MY FIVE BOOKS
The Winner by David Baldacci
It is not going too far to suggest that were it not for this incredible 1990s thriller, I would not be a writer today.
I read The Winner was I was 18 years old. Before laying my hands on this book I had no idea that there even was a thriller genre, let alone that the best of it could paint movies in my mind. Before The Winner I just read what I was told to read by my teachers. And I just could not see what all the fuss was about. Wuthering Heights? Emma? Brave New World? Not for me. And so I stuck to history and to mythology, leaving the TV screen and the cinema to do my entertaining,
But then I was given The Winner. I began it with a sneer. An expectation that I would not enjoy it. Five pages in I was sold. Ten pages more I was hooked. I finished it in two days. Four more and I’d read everything Baldacci had written to that point.
The rest is history. Here I am today, doing my damnedest to be ‘The British Baldacci’. Living proof that if you find the right books, the love affair never ends.
The Complete Works by Roger Lancelyn-Green
Tales of the Greek Heroes. Myths of the Norsemen. The Tale of Troy. Tales of Ancient Egypt. The Adventures of Robin Hood. King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
The complete works of Roger Lancelyn-Green make up over 40 books, all of them on the subject of myths and legends. And from age 10 to 16, they were all the ‘fiction’ I chose to read.
Written in a style immediately accessible to a young mind, their author truly was an all-time loss to education. Able to communicate such deeply complex and emotional tales to children, he would have made the greatest teacher who ever lived.
And to me he probably was that, because it is hard to know what I did not learn from his stories. The tales themselves, sure. But so much more. These were the bible tales of various cultures. The lessons by which whole civilisations lived their lives. And here the author recounted those same lessons to any young man lucky enough to pick up his books.
The writer I am today – the man I am – owes more to these books than even I will ever realise. And I cannot recommend them enough.
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
It’s not crime, it’s not a thriller and yet it is my favourite novel of all time.
I first read Catch-22 at Bar School. By this time I was fully immersed in the likes of John Grisham, James Patterson and Lee Child, but occasionally the old feeling of shame would kick in and I’d endure a classic. These were experiments that usually ended badly. Time and again I tried. Time and again I failed.
And then I met John Yossarian. Never have I read another book that so effortlessly mixes death, suffering, fear, madness and laugh-out -oud humour. Honestly, the number of times I found myself bursting into laughter on a packed Central Line tube, they must have thought a lunatic was on their carriage.
I recommend Catch 22 to anyone with time to immerse themselves in a flat-out reading experience. Every character is so alive (until the point they are not). Every chapter is a masterpiece. Every image is expertly – even visually – rendered.
It’s just perfect.
The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
The grandaddy of all political action thrillers. The true masterpiece of on-the-page tension. The very best of the best. And all of that from a debut?! Just how are the rest of us supposed to live up to that?
I flat out refuse to even touch upon the plot of this novel. If you don’t know what happens, go read the book. If you do know what happens, go read the book. And if you’ve already read the book – be that once or one hundred times – go read the book!! Only good things can ever come from reading this book.
And besides, who cares about the plot anyway?! At the risk of excommunication, there is literally nothing exceptional about the plot of the greatest thriller ever written. There is almost nothing in the story that we have not seen before. And that does not matter one iota, because delivery is everything and no one has ever delivered as Frederick Forsyth did when he wrote his first book.
Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser
This one is another cheat like Roger Lancelyn-Green, because I mean the complete set of ‘The Flashman Papers’ rather than just a single book.
This is not to say that each book is as good as the next or as the last. The series starts incredibly well – ‘like watching a new star appear in the night sky’ was what one critic said about the stunning debut, entitled simply Flashman – and somehow it gets better, with Flashman at the Charge and Flashman and the Great Game being high points. It ends with a bit of a whimper – both Flashman’s Tiger and Flashman on the March show signs of genius on the wane – but the series as a whole is a thing of beauty and that is how it should be read.
For me, and despite teeming with politically incorrect moments that would see him cancelled in a heartbeat if he were writing today, MacDonald-Fraser is unassailable. The very idea of taking a hated fictional character from a recognised classic and building a history around him that encompasses practically all of the great events of the 19th century? Exceptional. But to then do it as well as George MacDonald Fraser did? That’s just genius.
