The late British thriller writer John Gardner (not to be confused with the late American academic/novelist of the same name) is nowadays best known, if at all, as the man who rebooted the James Bond literary franchise back in 1981, with the publication of License Renewed. In 1979, Gardner was approached by a representative of the Ian Fleming estate and asked if he’d be willing to continue the series. Fleming died in 1964, having penned twelve James Bond novels, including Casino Royale, the 1953 novel that introduced Bond to the world. By 1979, Gardner was in his early fifties and had already published dozens of books, most of them spy novels and/or thrillers, but he had also produced an autobiography, three Sherlock Holmes novels, and a story collection. He wasn’t exactly unknown, but he hadn’t produced anything that could be called a pop-cultural phenomenon. Between 1981 and 1996, Gardner wrote fourteen original Bond novels and two Bond film novelizations, quitting only when esophageal cancer forced him to slow down the pace of his literary output. Several other fairly prominent writers – Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver, William Boyd, Anthony Horowitz, etc. – have written James Bond novels, but no one ever produced as many as John Gardner did, not even Ian Fleming.

Although I’ve enjoyed some of the Bond films, I’ve never been a big fan of the franchise. But through the years I’ve seen plenty of John Gardner’s non-Bond thrillers on the shelves of my local bookstores. A few years ago, I was intrigued by a paperback edition of Gardner’s 1993 novel, Maestro, so I bought it and brought it home to read. Alas, I soon discovered that it was the fourth in a five-book series known as the Herbie Kruger novels, so I put it away for a while. A few months back, at another used bookstore, I found a copy of his 1979 novel The Nostradamus Traitor, the first of the Herbie Kruger novels, so I bought it. I also bought two of his standalone novels, The Werewolf Trace (1977) and The Dancing Dodo (1978). I read The Nostradamus Traitor months ago, right after I acquired it. I planned to write about it here when I finished it. Alas, I found it underwhelming and didn’t want to write a “meh” review of it. It’s far easier to write entertainingly about a very good novel or a very bad novel than about one that is just so-so. A few weeks ago, I decided to give Gardner’s oeuvre another chance, so I dug up my copy of The Werewolf Trace. For some reason, though not obsessed with either topic, I am drawn to stories about wolves and/or werewolves. Joan Aiken’s 1962 children’s novel, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, was one of my favorite books when I was a kid. I also really liked Daniel Mannix’s The Wolves of Paris, which I read in my twenties. And Nicolas Evans’s The Loop, another novel about wolves, which I read (and reviewed here) just a few years ago. I also wrote fondly here of Paul Christensen’s 2014 anti-Baby Boomer novel, The Hungry Wolves of Van Diemen’s Land. My bookshelves hold a few dozen paperbacks that I bought just because of the words wolf or werewolf in the title, or because the cover featured an interesting wolf/werewolf illustration.

I found The Werewolf Trace slightly more entertaining than The Nostradamus Traitor but still not great. If you are going to put the word “werewolf” in the title of a book, you should be prepared to deliver some great thrills and chills.

Finally, I read The Dancing Dodo. I have no great affinity for dodos or the literature written about them (if there is any), but I enjoyed the novel, nonetheless, while still not finding it a real keeper. Having now read three Gardner novels, I thought it would be a shame not to get at least a short essay out of the experience. So I am going to write a little bit about all three. Part of my reason for wanting to read Gardner has to do with the fact that he is mentioned quite a few times in Mike Ripley’s 2017 nonfiction work Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed, an entertaining survey of the mid-20^th-century British thriller novel, which I read earlier this year. Gardner (1926-2007) had a rather interesting life. His father was an Anglican priest. During WWII, Gardner joined Britain’s Home Guard, a voluntary citizens militia, at the age of 14. He had to lie about his age, because the Home Guard was restricted to people seventeen years old or older (though the age restrictions weren’t strictly enforced). At 18, in 1944, he joined Britain’s Fleet Air Arm, and eventually he served in the Royal Marine commandos. After leaving the service, Gardner followed his father into the Anglican priesthood. Five years after his ordination, having lost his belief in god, Gardner dropped out of the priesthood and became a journalist instead. By 1959, he had a developed a serious problem with alcoholism. As part of his effort to wean himself from alcohol, he wrote a memoir called Spin the Bottle (1963) and thus his career as a writer of books was begun.

All three of the Gardner novels I’ve read this year are Nazi thrillers. This isn’t unusual. Gardner entered the British military near the very end of WWII. And, as Mike Ripley points out in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, nearly seventy percent of the British authors who were writing thrillers in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s had served in WWII. The 70s were a golden age for mass-market Nazi thrillers, probably because so many thriller writers of the era had first-hand knowledge of WWII. Bookracks of the era were filled with titles such as The Odessa File, The Boys From Brazil, The Marathon Man, The Eagle Has Landed, Eye of the Needle, and so forth. Given the popularity of the subgenre, I’m surprised that Gardner remained relatively obscure until he was hired to reboot the James Bond literary franchise. The problem, however, is that Gardner’s Nazi thrillers, though well written and highly intelligent, were simply not all that thrilling. They are written with a bit too much British reserve, a problem that never plagued Jack Higgins or Ken Follett or Frederick Forsyth. I read The Nostradamus Traitor very early in the year, back in February, I believe. But when I sat down to write about it for this essay, I had to go online and find a plot summary, because I had largely forgotten the entire story. While looking for a plot summary I came across the original Kirkus Review appraisal of the novel, from way back in 1979. As I read that old review, I felt as if I could have written it myself. It begins: “A jumpy and complex spy puzzle – scooting back and forth between 1941 and 1978 – that’s pretty darn good but should perhaps have been a great deal better; one often has the feeling with the prolific Gardner (The Werewolf Trance) that a really first-rate spy novel would emerge if only he’d give it enough time to grow.” The reviewer then sketches out the plot and agrees with me that it’s a humdinger of an idea. But then he concludes the review by observing, “With Gardner, one admires the cleverness but winds up wondering why the book that leads up to it…never settles down and takes hold.”

I could be wrong, but I believe that the three books I read – published in 1977, 1978, and 1979 – were all written under the influence of Jack Higgins’s 1975 novel, The Eagle Has Landed. Like that novel, all three of the Gardner novels I’ve read start out in the 1970s but then spend a great deal of time exploring events that occurred in the 1940s during WWII. Where Gardner falls short, I think, is that his WWII sections are generally recalled long after the fact by an interview subject who is telling the protagonist about experiences that occurred decades ago. Thus, the WWII exploits lack the immediacy of the exploits recounted in The Eagle Has Landed.

Another problem for Gardner is that he was often very bad at titling his books (this isn’t a flaw in his Bond novels, but those were probably titled by the Ian Fleming Estate). One of his later thrillers is titled Angels Dining at the Ritz, which doesn’t exactly scream “thriller” to me. The Nostradamus Traitor is a decent title and mimics the 1970s (and beyond) trend, popularized by the success of Robert Ludlum, of Article-Adjective-Noun thrillers (The Bourne Identity, The Osterman Weekend, The Valhalla Exchange, The Andromeda Strain, The Odessa File, The Stepford Wives, The Marathon Man, The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Eiger Sanction, The Matlock Papers, The Rhinemann Exchange, The Anderson Tapes, The Tangent Objective, ad infinitum.) He attempts to do the same thing with The Werewolf Trace, but “trace” is such an uninteresting word that it doesn’t work as well. It has no one fixed meaning. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it can be a barely detectable line, a small amount of a chemical, a mark left by something that has passed, a path, a trail, a road, a sign of evidence, the ground plan of a military installation, the intersection of a line with a plane (or the path taken by such a line), and many other things. In Gardner’s novel, it refers to the protagonist’s effort to trace the true identity of a Nazi who was identified in old intelligence reports as “Werewolf.” Gardner could have come up with hundreds of better titles: The Werewolf, Tracking The Werewolf, The Nazi Werewolf, On the Trail of the Werewolf, Heil Werewolf! (a phrase actually used in the novel) etc. God knows why he settled on The Werewolf Trace. (In the Kirkus Review appraisal of The Nostradamus Traitor that I quoted above, The Werewolf Trace is mistakenly referred to as The Werewolf Trance; subconsciously, the reviewer was probably trying to make the book sound more interesting). Even worse is the unforgiveable title The Dancing Dodo, which sounds like a children’s book written by Dr. Seuss. The Dancing Dodo of Gardner’s 1978 novel is a military warplane. Technically, the plane was known as a B-26 Martin Marauder. The Dancing Dodo is simply the nickname given to one particular Marauder by its flight crew (the plane could be notoriously difficult to fly; naming it after a flightless bird was a joke). Had Gardner simply titled the book The Marauder, it would have sounded a lot more thrilling. But because he could have had his fictional aircrew give the plane almost any name – Air Wolf! Air Shark! The Flying Tiger! Death From Above! – it’s inexcusable that he settled on The Dancing Dodo. That title probably helped drive away more thriller fans than it attracted. What’s more, this is actually a novel with a pretty great concept. In the mid 1970s (natch), three schoolboys discover an old British warplane completely buried in an especially swampy part of the famous Romney Marsh. When they look inside they find a crew of skeletons (The Skeleton Crew!). The boys report their find to the authorities. The authorities investigate and discover that the dead crewmembers (identified by their dog tags and other ID) all survived the war and are still alive. What’s more, the plane that was dubbed The Dancing Dodo by its crew, is on record as having been “cannibalized” (disassembled and its parts used for repairs to other planes) before the end of the war. Eventually, it is discovered that the plane in Romney Marsh was actually stolen by the Nazis (with the help of an American traitor), who put a crew of elderly, sick people into the cabin, and equipped the plane with aerosol sprayers filled with a contagion that can trigger a recrudescence of the Black Plague. The Nazis got a pilot to fly it back to Britain, where they were hoping to crash land it near London (after the pilot had strapped a couple of his elderly passengers into the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats and then parachuted himself to safety.) The old people would die in the crash. But as members of the British public rushed to help rescue the British airmen they presumed to be inside the plane, the aerosol canisters would spray the entire area with a contagion powerful enough to wipe out the entire population of England within a few months. The plan didn’t work, because the pilot ran into trouble over Romney Marsh and was forced to parachute to safety there. The plane crashed, killing all aboard, and burying itself under ten feet of swampy marsh mud, not to be discovered for another thirty years. Unfortunately, the aerosol containers of Black Plague (not to be confused with the aerosol bug spray Black Flag) are still on board the plane and still deadly. And the boys who discovered the plane first have all started to grow ill…

