Conspiracy nuts are fun to watch. They’re like wind-up toys – all it takes is a little nudge and they’ll go on all night. As wild and far-fetched as their stream of consciousness rants get, and as entertaining as the game of connect the disparate dots may be, the real pleasure of listening to them is that one thread they’ll eventually pull that you find snags something in your subconscious, one of your own irrational paranoid fantasies perhaps. It’s bound to happen right? As many hooks as they cast, one is certain to get you, yeah? So, maybe, just maybe they (and by extension, you) are not so crazy. Careful now, or you’ll turn into one.

So it is with Alan Glynn’s new novel Bloodland which features an Irish journalist jumping at an opportunity to churn out a quick, cheap best-seller – the biography of an actress recently deceased in a helicopter accident. It’s a cash-in and he feels appropriately chagrined to be on the project, but he’s a bit burned out and a fluff piece with real money behind it is exactly what he thinks the doctor ordered. Of course the 'accidental' ruling on her death begins to seem a little suspect as her past and specifically her various affiliations with an unlikely array of powerful and shadowy figures is unveiled.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my favorite conspiracy books and films and I’ve got some of them listed here in clusters (connected dots if you will) ‘cause that seemed appropriate somehow.

More than any others, Bloodland (and probably its predecessor Winterland) put me in mind of the hazy, barely relatable events of William Gibson's Bigend trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History), but Glynn isn't alone in using the death of an actress as his launching point. In the last year we've seen Duane Swierczynski's Fun and Games and Marcus Sakey's The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes that began there, but I'd like to recognize the factual murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short better known as The Black Dahlia which has given us, among others, James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, Craig McDonald’s Toros and Torsos and Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger – just to represent the mad trend of Daddy-Was-the-Black-Dahlia-Killer books, of which there’ve been… too many. How crazy is Hodel’s theory? Well, it turns out his dad was also The Zodiac Killer (I'm not kidding, check out Most Evil), as one of the most popular places to start a conspiracy theory. So, hey, have fun with those.

Another one that starts with the murder of a young girl, but not a famous one, is Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg - and go ahead and attach the film Cutter's Way and its unofficial sequel Joel and Ethan Coen’s Big Lebowski as I made a claim to way back here (the link that makes them obvious - Jeff Bridges). The Coen Brothers made another farcical conspiracy picture, the underrated Burn After Reading which seemed to be taking digs at the stylings of film makers like Tony Scott whose Enemy of the State I'd say was a winking, unofficial sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's conspiracy masterpiece Conversation (the link this time is Gene Hackman). The Conversation features an audio specialist the same way Brian De Palma's Blow Out does, though De Palma's film seems like a near remake of Michelangelo Antonio's Blow-Up (just switch photographer for audio engineer) rather than directly influenced by Coppola.

What about dark dealing within your government? X-Files: Fight the Future was a cap on the carefully revealed and obscured conspiracy revolving around a cooperative alien invasion of earth built throughout the show's first five seasons, but how about just taking over one country at a time? Seven Days in May from the novel by Fletcher Knebel makes a scarily plausible case for the vulnerability of American Democracy in a slightly less convoluted manner than Richard Condon's Manchurian Candidate, but both stop well short of Oliver Stone's psychedelic kaleidoscope of paranoia JFK which cast such a broad, reckless (irresponsible? meh - entertaining) net over the assassination of John F. Kennedy that it warrants its own drinking game.

For more fun with magic bullets check out Ellroy's American Tabloid or Philip Kerr's The Shot, but if you really wanna get into presidential conspiracy you just can't beat Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men. Of course if you're Oliver Stone, you can try (Nixon), but for my money Andrew Fleming beat him out with Dick (really, as good as Dan Hedaya is as Richard Nixon, it's Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch as Woodward and Bernstein who steal the show). And Alan J. Pakula's adaptation, All the President's Men is the capstone of his best conspiracy movies which include Klute and The Parallax View from the novel by Loren Singer. The film starring Warren Beatty is a benchmark in the government/corporate conspiracy nexus which George Clooney seems to have aspirations toward meeting in movies like Syriana, The American and Michael Clayton (yeah it's close to Julia Robert's Erin Brockovich so let's go ahead and put her John Grisham turn in Pelican Brief and her voice of sanity next to Mel Gibson's brand of nutty in Conspiracy Theory as her own conspiracy trilogy). 

Now I'm getting carried away in the seventies because they were such a great time for conspiracy films that include Marathon Man and Three Days of the Condor from James Grady's book Six Days of the Condor, but I'm gonna branch out and hit Alfred Hitchcock who made some classic of the genre 39 Steps, Man Who Knew Too Much or North by Northwest which features a menacing turn from John Cassavetes who also turns up in Rosemary's Baby which sits at the nexus of two conspiracy specialists: film maker Roman Polanski (Chinatown, Ghost Writer), and novelist Ira Levin (The Boys from Brazil, Stepford Wives).

And I'm not even going to touch the mixture of religion, those bloody knights templar and the masons and their legacies of fantastical fiction. I'll leave it to folks like Dan Brown, Raymond Khoury and Steve Berry, thank you very much.

What are your favorite conspiracy books and films?

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.