In common with a lot of thriller writers, I'm a fan as well as an author. I read probably fifty to sixty thrillers and mysteries a year, and still get a rush when I spot a new book by a favorite author.
The full list of favorites is too long to run here: it'd take up the rest of the article. Suffice to say that I like people who write well, with wit, and who give me credit for some intelligence. I try to treat my readers the same way.
When I was a kid, going all the way back to All Saints elementary school, I already read mysteries. When I was in college, it was my main source of recreation. John D. MacDonald, Ross Thomas, Donald Hamilton, and Ross Macdonald were my favorites. John le Carre was an eye-opener; so, in his own way, was Mickey Spillane.
My wife and I always took books to bed, and she would sometimes read aloud from the early Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker - the parts where Parker would describe the way his characters were dressed, which, for some reason, she found enormously amusing. My own main character, Lucas Davenport, is something of a clothes-horse, probably influenced by those early Parkers. I think I've read every one of the Spenser novels, and actually own an autographed first edition of The Godwulf Manuscript. Not to say they're perfect: I've thought of sending one of my bad guys off to Boston to bump off Spenser's girlfriend and the dog . . .
(No, John, for God's sakes, not the dog . . .)
Later, when I was working as a reporter, I kept up with Lawrence Sanders and the Commandment and Deadly Sin novels, and, outside the mainline thriller stuff, the books by Stephen King. Interesting thing about King: he writes good theory. Writers interested in special effects would do well to look at Danse Macabre and On Writing, if they can be found. Can't have my copies.
Some of the old guys are gone - I read recently that Donald Hamilton died a couple of years back at age 90. But some of the best writers out there - best writers of any kind - are still doing thrillers, and many of them seem to be former or even current reporters: Carl Hiaasen, Daniel Silva, Michael Connolly, Alex Berenson.
Guys who can give you the grit along with the flash. Guys who have, so to speak, stuck their fingers into the wound.
I'm back in the bookstore every week, looking for them.
What thriller authors get your heart racing?
Editor's Note: John Sandford is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the bestselling author of both the Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers novels.
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