This is a great setup! Why on earth would Gardner have attached a title like The Dancing Dodo to such a brilliant story idea? He could have called it The Ghost Plane, The Nazi Ghost Plane, The Revenge of the Nazis, The Plague from the Past, The Last Nazi Air Strike, A Blast From the Past, Hitler’s Ghost, or thousands of other things far more thrilling than The Dancing fucking Dodo! (For American baby boomers like myself, Romney Marsh – which also figures prominently in The Eagle Has Flown, a sequel to the Eagle Has Landed – is best remembered as the setting of The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, one of the most memorable installments of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, a TV show popular in the 1960s. In order to evoke that highly popular TV movie, Gardner could have named his novel The Aircrew of Romney Marsh, which sounds similar.)

Another problem with the three Gardner novels I read is that, though they eventually develop some great twists, it takes forever for him to get there. Not until the last third of The Dancing Dodo does anyone discover that this long-lost plane was actually a Nazi trick intended to destroy the population of Great Britain. Prior to that, the novel is just a basic detective story in which two investigators (a Brit and an American) jot around England, poking their noses into old files and interviewing ancient codgers, looking for clues as to the real identity of the dead airmen in the plane. And this part of the book is only mildly interesting.

The best of the three novels I read is The Werewolf Trace. I won’t recap the entire plot, but the protagonist of the novel fairly quickly figures out that “Werewolf” is a code name used in old British intelligence files to identify a young boy who was a prominent member of the so-called Hitler Youth group. Hitler seemed extremely fond of this lad, leading the Brits to suspect that Werewolf could either be an illegitimate son of his or, perhaps, Helmut Goebbels, the young son of Nazi bigwig Joseph Goebbels, of whom Hitler was fond. After the war, the Brits tracked (or traced) Werewolf, who was spirited away from Germany after Hitler’s death and resettled in South America, where he was raised by a former SS Sturmbannfuhrer known to the Brits only by the codename Moonlight (get it? Moonlight, Werewolf?). So, why do the Brits in 1975 still give a damn about the identity of Werewolf? Well, they lost track of him for awhile, and only recently learned that he has gained British citizenship and become a successful furniture dealer in England, specializing in Scandinavian furniture, which explains his frequent absences to Denmark (which borders Germany). In the mid 1970s, Britain’s political scene was a mess (what else is new?). The IRA were exploding bombs in London on a regular basis. Striking workers were crippling a number of industries. Socialist politicians were starting to gain some traction with the British public. And MI5 is now worried that Werewolf has come to Britain waiting for a moment like this to lead a nationalist/socialist takeover of Britain that he will eventually spread across Europe, giving rise to a Fourth Reich! Or something like that…

Again, this is a great set up, and it probably owes a lot to Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil. But too much of the novel is wasted simply describing protagonist Victor Cooling’s efforts to track down the identity of Werewolf. When he finally figures out that Werewolf is now a supposedly reputable British businessman calling himself Joseph Gotterson, he then wastes a lot of time in a highly improbable effort to scare Gotterson into believing that the ghosts of dead Nazis are conspiring to ruin his effort to give rise to a Fourth Reich. Or something like that…

The scare tactics that Cooling uses to turn Gotterson’s family home (which he shares with a lovely wife, a young daughter, and a German shepherd), though far fetched, are kind of fun. But it might have been a better novel if Gardner had made it genuinely supernatural rather than just faux supernatural. But Gardner does make at least one brilliant choice. Somewhere along the way, as Cooling and company are trying to drive Gotterson mad in an effort to get him to confess that he is Hitler’s (or Goebbel’s) son, the reader’s sympathy gradually switches from Cooling to Gotterson. And in the end (SPOILER!), after Cooling’s mind games have caused Gotterson to commit suicide, the British are exposed as villainous and Gotterson is revealed to have been simply a good and decent British businessman driven to self-destruction by MI5 agents determined to prove that he was some kind reincarnation of Hitler.

These days, as I read and re-read a lot of the Nazi thrillers of the mid-to-late 20^th century, I’m struck by how often the Nazis (or Nazi-adjacent characters) are portrayed in a positive light. In The Eagle Has Landed, famous Nazis such as Himmler and Hitler are, naturally, portrayed as villains, but almost all of the men they employ to kidnap Churchill are kind and sympathetic characters (one even lays down his life to save the lives of two British children). Some of those same sympathetic Nazis return in The Eagle Has Flown, and remain sympathetic. Gotterson is the most sympathetic character in The Werewolf Trace. Even Faber, the Nazi at the center of Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle, is portrayed as a somewhat honorable person and, for most of the book, the reader roots for him not to get caught. This is a phenomenon — sympathy for the devil, if you will — that I hadn’t much noticed before, but I find it fascinating and may write about it in greater detail later.

I have now read three John Gardner novels without loving any of them, but I am determined to read more. His writing seems intelligent and well above average for a pop fictioneer. Alas, he occasionally wanders into a thicket of clichés from which he cannot seem to escape: “He thought he would give them a run for their money. The Deputy Director had said they would be watching his back, but he knew that covered a multitude of sins.” His biggest sin is that he conceives of sensational plots but refuses to exploit the innate sensationalism of the idea. But I have high hopes for his Railton Family Saga, a series of three long novels that follow a family of British spies through the better part of the 20^th century. I have already acquired Book One, The Secret Generations. I won’t get to it right away, but when I do read it I shall report back to you.

I have commented often about the many memorable 20^th-century popular novels – The Dirty Dozen, Rosemary’s Baby, Marathon Man, The Graduate, The Exorcist, Six Days of the Condor, etc. – that were followed up by perfectly forgettable sequels – A Dirty Distant War, Son of Rosemary, Brothers, Home School, Legion, Shadow of the Condor, and so forth. Some hugely entertaining late 20^th-century pop fictions – Michael Tolkin’s The Player, John Grisham’s The Firm, Tom Perrotta’s Election – have been followed up with wretched 21^st-century sequels – The Return of the Player, The Exchange, Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Wretched sequels – Return to Peyton Place, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit II, Psycho II, Beyond the Chocolate War – to famous novels are practically a genre unto themselves. And then there is the subgenre of wretched sequels written by someone who didn’t write the first book. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, and countless other pop-fiction classics have gotten sequels that were written and published long after the original book’s author had died, sequels that the original author probably would have hated.

