry is usually one of my absolute favorites. Unfortunately, his latest book has a basic premise that is simply not plausible, and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief. There are a couple others that are pretty far-fetched also. However, The Butcher’s Boy, its sequel Sleeping Dogs, and Metzger’s Dog are among the best mystery/adventure novels I’ve ever read.

John Sandford

The best living writer of detective novels, and better than any of the dead ones that I've come across. Most of his books are the "Prey" series, set in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and featuring detective Lucas Davenport. Sandford has never written a bad book, or one with a plot that is not believable.

Some authors (myself especially) use their stories to make occasional observations about aspects of our society that are irrelevant to the storyline. Sandford has a thread running through some of his books, an observation about female TV newscasters as seen by their male viewers, that is at once hilarious and dead-on accurate. It is the kind of revealed truth that gives Sandford great credibility and makes the reader fall all the harder into the stories he's created. Read his books and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Trivia: A bad guy in Mortal Prey is named John Ross, and he's from St. Louis. Coincidence or tribute? You decide. Sandford's son has a website for him at www.johnsandford.org, where he (the son) complains a lot about people either sending hate mail or asking for free books. Me, I just get fan letters from guys in prison.

Mickey Spillane

No one writes like Mickey Spillane. Some would add "Thank God" to that statement, but not I. Private eye Mike Hammer is the character most associated with Spillane, first appearing in 1947. Spillane started writing for a male audience comprised of returning servicemen, and if it’s violent, sexist action you want, with plenty of double-crossing women and enough liquor to float a battleship, Spillane provides. He also created secret agent Tiger Mann during the 1960s James Bond craze, and has written a number of detective novels not featuring Hammer, as well as a bunch of short stories. His total sales exceed 200 million copies. His publishers are absolute fools to let his books go out of print.

My favorite Spillane anecdote happened years ago when Spillane was buttonholed at a party by a European. At the time, Spillane had written a total of seven novels, all huge sellers. The European said it was a terrible indictment of American culture that of the top ten all-time bestselling novels, seven of them had been written by Mickey Spillane. Spillane grinned and said "You're lucky I don't write three more books."

Spillane became a Jehovah’s Witness about fifty years ago. This didn’t stop him from using nude photos of his second (and now ex-) wife Sherri on the cover of his novels The Erection Set in 1972 and The Last Cop Out in 1973. You can see the first image here. Sherri Spillane is now a talent agent at the Ruth Webb Agency. Her clients include Joey Buttafuoco, Dawn ("Mary Ann") Wells, John Wayne Bobbitt, Kato Kaelin, Lynda ("Wonder Woman") Carter, Tonya Harding and Gennifer Flowers. I am not making this up.

Ross Thomas

This is an odd one. I love Thomas’ books that feature Artie Wu, Quincy Durant, Soldier Sloan, Otherguy Overby, and other scam artists. I can’t finish most of his Padillo-and-McCorkle spy novels. The spy series feels like it’s written by an entirely different author. Go figure.

Harry Turtledove

I dislike sci-fi/fantasy, and Harry Turtledove is a science fiction writer. However, Turtledove also writes "alternate history" novels, and is the acknowledged master of them. I like these. They take a "what if" stance on a historic event, such as what if during the Civil War, Lee’s Secret Order 191 had not been lost? Presto, a whole new set of events from that moment forward (two United States’, new and different alliances with foreign countries, a different WWI, etc.) Imaginative and original, give these novels a try.

Andrew Vachss

This one-eyed New Yorker represents children exclusively in his day job as a lawyer. Most of his books and stories have plots or subplots involving the sexual abuse of children and the ensuing retribution against the abusers. (In a magazine contest asking readers to come up with the least likely pair of novelists to embark on a collaboration, the winner suggested Andrew Vachss and Vladimir Nabokov.) Vachss' characters are often cartoonishly unrealistic, and the imagery he evokes is reminiscent of the dark, stylized scenery in the Batman movies, but that is part of the appeal of his work.

Joseph Wambaugh

The best cop fiction ever, written by an ex-cop. Darkly comic (a style I love) police stories are Wambaugh’s trademark. He has a true ear for dialogue and an appreciation of the absurd. Wambaugh has also written nonfiction, including The Fire Lover in 2002, which is in my "to read" pile.

Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark

Part of the old Algonquin Roundtable in NYC with Lawrence Block (see above), Westlake writes adventure novels and comic crime novels under his own name, and the hardboiled series with protagonist Parker (an armed robber) under the pen name Richard Stark. Westlake’s sense of humor varies from slapstick to subtle, depending on the book. Kahawa, a story about hijacking a trainload of coffee in Idi Amin’s Uganda, is one of my favorites. Westlake’s excellent short stories frequently run in Playboy.

Randy Wayne White

I've only read two of White's books so far. That's because until three days before I wrote this, I had never heard of him. I was talking with John Sandford (see above) last Thursday at a book-signing (his, not mine), who said if I liked the late John D. MacDonald (see above), MacDonald's quirky characters, and Florida settings full of heat and corruption (yes to all three), I would like White. Boy, was he telling the truth! John D. would be proud. White's ex-NSA spook turned marine biologist Doc Ford is a worthy successor to MacDonald's Travis McGee, including his amazing ability (in the two books I read, at least) to regularly hit the trifecta of finding hotties who are at once intelligent, childless, and financially self-sufficient. Ford's aging hippie sidekick Tomlinson is also a hoot, spouting dialogue I couldn't invent in my wildest dreams.

White is a former fishing guide (and outdoor writer) who used to guide out of Sanibel/Captiva Island. Mildly interesting aside: My mother bought a small vacation house on Captiva in the late 1970s. I first went there to visit when I was 23 in 1980, canceling a ski trip to do it and afterwards vowing never to return. Maybe I was on the wrong side of the island, but in the three days I was there I saw no evidence of fishing charters, boat rentals, etc. There was nothing to do, except read, take walks, and drink alone. The youngest man I saw on Captiva besides myself was over fifty. The youngest woman had snow-white hair. I told my mother it was a great place to go if you'd just had a nervous breakdown, which I hadn't, or were on your honeymoon, which I wasn't. I went again seventeen years later with my four-year-old daughter, and things had changed to the point where you could now fish for tarpon, jet-ski, parasail, and find women to tease who weren't all past menopause. If the real-life Captiva is now accurately depicted in Randy Wayne White's novels, I'd be half tempted to move there.

I'm going to have to get the rest of White's books. His website is at www.rwwhite.com.

-Class Room Dates-
(6:00 PM-10:30 PM)

Friday, July 11th, 2008
Friday, July 18th, 2008


-Range Sessions-
Range sessions will be only two days in July:

Sunday, July 13th, 2008
Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Range Times
(10:30 AM - 2:30 PM)

S&W .500 John Ross Special Edition.