But I have come here today not to bury the pop-fiction sequel but to praise it. Plenty of great pop fictions – A.B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon – have been followed up by sequels that were as good or better than the original – The Way West, The Silence of the Lambs. (Alas, Guthrie Followed up The Way West with four less worthy sequels, and Harris followed up The Silence of the Lambs with two less worthy sequels; some guys just don’t know when to quit). Today I want to talk about one hugely popular 20^th-century bestseller that got, in a roundabout kind of way, a very good, if underappreciated sequel. The original book was Jack Higgins’s Nazi thriller, The Eagle Has Landed, the fifth bestselling novel of 1975. I recently wrote a long appreciation of that novel so I won’t recap it all again here. One of the main characters in TEHL is Liam Devlin, a Catholic from Northern Ireland and a member of the Irish Republican Army. Because the members of the IRA hated Great Britain, they tended to side with Germany during WWII. Devlin actually went to Germany, to escape Scotland Yard, and wound up working with other Germans in a scheme that involved sneaking into Great Britain and kidnapping Winston Churchill and bringing him back to Germany. That effort ended poorly, and Devlin was one of the only members of the team to make it out of England alive. In the early 1980s, Higgins resurrected Devlin in two more books, Touch the Devil (1982) and Confessional (1985). But these weren’t really sequels to TEHL. They are set in the 1970s and 80s and deal with Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” and other Cold War-era issues. Devlin is the hero of those books but he’s in his sixties by then and WWII is far behind him.

Fortunately, in 1990, Higgins went to the Devlin well one more time and produced The Eagle Has Flown, a genuine sequel to The Eagle Has Landed. The kidnapping tale of TEHL ends in early November, 1943. The action in The Eagle Has Flown begins a few weeks later, in late November 1943. Both novels have framing stories set in 1975, brief sections at the beginning and the end that tell how “Jack Higgins” came to learn about this (supposedly true) story. Minus the framing devices, you could read TEHL and TEHF back-to-back as one long WWII adventure novel. Had Higgins published The Eagle Has Flown a year or two after The Eagle Has Landed it would almost certainly have been a massive bestseller. Alas, by 1990, Higgins was no longer a mainstay of the bestseller lists, and Nazi thrillers were beginning to become a bit passé, as legal thrillers, forensic thrillers, and techno-thrillers began to dominate the thriller genre. This is a shame, because The Eagle Has Flown is nearly as good as The Eagle Has Landed. TEHL is much denser, with more of a sense of place and more character description. Much of that novel is set in a small fictional town called Studley Constable, located on the east coast of England in the county of Norfolk. Because few readers probably know much about small-town life in Norfolk, Higgins wisely spent a great deal of time detailing the life and people of Studley Constable. But the British sections of The Eagle Has Flown are set mainly in London, a place that has been depicted countless times in books, films, and TV shows. Thus, Higgins didn’t feel the need to describe it as exhaustively. What’s more, many of the characters in TEHF also appeared in TEHL, and thus Higgins doesn’t bother much with reiterating their back-stories. As a result, however, The Eagle Has Flown moves at a much zippier pace than The Eagle Has Landed.

The plot of TEHF is sort of a streamlined version of TEHL. In the first novel, Devlin enters England with a German officer named Colonel Kurt Steiner. Steiner has thirteen soldiers under his command. Together these fifteen men will try to remove Winston Churchill from England. In TEHF, it is only Devlin himself who enters England. And this time he is there to try to rescue Colonel Steiner, who was shot dead at the end of TEHL. Obviously, Higgins had to retcon a different ending on to TEHL in order to make it worthwhile for Devlin to sneak back into England. So, in the early pages of TEHF, we learn that, although Steiner was believed to have been shot dead in the act of trying to kill Churchill (after the kidnapping has clearly failed), he was rushed to a hospital where emergency surgery managed to save his life. After convalescing for a bit, he was sent to the Tower of London as a POW. Plenty of German spies were caught in the UK in WWII and sent to the Tower. The most famous of these was Rudolf Hess. Most spies were eventually either persuaded to turn against the Nazis or executed. Hess, because he was high-ranking (and a bit of a lunatic) survived the war and was later tried for war crimes at Nuremburg and sent to Spandau Prison in Germany, where he remained until committing suicide in 1987.

One weakness in The Eagle Has Flown is the pretext for rescuing Steiner from England. In real life, the Nazis aren’t known to have made any great effort to rescue Hess or any other German prisoners held in England. The odds against success were just too great. No high-ranking Nazi would, in real life, have expended much effort to rescue a POW like Steiner, who was given the nearly suicidal kidnapping mission primarily because he was on the SS’s shit list and was regarded as completely expendable. Nonetheless, in The Eagle Has Landed, the kidnapping of Churchill was overseen almost entirely by Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Reich-hand man. Himmler keeps quiet about it, concealing knowledge of it from Hitler. If it succeeds, Himmler plans to take all the credit. If it fails, Himmler will disavow all knowledge of it. As The Eagle Has Flown opens, the kidnap attempt has clearly failed. Himmler’s excuse for wanting to retrieve Steiner from England is that, “The man is a hero of the Reich, a true hero. We can’t leave him in British hands.” And so he puts German General Walter Schellenberg in charge of finding Devlin and sending him back into England to retrieve Steiner. In fact, Himmler has no intention of celebrating Steiner as a hero of the Reich. He simply wants to eliminate all the evidence of his failed kidnap plan before Hitler can hear about it. He wants Devlin to bring Steiner back to Germany, where Himmler will have them both killed in order to cover up his involvement in the disastrous kidnap plan. This doesn’t make a lot of sense because, as Higgins notes, the British have kept the lid on the entire failed kidnap plan. They don’t want to the public to know how close the Nazis came to actually kidnapping Churchill on British soil. So Steiner’s name is never likely to appear in any British messaging. Himmler doesn’t need to silence Steiner because the British are doing so already.

But that’s a minor quibble. The rest of the book mirrors TEHL in many ways, but TEHF is, as noted, streamlined, more zippy. But, like TEHL, it is filled with fascinating details about airplanes, parachutes, shortwave radio communications, the British coastline, the operation of the SS, the operation of Britain’s SOE (Special Operations Executive, a wartime intelligence agency), and more. Early in the novel, the British move Kurt Steiner from the Tower of London to a 17^th century convent known as St. Mary’s Priory, which has been converted into a hospice during the war. It is located in Wapping, on the Thames. The Priory itself is almost a character in the story, and is described in fascinating detail. It has catacombs that run beneath the Thames and have long been forgotten about by the nuns and priests now running the hospice. When the Thames is at low tide, an old brick-lined passageway that leads into the Priory is partially exposed. Devlin hopes to use this forgotten passageway to get Steiner out of the priory.

Complicating matters is the fact that Brigadier Dougal Munro, of the SOE, is expecting Devlin to make an attempt to rescue Steiner and he is hoping to catch Devlin in the act. Munro had Steiner moved from the Tower of London to St. Mary’s Priory precisely because he figured it would be easier for Devlin to break into. Thus, while sneaking through those underground passageways, Devlin may be walking right into a trap. Further complicating matters for Devlin is the fact that, just as in TEHL, he will have to deal with a couple of brothers, both of them British gangsters and foul tempered, who want him dead. As in TEHL, bad weather, poor visibility, and unexpected roadblocks will require Devlin again and again to improvise his way out of a seemingly inescapable jam.

At first, the stakes in this book don’t seem anywhere near as high as they were in TEHL. In the first novel, a successful extraction of Churchill could force the British to agree to a negotiated settlement of the war. In TEHF, a successful extraction of Steiner from St. Mary’s Priory isn’t going to hurt Britain much and won’t help the Germans at all (except Himmler). Perhaps sensing this problem, late in the book, Higgins ups the ante. General Schellenberg learns that Himmler and his SS goons are planning to assassinate Hitler (as well as General Irwin Rommel and Admrial Wilhelm Canaris) at an upcoming event and then implant Himmler as the leader of Germany. Shellenberg loaths Hitler but, like Canaris (who was actively trying to sabotage the Nazis), he believes that the war will end sooner if a madman like Hitler remains in charge of Germany. Himmler was every bit as evil as Hitler but he was less crazy and a better manager of operations. Schellenberg believes the War could go on for years and years if Himmler replaces Hitler. For that reason, he wants Steiner to return to Germany in time to lead a special group of soldiers who will prevent the assault on Hitler. This ups the ante, but it doesn’t exactly matter to the average 21^st-century American if Hitler or Himmler leads the Nazis. Both were monsters. Still, this added twist is a fun one and gives some urgency to the matter of returning Steiner to Germany.

Hitler, as depicted in this novel, is pretty much at the end of his mental tether. His sanity is almost gone and he is relying almost entirely on astrologers and psychics for tactical advice. This clashes with other portraits of Hitler in popular fiction. In Daniel Silva’s 1996 novel The Unlikely Spy, Hitler correctly believes that the Allied invasion of Europe will occur at Normandy, but his top military advisers insist that it will take place at Calais. Eventually, Hitler relents and prepares for an invasion at Calais, with disastrous results. In The Eagle Has Flown, Rommel, Canaris, and every other top advisor to Hitler assures him that the invasion will be at Normandy. But Hitler, whose astrologer has insisted that the invasion will come at Calais, refuses to believe them. I don’t know all the facts of the matter, but a quick AI check online tells me that Hitler was expecting the attack to come at Calais. He believed the invasion of Normandy to be a feint. Thus, Higgins’s depiction of Hitler’s state of mind would appear to be more accurate than Silva’s. If AI is to be trusted, that is.

The ending of The Eagle Has Flown is fun, exciting, and far-fetched. Just like the ending to The Eagle Has Landed. If The Eagle Has Flown had been published in 1977, it would probably now be remembered as one of the bestselling novels of the 1970s. As it is, the book languishes in relative obscurity. At Goodreads.com, this 31-year-old novel has garnered only 172 reader reviews. Eye of the Needle, a similar WWII espionage novel, published in 1978, has over 5,000 reader reviews. In bestsellers as in espionage, timing is everything.

In the past week, my wife and I tried to watch two streaming series about young adults. The first was The Shards, set among high school seniors in the summer of 1981 and the months that follow. This series is based on a semi-autobiographical 2023 novel by Brett Easton Ellis, who was born in the last year of the Baby Boom, which makes him, essentially, part of Gen X. I admire some of Ellis’s work but I am not a big fan. The TV show was created by Ellis and Ryan Murphy. I have loathed every Ryan Murphy production I’ve ever tried to watch, and I expected to loath this one, too, although I was hoping to be entertained by a nostalgic trip back to 1981 (the hair, the clothes, the cars, the music), lots of real-estate porn, and depictions of Ellis’s early years as an aspiring writer (the main character of the novel and series is named Bret and is clearly based on the author). Alas, the characters were all so insufferable and repellent (a frequent aspect of the work of both Ellis and Murphy) that my wife and I switched channels after about ten minutes. Over the next few days, we made a few more stabs (pun intended; the story features a knife-wielding assassin) at The Shards but still couldn’t manage to get interested in it.

Fortunately, the other teenage drama we streamed turned out to be immensely watchable. Sterling Point is the story of Annie Jacobsen, a rising high-school senior (or perhaps a recent graduate; she’s just about to turn 18 when the show begins) who lives with her wealthy father, Steven, and her twin brother, Connor, in a luxurious New York City home. Annie and Connor were adopted by Steven and his late wife, Goldie, as infants. Annie and Connor have been told that Goldie died of cancer when they were two years old, but they’ve never really been satisfied with this explanation for her disappearance. Her death occurred under mysterious circumstances while she was away in Canada, presumably visiting her father. They know very little about Goldie’s background, because Steven refuses to talk about her. So they are somewhat surprised when a lawyer shows up at their townhouse to inform them that their maternal grandfather has died and left them an expensive piece of property in his will: an island in a rural part of Canada known as Sterling Point, which lies a bit outside of Toronto and appears to be accessible only by seaplane. Connor and Annie never even knew they had a Grandpa Gordon. In fact, they know nothing about Goldie’s side of the family. Annie has long wanted to know more about her mother, and the death of Grandpa Gordon inspires her to sneak off to Sterling Point and try to find the truth about her mother’s mysterious life and death.

I’m not going to delve into the plot too much because, while I found it enjoyable, it was almost beside the point for me (and it is filled with surprising developments that I don’t want to spoil for you). I’m also not going to say much about the adult characters in this series. The adult actors are all strong – Jay Duplass, Missi Pyle, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, etc. – but for me, the adults here were like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon: basically just background noise. As an old fart (I turn 68 in a few days), I know very little about so-called Zoomers (born circa 1997-2012). I worked with some of them during my stint at an Amazon warehouse back in the Pandemic days, and I found them to be excellent co-workers and kind people. I have some Zoomer greatgrandchildren whom, alas, I rarely see (they are widely scattered). I have had some Zoomer neighbors whom I was very fond of. And I follow several Zoomer bookstagrammers online (my favorite is Rae of raes.book.corner). I am no expert on the species, but two recent cultural products have gotten me rather interested in them. The first of these was the recent hit horror film Obsession, written and directed by Curry Baker. This is ostensibly a thriller about a young man named Bear (Michael Johnston) who employs a magical device to make the girl he’s secretly crushing on, Nikki (a world-class performance by Inde Navarrette), fall in love with him. The thriller aspects were great, but for me the movie was much more interesting as a statement on just how fraught with peril the dating scene has become in an era where making some sort of inappropriate advance to a classmate or co-worker might possibly cause a young man to find himself the victim of cancel-culture if the girl should take offense at his advances and complain about them online. There is little chance of Nikki trying to shame Bear online. In the beginning of the film, Bear and Nikki are good (platonic) friends, and she probably knows that he has a crush on her. Nonetheless, Bear, during his childhood, probably saw the way that inappropriate boyfriend behavior derailed the careers of celebrities like Aziz Ansari and Armie Hammer, and thus he seems unable to come out and simply ask Nikki for a date. I haven’t been on the dating scene since 1980, but these days I keep hearing that young people are having less sex than the members of previous generations, and are conducting more and more of their interactions with friends via electronic devices, making them somewhat socially retarded when it comes to face-to-face interactions. I don’t know how true that is, but Bear’s incredible reticence when it comes to asking Nikki out seems to suggest that he struggles to discuss serious matters of the heart with an actual real-life girl, even one as receptive to his conversation as Nikki seems to be.

We hear often from the media just how different today’s young people are from the young Boomers or Gen Xers and maybe even the young Millennials. But this was the first cultural document that really made me feel just how difficult it can be for young people who grew up during the Great Awokening (or what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refers to as Woke I) to express themselves freely. I feel sorry for these kids, because the Great Awokening had nothing to do with them. It began around 2014, when the oldest Zoomers were 17 and the youngest only 2. They didn’t start that fire, or even really fuel it much, but it seems to have engulfed them anyway.

Sterling Point shows us the female side of the Zoomer equation (although it has plenty of interesting male Zoomer characters, as well). The show’s four most interesting characters are Annie Jacobson (Ella Rubin), and three girls she meets up in Canada: Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), Oona (Bo Bragason), and Maple (Mable Strachan). When Annie first arrives at her grandfather’s cabin at Sterling Point she finds herself confronted by 16-year-old Ramona, who claims that Gordon was her grandfather and that the house and island, by rights, belong to her. As the girls exchange background info, it soon seems possible that they might be related, possibly even sisters. Ramona has had a longtime crush on Oona, a slightly older girl and a much more outgoing lesbian than Ramona. Oona sleeps around with a lot of attractive female visitors to Sterling Point. This frustrates Ramona, who – somewhat like Bear with Nikki – is too shy to tell Oona how attracted to her she is. Thus the relationship between Oona and Ramona is currently just platonic. Maple is Oona’s 12-year-old sister and an apparent intellectual genius trapped in a young girl’s body. Oona and Maple’s mother has (once again) run off with some young male love interest and left them to get along without her (for all practical purposes, Oona is Maple’s mother). They live together in a houseboat that makes for a sexy piece of real-estate porn but is probably not all that comfortable or practical. As the summer wears on, all four of these girls will become entwined with each other’s lives. Making that entwinement difficult is the fact that they are Zoomers (although Maple is a bit younger than the rest) and, though they are each capable of talking a blue streak (particularly Annie), they suffer from a bit of the social retardation that afflicted Bear in Obsession. They are terrified of offending each other so they tend to tiptoe around delicate subjects and to hide their real feelings from each other. Each of them says “I’m sorry” more often in a day than most Boomers did in a month when they were the same age. The woke culture they were raised in seems to have made them reticent to an almost crippling degree, afraid of opening their mouths for fear that they might say something racist or homophobic or ableist or just plain hurtful. None of these girls have real mothers, so they tend to tiptoe around that fact in conversation – until, of course, they don’t. Their interactions with each other seem to consist of evasive bouts of shyness, followed by sudden bursts of oversharing, which often result in temporary estrangement from each other. It struck me as an exhausting way to live. But the actresses are soooo good in their roles that I feel almost certain that they were encouraged to ad-lib much of their dialog. Every word from their mouths, no matter how awkward, felt authentic to me in a way that TV dialog rarely does. Amélie Hoeferle as Ramona (pictured above) is particularly great, and her performance is an absolute clinic in how to depict both reticence and oversharing in the same character, sometimes in the same scene.

Much of my experience of Zoomers comes from watching Bookstagram videos in which they recommend books to each other. They tend to be super-sensitive to people’s feelings and are always warning their viewers that, although they enjoyed a certain book, it might prove triggering to anyone uncomfortable with depictions of suicide, or sexual abuse, or racism, or gun violence, or homophobia. The same is true when Zoomers recommend books on Goodreads.com or Amazon.com. They will recommend a book and then apologize to anyone who may find the subject matter inappropriate. Zoomers didn’t invent this behavior out of thin air. It seems to have developed simply as a byproduct of being raised during the Great Awokening when hurting the feelings of some member of a “vulnerable community” was treated as a capital crime. These poor young people always seem to be walking on eggshells (or, perhaps, talking on eggshells). After watching Obsession and Sterling Point, I couldn’t stop thinking of them as Generation Eggshell. Sterling Point is one of the best series I’ve seen this year and after binging it over the weekend with my wife, I wanted to go out on the street and give a great big hug to every Zoomer I came across (talk about inappropriate behavior!).

There is a popular saying, first coined by G. Michael Hopf, that goes, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.” I first mentioned this a few years back when I wrote about the several generations of Nebraskans depicted in Beth Streeter Aldrich’s novels With a Lantern in Her Hand and A White Bird Flying. The original pioneers to Nebraska lived achingly hard lives, carving an agricultural civilization out of some of the harshest territory in America. Their children grew up watching these hard times, but when they became adults they were able to go into careers as teachers and bankers and lawyers. Their lives were easier, but they had been toughened in their youth by watching various siblings, parents, and neighbors die of disease, starvation, or farming accidents. But the children of those bankers, lawyers, teachers, and such, knowing almost nothing about the hard times of their parents and grandparents, grew up much less able to handle hardship than the previous two generations were. The Zoomers have grown up in times when it was incredibly difficult to express yourself – in school, online, with friends, in interactions with members of the opposite sex – for fear of saying something that might make you an online pariah. As a result, though often very smart and articulate, they seem somewhat stunted in their conversational skills (if Sterling Point is in any way accurate, that is). Hopefully, when the Zoomers have children of their own, they will allow them a lot more freedom to speak their minds than their parents had during the Great Awokening and its aftermath. I’m hopeful that the Zoomers will encourage their children to be thick-skinned when it comes to people trying to police their speech. If that happens Generation Eggshell might produce Generation Rhinoceros.

Among the older Zoomers I have followed online are plenty of impressive readers and writers. But I fear that as Zoomers begin publishing books (some already have) they will write with the same excessive reluctance to offend with which they tend to talk. This will be particularly damaging to pop fiction, in my opinion, which has generally been unafraid to offend its readers. The opening pages of William Goldman’s classic 1974 thriller, Marathon Man, contain the words “Krauts,” “Huns,” “jigaboos,” “heathen Chinee,” and many another racial slur. Here are the opening lines of Stephen Hunter’s 1994 thriller, Dirty White Boys: “Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had bigger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar’s own figuring, hardly human at all. His was the largest penis ever seen on a white man in that prison or any of the others in which Lamar had spent so much of his adult life. It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny thing that hardly looked at all like what it was but rather like some form of rubber tubing.”

Submit a story with that opening line to a creative writing workshop at Oberlin or Kenyon or the University of Iowa and the police are likely to be called. In my recent essay criticizing the New York Times’s list of the Fifty Best Thrillers of the 20^th Century, I lamented the list’s lack of conservative writers (such as Frederick Forsyth, Andrew Klavan, Joe Carr, Michael Crichton, Dean L. Koontz, etc.). One of my readers, not unreasonably, accused me of allowing my essay to “devolve into a rightwing pity party, echoing what we hear from ‘conservatives’ about the absence of their voices in Hollywood and academia.” In my response, I noted that I have been a registered Democrat for my entire adult life and that in a recent essay about Jack Higgins’s 1975 thriller, The Eagle Has Landed, I compared Donald Trump to Hitler. I am neither reliably leftwing nor rightwing. I am opposed to illegal immigration, but I support same-sex marriage. I am in favor of both abortion rights and capital punishment. I loathe cancel culture from both the left and the right. I want free speech both for the rightwingers I disagree with and the leftwingers I disagree with. I try to emphasize with all kinds of people, and while reading the Times’s list I could imagine a lot of conservative readers feeling disappointed that the list comprised so many MFA-holding grads of elite colleges whose writing tends to betray a left-leaning bias (blacks and gays are almost never villains; conservative politicians and rich white bankers and developers are almost always revealed as bad people; and as for devout southern Christian rednecks – forget about it). Conservative-coded thrillers tend to feature military men, often Christian ones, in a strong and positive light. I don’t think that sort of thing should disqualify a book from consideration for a Best Thrillers list.

The Times, of course, isn’t known as the Gray Lady for nothing. It’s a famously stuffy publication and when it tries to comment on popular trends it often sounds as if your grandmother is trying to beatbox. In a recent editorial, a Times writer had this to say about Zoomers and their fashion choices: “Why is everybody under the age of 30 these days dressed like an actual lunatic? It seems no one has even worn clothes before. JNCO jeans with a blazer, a cardigan sweater tucked into camo pants with no belt, a T-shirt over a peasant dress with sleeves pulled through with a belt?! And for an era when people ask strangers online to rate their fit, it’s genuinely insane how poorly everyone’s clothing fits. High-waisted jeans bell out over women’s navels while flared or boot-fit cuffs clang around their calves; untucked shirts hang off the sides like paper-doll clothes; nobody’s wearing the right shoes. You’ll see a perfectly fine-looking young man in an NFL T-shirt and gym shorts, and then he’ll be wearing a pair of penny loafers over sweat socks. Worst of all, everything’s clean. Wildly clean, clean and creased, as if it had just come out of a drop-ship envelope. And the less said about the haircuts, frankly, the better.”

Okay, boomer. Ironically, the Times is often notoriously behind the times. When the ground-breaking 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde was released, the Times’s lead film reviewer, Bosley Crowther wrote not one, not two, but three negative reviews of it! Years from now, people are going to look back at the Times’s 50 Best Thrillers of the 21^st Century and wonder where the hell C.J. Box and Tess Gerritsen and Mark Greaney and Andrew Klavan and Joe Carr are.

But my biggest problem with the Times’s list is that many of the books on it are decent crime novels or works of psychological suspense or twist-filled mysteries, but very few of them are actually pulse-pounding, page-turning thrillers. Most of them are rather slow burners. And many of them seem overlong. A 1,074-page thriller (like Stephen King’s Under the Dome) is pretty much a contradiction in terms. Most of the great thrillers I grew up with – Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Jaws, Eye of the Needle, Six Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, Where Are The Children?, The Eagle Has Landed, The Andromeda Strain – tended to be under 400 pages, some of them well under.

Another problem for me is that many of the “thrillers” identified by the Times have very unthrilling openings. Times critic A.O. Scott raved about the opening three paragraphs of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which feature a husband describing the back of his wife’s head. This is a good opening for a novel of psychological suspense (which Gone Girl is) but not so much for a thriller (which Gone Girl isn’t). The Times’s list is heavy with writers such as Megan Abbott, Tana French, Oyinkan Braithwaite, and Kate Atkinson: highly educated, female, writers whom I presume are fairly liberal in their politics. Nothing wrong with that. But here is how such writers tend to begin their “thrillers”:

From The Secret Place by Tana French: “There’s this song that keeps coming on the radio, but Holly can only ever catch bits of it. ‘Remember oh remember back when we were,’ a girl’s voice clear and urgent, the fast light beat lifting you up off your toes and speeding your heart to keep up, and then it’s gone. She keeps trying to ask the others ‘What is it?’ but she never catches enough to ask about. It’s always slipping in through the cracks when they are in the middle of talking about something important or when they have to run for the bus; by the time things go quiet again it’s gone, there’s just silence, or Rhianna or Nicki Minaj pounding silence away.”

From Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott (for my convenience, I’m eliminating the many paragraph breaks): “I guess I always knew, in some subterranean way, Diane and I would end up back together. We are bound, ankle to ankle, a monstrous three-legged race. Accidental accomplices. Wary conspirators. Or Siamese twins, fused in some hidden place. It’s that powerful, this thing we share. A murky history, its narrative near impenetrable. We keep telling it to ourselves, noting its twists and turns, trying to make sense of it. And hiding it from everyone else. Sometimes it feels as if Diane was a corner of myself broken off and left to roam my body, floating through my blood. On occasional nights, stumbling to the bathroom after a bad dream, a Diane dream, I avoid the mirror, averting my eyes, leaving the light off, some primitive part of my half-asleep brain certain that if I looked, she might be there…So, even though I haven’t seen her in a dozen years, it isn’t truly a surprise when Diane appears at the Severin Lab, my workplace, the building in which I spend most of my waking life. ‘Of all the labs in all the world, she had to walk into mine.’ And everything begins again. The strangest part is how little we actually know about each other. Not our birthdays, our favorite songs, who made our hearts beat faster, or didn’t. We were friends, if Diane is friends with anyone, only for a few months, and long ago. But we do know the one thing no one else in the world knows about the other. The only important thing.”

This is perfectly fine writing, the kind of opening lines you might find in a novel of domestic ennui by Anne Tyler or Ann Patchett. I like both those writers but neither is a thriller writer, unless you consider the human heart in conflict with itself thrilling. But let’s explore some opening lines from the kind of books that I consider genuine thrillers:

From Jackdaws by Ken Follett: “One minute before the explosion, the square at Sainte-Cecile was at peace. The evening was warm, and a layer of still air covered the town like a blanket. The church bell tolled a lazy beat, calling worshippers to the service with little enthusiasm. To Felicity Clairet it sounded like a countdown.”

From Time to Hunt by Stephen Hunter: “We are in the presence of a master sniper. He lies, almost preternaturally still, on hard stone. The air is thin, still cold; he doesn’t shake or tremble.”

From Phantoms by Dean Koontz: “The scream was distant and brief. A woman’s scream. Deputy Paul Henderson looked up from his copy of Time. He cocked his head, listening.”

From Bloodstream by Tess Gerritsen: “If she was still enough, quiet enough, he would not find her. He might think he knew all her hiding places, but he had never discovered her secret niche, this small hollow in the cellar wall, concealed by the shelves of her mother’s canning jars. As a young child she had easily slipped into this space, and every game of hide and seek had found her curled up in her lair, giggling at his frustration as he thumped from room to room, searching for her. Sometimes the game would go on so long she’d fall asleep, and would waken hours later to the sound of her mother’s voice worriedly calling her name. Now here she was again, in her cellar hiding place, but she was no longer a child. She was fourteen and barely able to squeeze into the niche. And this was no lighthearted game of hide and seek.”

From The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins: “On precisely one o’clock on the morning of Saturday, November 6, 1943, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS and chief of State Police, received a simple message: The Eagle has landed.’ It meant that a small force of German paratroopers were at that moment safely in England and poised to snatch the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, from the Norfolk country house where he was spending a quiet weekend near the sea.”

From The Gray Man by Mark Greaney: “A flash of light in the distant morning sky captured the attention of the Land Rover’s blood-soaked driver. Polarized Oakleys shielded his eyes from the brunt of the sun’s rays; still, he squinted through the windshield’s glare, desperate to identify the burning aircraft that now spun and hurtled towards the earth, a smoldering comet’s tail of black smoke left hanging above it.”

From The Cobra by Frederick Forsyth: “The teenage boy was dying alone. No one knew and only one would have cared. He lay, skeletal from a life ruined by drugs, on a stinking palliasse in the corner of a filthy room in an abandoned block. The slum was in one of the failed housing schemes called a ‘project’ in Anacostia, a part of Washington, D.C., of which the city is not proud and which tourists never visit. If the boy had known his death was going to start a war, he would neither have understood nor cared. That is what drug abuse does to a young mind. It destroys it.”

From The Hunter by Tom Wood: “The target looked older than in the photographs. The glow from the streetlight accentuated the deep lines in his face and pallid, almost sickly complexion. To Victor the man seemed on edge, either high on nervous energy or maybe just too much caffeine. But whatever his explanation, it wasn’t going to matter thirty seconds from now.”

From Andrew Klavan’s Werewolf Cop (the title alone is a work of thriller genius, like Snakes on a Plane): “Lots of bodies. Lots of blood. So much disassembled humanity lay strewn from one end of the fourth-floor railroad flat to the other that even the veteran detectives surveyed the puddled gore with chalk-white faces. Even the men and one woman of the Crime Scene Unit refrained from making the kind of ironical remarks they had learned from watching TV cop shows. They went about their business in near silence, literally counting heads to determine just how many souls had been dispatched into the mystery.”

You can argue that the prose of Tana French or Megan Abbott is finer and more literary than the writing of the above, more commercial writers. You’d probably even be correct. But their opening lines are not thrilling opening lines. The commercial writers have done their homework and they know how to open a thriller novel. French and Abbott have probably also done their homework, and they have probably decided to subvert their readers’ expectations by giving them something different. Fine. But don’t call a novel a thriller if it is trying to subvert the genre’s expectations. It may be many things – a brilliant piece of literature, a crime novel, a mystery, whatever – but it isn’t a thriller if it isn’t trying to thrill the reader from practically the very first sentence.

And that is my fear for the upcoming writers of the Zoomer generation. That they will be good, talented people who will have been cowed into reticence and a fear of offending anyone by “Woke I” (God only knows what terrors Woke II will unleash). And they have been trained by the Times and its “experts” to believe that a thriller novel can read an awful lot like a novel of domestic ennui. That combination is likely to lead to an entire generation of thriller writers who can’t really offer their readers many thrills. It’s possible that their offspring, Generation Rhinoceros, will produce some great thriller writers. I certainly hope so. But I’ll be long dead before they are old enough to do so. Fortunately, there are probably still enough excellent late-20^th century thrillers that I haven’t read yet to keep me in heart-pounding suspense for another twenty years or so, at which point my heart is likely to stop pounding for good. I guess that won’t be such a bad way to go.

Today, the New York Times published a list of the fifty best thrillers of the 21^st Century. It will not surprise you to hear that I was underwhelmed by their choices. I was not surprised to see that Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel, Gone Girl, was the overwhelming favorite of the many writers and influencers who helped compile the list. I found the novel disappointing but I can’t deny that it is one of the most influential pieces of popular fiction of the century so far. It has inspired dozens and dozens of imitators, most of them with somewhat similar titles: The Girl in the Window, Gone, And Then She Was Gone, The Girl on the Train, The Girl in Cabin 9, and so forth. Ever since Gone Girl became a monster bestseller, words like “missing” and “girl” and “vanished” have been proliferating on the covers of pop thrillers.

In second place is Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, which strikes me as more of a mystery novel than a straight-out thriller, but it is nonetheless an excellent book. Also on the list (in 17^th place) is Lehane’s Shutter Island, which I think is one of the best thrillers of all time. Good job, New York Times!

In third place is Tana French’s 2007 novel, Into the Woods. French landed several other titles on the list as well. I have never been able to get through a Tana French novel. They strike me as slow-moving and ponderous crime novels rather than thrillers. I wasn’t even able to get through the miniseries adaptation of Into The Woods.

In fourth place we find The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson’s 2008 Nordic thriller. I tried to read it and failed. I tried to watch both film versions but also failed.

In fifth place we have No Country for Old Men. I am a McCarthy skeptic but even I enjoyed this novel. Would I rate it among the fifty best thrillers of the young century? I don’t know, but I would rank it way above the work of Tana French or Stieg Larsson.

In sixth place we have Oyinkan Braithwaite’s 2018 novel, My Sister, The Serial Killer. Though I enjoyed this book, I wasn’t thrilled by it and the title is about the best thing it has going for it.

Jumping ahead to ninth place we find Mick Herron’s Slow Horses. I am perfectly happy with this choice.

In twelfth place is Paula Hawkins’s 2015 megabestseller, The Girl on the Train. I found the book unreadable and the film unwatchable.

Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, a 2004 novel, is thirteenth on the list. I liked this detective novel a lot, but I don’t think of it as a thriller. But I’m okay with the choice.

In the 18^th spot is Stephen King’s 11/22/63. I couldn’t finish this book and I couldn’t get through the miniseries. Nonetheless, I am a clear outlier here. When I was working at a local bookstore I sold a ton of copies of this book and I heard from plenty of customers who claimed it was their all-time favorite book. The book gets tons of love from Instagram influencers (Bookstagrammers, as they are sometimes called). Clearly, I am wrong about this one.

In 21^st place we find the literary phenomenon know as Room, Emma Donoghue’s 2010 bestseller. I couldn’t get through either the book or the film, but I appear to be one of the only people who didn’t love either.

In 22^nd place we have John le Carre’s 2001 novel, The Constant Gardner. I admire le Carre and have read several of his novels, but I’ve never been thrilled by any of them. Nonetheless, I have enjoyed many film and TV adaptations of his work – The Night Manager, The Russia House, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, etc. Alas, I couldn’t make it through The Constant Gardner either in book or film form. Probably bad taste on my part.

At 23^rd place we find another book (and film) I couldn’t get through, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. The reviewer for the Substack called Leave It (Un)Read had this to say about the novel: “The Goldfinch is a mystifying slog with a whiny cipher of a protagonist, nothing interesting to say, and no interesting way to say it…I found myself forgetting it in the act of reading it.” Naturally it won raves from the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize. God help the mainstream literary establishment!

At 24^th place we have Jane Harper’s The Dry, which I read after a friend raved about a film version of it he had recently seen. It was an interesting psychological examination of dysfunctional family dynamics, but I found the novel a bit…dry for a thriller.

In 26^th place we have The Da Vinci Code. Like seven billion other earthlings, I have read this book. I enjoyed it but certainly wasn’t dazzled by it. But it was, indeed, a genuine thriller, albeit a rather silly one. I’m okay with this choice.

In 27^th place we have Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. My wife and stepdaughters are big fans of Moriarty’s work. I enjoyed Big Little Lies the book, and I enjoyed the miniseries (which transferred the story from Australia to Carmel, California) even more. I approve of this pick, even though the book strikes me as more of a mystery/crime drama than a thriller.

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz took 29^th place on the list. This was a clever thriller and I enjoyed it. The sequel was garbage, however, which has somewhat diminished my memory of The Plot. Still, I’m okay with this one.

In 30^th place we have The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I couldn’t get through the book or the miniseries. Thrilling isn’t a word I would associate with this novel.

In 31^st place we have Defending Jacob, by William Landy. I thought this was one of the most overwritten pieces of pop fiction I’d ever read. It needed to lose about half its length. The Apple-TV miniseries was much better.

At 36^th place we have Alex Michaelides’s The Silent Patient, one of the most phenomenally successful pieces of pop fiction in history and possibly the worst novel I have ever finished.

At 38^th on the list is Terry Hayes’s I Am Pilgrim, another monster commercial success that I found disappointing.

In 39^th place we have Sarah Waters’s excellent Fingersmith. I would rank Waters’s novel Affinity a bit higher than this one, but it was published in 1999, and thus wasn’t eligible for the list.

Blake Crouch’s 2016 Crichtonesque technothriller, Dark Matter, is ranked 40^th on the list. I’m fine with that. I enjoyed it a great deal. The Apple-TV miniseries was a huge disappointment, despite the fact that Crouch was the showrunner.

At spot 42 we have Caroline Kepnes’s 2014 novel, You. I haven’t read it but I am a big fan of the (ridiculous) Netflix TV series it inspired, so I am happy with this choice.

Before I Go To Sleep, a 2011 novel by S.J. Watson struck me as “all concept and no execution.” I didn’t care for the film either.

In 49^th place we have Anthony Horowitz’s The Magpie Murders. This was a fun spoof of the classic Agatha-Christie-like mysteries of the Golden Age of mystery fiction, but it was simply not a thriller, and wasn’t even intended to be.

A total of 291 people contributed to the Times’s list, and what I found most disappointing was just how similar each contributor’s individual choices were to the others. Virtually every list included Gone Girl (including the one compiled by Flynn herself!). But the same handful of writers – Tana French, Gillian Flynn, Stieg Larsson, Dennis Lahane, etc. – showed up over and over again.

Another curious thing about the list is that it is inclusive of all kinds of authors: men, women, blacks, browns, whites, Brits, Yanks, Aussies, and so forth. But one category of thriller writer is almost completely omitted from the list: conservative-coded authors. Former Navy SEAL Jack Carr is one of the biggest names in the thriller-writing game these days. Less than a year ago, the New York Times published a long profile of him, detailing his military service, his popularity with military veterans, his involvement with the Amazon TV series The Terminal List (which is based on his work), his appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast, his own three podcasts, his love of tomahawks and guns and other weapons. Naturally, the comments section contained a lot of lefties complaining about Carr’s love of Ayn Rand’s work, his views on traditional masculinity, his appearances on Fox News, his opposition to gun control laws, and so forth. His books have sold more than five million copies since his debut in 2018, but Carr gets no love from the compilers of the Times’s list of the fifty best thrillers. The Times clearly didn’t want to trigger their upper-class, left-leaning readership.

Brad Thor, a mentor of Carr’s, also gets no mention from the thriller-list judges. Although he left the Republican Party in 2018, he is a member of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, makes appearances on Fox News, and his books definitely code conservative. Since 2002 he has published more than 25 thriller novels, many of them hugely popular. But no one at the Times seems to have heard of him.

Likewise, the list makes no mention of Ralph Peters (who also publishes under the name Owen Parry), a longtime conservative commenter and fiction writer. His 1989 novel, Red Army, is considered a classic of military fiction. But he has also published a dozen or more novels this century. He isn’t a knee-jerk Republican, either. He severed his connection with Trump-friendly Fox News in 2018 because he considered the Trump Administration “ethically ruinous.” Apparently that wasn’t enough for him to earn any consideration from the Times.

Linda Fairstein has published more than twenty novels since 1996, most of them legal thrillers. She was set to receive the Grand Master award from the Mystery Writers of America in 2018 when the moral panic known as the Great Awokening brought her career to a sudden end. For more than 25 years, Fairstein, a lawyer, was the head of the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, putting away men accused of rape, sexual battery, and other crimes against women. She oversaw the prosecution of the so-called Central Park Five, four black men and one Hispanic man who were convicted of raping a woman in Central Park in 1989. The convictions were overturned in 2002. Fairstein continued to insist that the D.A. had achieved its convictions fairly and she stood behind them. That didn’t create much trouble for her at the time. She continued to publish about one novel a year up until 2018. But by that point, her connection to the case became toxic and she was dropped by her agent and her publisher. Glamour Magazine bravely withdrew the Woman of the Year Award it had granted Fairstein 25 years earlier. And, of course, the MWA withdrew its Grand Master prize. Needless to say, Fairstein’s work doesn’t appear anywhere on the Times’s list of the best thrillers of the century.

Andrew Klavan is another devout conservative who happens to be among the best thriller writers of our time. He has been publishing novels since the 1970s. Among his best-known books are True Crime (made into a Clint Eastwood film in 1999) and Don’t Say a Word (the source of a 2001 film starring Michael Douglas). Klavan is an outspoken political conservative and Christian convert. He has been even more prolific a thriller writer in the 21^st century than he was in the 20^th. But he gets no love from the compilers of the thriller list.

The late Frederick Forsyth was perhaps the best thriller writer of the 20^th century, but he also published some top-notch thrillers in the 21^st, including Avenger (2003) and The Revenge of Odessa (2025). But he gets no mention from the Times’s list compilers, possibly because he was a supporter of Brexit and a lifelong conservative.

Patricia Cornwell is one of the most successful thriller writers alive, but she has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican political candidates and has been friendly with prominent conservative politicians such as Orrin Hatch, George H.W. Bush, and many others. She gets no love from the Times, despite have published roughly twenty novels this century.

Alex Berenson is one of the best spy novelists alive, and a former New York Times reporter, to boot! But early in the pandemic he published outspoken nonfiction pieces arguing, among other things, that Dr. Anthony Fauci had misled the public on a lot of pandemic-related topics, and that the mainstream media had spuriously castigated the lab-leak theory of the COVID virus’s origins as racist without ever giving it a fair hearing. At the time he was denounced in the liberal press as a heretic. The Atlantic called him “America’s wrongest man.” But a lot of his pandemic opinions are now mainstream. Nonetheless, Berenson, the author of twelve novels about fictional CIA agent John Wells, and one excellent standalone thriller called The Power Couple, gets no mention from the Times’s thriller experts.

It’s a shame that the Times didn’t even consider thrillers written by conservatives, because the thriller genre is one in which conservatives have generally shined through the years.

I’ve spent the last hour putting together a list of fifty or so 21^st century thrillers that I think are among the best I’ve read. My list would also include Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter, Dennis Lahane’s Shutter Island, Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, and perhaps one or two others that appear on the Times’s list. But many of my choices were mentioned by absolutely none of the experts gathered by the Times. This is particularly surprising because many of the authors on my list are among the bestselling writers of the past few decades. This list of mine is in no particular order.

Five Decembers by James Kestrel

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

A Gentleman and a Spy by Robert Harris

The Ghostwriter by Robert Harris

Conclave by Robert Harris

Any of the five Hollywood Station novels by Joseph Wambaugh

Fire Lover by Joseph Wambaugh (nonfiction, but very novelistic and one of the most thrilling tales I’ve ever read)

Gravity by Tess Gerritsen

The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen

The Apprentice by Tess Gerritsen

The Bone Garden by Tess Gerritsen

The Last Jew by Noah Gordon

Never by Ken Follett

Jackdaws by Ken Follett

Hornet Flight by Ken Follett

The Ex by Alafair Burke

The Wife by Alafair Burke

Dead Connection by Alafair Burke

Appaloosa by Robert B. Parker

Resolution by Robert B. Parker

Brimstone by Robert B. Parker

Hot Springs by Stephen Hunter

The Gunman Jackson Swagger by Stephen Hunter

Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray

The House With Nine Locks by Philip Gray

The Power Couple by Alex Berenson

The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson

The Deceivers by Alex Berenson

The New Girl by Daniel Silva

The Revenge of Odessa by Frederick Forsyth

Avenger by Frederick Forsyth

Pretty Little Things by Jilliane Hoffman

Retribution by Jilliane Hoffman

Prey by Michael Crichton

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

State of Terror by Hilary Rodham Clinton and Louise Perry

Money Shot by Christa Faust

At Risk by Stella Rimington

The Society by Michael Palmer

Central Park West by James Comey

The Next Time I Die by Jason Starr

Blue Heaven by C.J. Box

Felonious Monk by William Kotzwinkle

Bloody Martini by William Kotzwinkle

Cold Storage by David Koepp

Aurora by David Koepp

The Living Dead by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus

Into the Forest by Jean Hegland

A Keeper by Graham Norton

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber

Sutton by J.R. Moehringer

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Given a bit more time I could probably produce a lot more titles that are more worthy of a Best Thrillers of the 21^st Century list than many of the ones that the Times’s list contains.

If, back in 1990, 291 experts on pop fiction had been asked to rate the best thrillers of the previous twenty-six years, the list they produced would almost certainly have included such titles as: Rosemary’s Baby, The Boys From Brazil, The Stepford Wives, The Exorcist, The Day of the Jackal, The Godfather, Jaws, The Odessa File, The Eagle Has Landed, The Eye of the Needle, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, From Russia With Love, The Andromeda Strain, Jaws, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Dogs of War, The Choirboys, The Eagle Has Landed, Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand, The Shining, Firestarter, Cujo, Gorky Park, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Hunt for the Red October, The Fourth Protocol, It, Misery, Interview With a Vampire, and many others that remain in print to this day, are very influential, and continue to inspire adaptations in other media or, at the very least, inspire various ripoffs and homages in print or in cinema or on streaming services.

But I find it hard to believe that many of the thrillers cited by the Times’s group of experts will still be remembered ten years from now, much less 25 or fifty years from now. Here are some of the titles put forth by the experts: Hidden Pictures, Verity, Stillhouse Lake, These Toxic Things, Lady Chevy, Cottonmouths, Rivers of London, The Murder at Sissingham Hall, The Wreckage, Creepers, Saturday, Flashout, The Analyst, The Death of Us, The Reunion, Into the Darkest Corner, The Bottoms, The Blink of an Eye, Lie With Me, Everybody Knows, The Cut, Cross My Heart, Beautiful Animals, A Beautiful Crime, and The Last Resort. Can you name the authors of any, many, or most of those books? I’m guessing the average thriller fan can name only a few of the authors in question. What’s more, few contemporary thrillers have lodged themselves permanently in the public consciousness. Even someone who has never read a word by Ira Levin probably knows what is meant by a Stepford wife. Before 1970, most Americans probably couldn’t have told you what it was that an exorcist did. Thanks to William Peter Blatty, by 1971 practically everyone did. Frederick Forsyth didn’t get the name Jackal from the famous terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Carlos was given the nickname because of how influential Forsyth’s novel was. Mention Pennywise or Cujo or Carrie White and probably every contemporary culture vulture will know what you’re talking about. The book Misery is often referenced when people are discussing crazed fans of celebrities. Shark week remains a cultural phenomenon more than fifty years after Peter Benchley’s Jaws made shark attacks one of America’s most common nightmares. George Smiley, James Bond, the Vampire Lestat, Norman Bates, Vito Corleone, Jason Bourne, Jack Ryan – those characters remain household names to this day. Can you name a character from any of the contemporary thrillers mentioned at the top of this paragraph?

Every new literary season seems to bring us more variations on the Gone Girl theme: Women killed by their abusive lovers, or who fake their own death to get away from abusive lovers, or who conspire with other women to kill their abusive lovers, or who stage elaborate crimes to frame their abusive lovers, or women who escape a bad situation only to find themselves in a worse one. Some of these are fun time-wasters but almost none of them are memorable and their sound-alike titles (spoofed in the Netflix series The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window) are pretty much guaranteed to be quickly forgotten. Most of these books are written by women with elite college educations, women without any personal knowledge of crime or detection or violence or gunplay, which is why the novels are mostly completely lacking in authenticity. But Joseph Wambaugh spent fourteen years on the L.A.P.D. before he began writing about cops. Fully a third of the British thriller writers who published books in the Sixties and Seventies were WWII vets. Forsyth, Fleming, le Carre, and others all had some experience in the intelligence/espionage trade. Benchley was a lifelong enthusiast of the ocean and its creatures.

I could be wrong, but I am guessing that if, in the year 2050, the New York Times puts together a list of the best thrillers of the 21^st century, almost none of the books on the list that came out today will be on it. Most of them will be long forgotten. Here today, gone (girl) tomorrow.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead for a 50-year-old novel.)

I am not here to discuss Donna Tartt and her debut novel. I am here to discuss the 35^th novel of Jack Higgins, the most famous pseudonym (he used several) of British thriller writer Harry Patterson (1929-2022). That novel (published when Donna was a mere Tartlet of 12) is called The Eagle Has Landed and was the fifth bestselling work of fiction in America for the year 1975. That year is significant because I have argued persuasively in a previous essay that it was the greatest year in the history of mystery (and mystery-adjacent) fiction (so persuasively, in fact, that no one has ever tried to refute my contention, possibly because no one has ever read it). My contention wasn’t based solely on the bestseller list of that year, but the list itself is pretty impressive:

1. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (filled with crime)

2. The Moneychangers by Arthur Hailey (filled with embezzling, gang rape, counterfeiting, forgery, etc.)

3. Curtain by Agatha Christie (the final Hercule Poirot novel penned by Christie)

4. Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner (a fictionalized account of an actual murder)

5. The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh (one of the greatest cop novels ever written)

6. The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins (we’ll get to it)

7. The Greek Treasure by Irving Stone (not a crime novel, although its subject, Heinrich Schliemann, is nowadays regarded as a conman, a looter, and a vandal who took credit for archeological discoveries made by others; among his harshest critics, his name is often spelled HE-inrich SchLIE-MANn)

8. The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton (the title says it all)

9. Shogun by James Clavell (a historical novel with plenty of kidnapping, murder, etc.)

10. Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow (not a crime novel but an excellent fictionalized account of the life of poet Delmore Schwartz).

That essay of mine contains dozens and dozens of other iconic crime (or crime-adjacent) novels published in 1975. To have made the bestseller list in a year so rich with classic crime novels was quite a feat for an author who had published 34 previous novels without ever landing one on an American bestsellers list. In fact, in 1975, Higgins, Judith Rossner, and E.L. Doctorow were the only newcomers to the Publishers Weekly year-end list of bestselling novels, but Rossner and Doctorow had already established a great deal of literary credibility with the publication of earlier books that were well received but not bestsellers. Jack Higgins, on the other hand, had published nearly three dozen books without establishing himself as a household name among American fiction lovers. But The Eagle Has Landed would go on to sell more than fifty million copies (in 43 languages) over the course of its long life, has never gone out of print, and has made the British Crime Writers Association’s list of the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time. Was it deserving of all that success? Before this essay concludes, I will put forth an argument that it might be the greatest thriller of its era.

But first I’ll briefly describe my own relationship with the book. Bear in mind, however, that I will be turning 68 in a few weeks (please send cash in lieu of gifts) and my memory, once sponge-like, is now more of a colander (in fact, my wife uses it to rinse vegetables). Julie and I both remember reading The Eagle Has Landed in the late 1970s. My guess is that she must have recommended it to me because, as noted in a recent essay, she was going through a Nazi phase when we met (our first shared reading experience was Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle). However, it is also possible that I read the book earlier, in 1976 or so, a few years before meeting wife. At any rate, my recollection is that it didn’t have nearly the effect on me that other bestsellers of the era – The Choirboys, The Great Train Robbery, Jaws, etc. – had produced. As the years went by, I largely forgot about The Eagle Has Landed and I never read any more novels by Jack Higgins, even as I continued to gobble up books by Wambaugh, Crichton, Follett, Forsyth, etc. This tended to convince me that the book hadn’t really been that good. But, as I am currently re-reading a lot of the old Nazi thrillers my wife and I used to love, I decided to give TEHL another chance to dazzle me. And indeed it did. In fact, it is so good, that I now wonder if I actually read the book at all back in the 70s. I definitely remember reading the opening chapter, a framing story set in a cemetery that I’ll describe in a moment. But perhaps that framing story, which takes place in the early 1970s, put me off and I never read the rest of the novel. When I told Julie that I was no longer sure I had read the whole novel before, she told me that all she could remember of it these days was its devastating last line: “As promised.” Alas, that line appears nowhere in the novel. She was shocked to hear this. We spent a few minutes asking various AI search engines questions like “what 1970s thriller ends with the line ‘As promised?’” but got no satisfaction. This isn’t surprising since we are both old AF and can barely remember our names some days. I’m fairly certain that Julie did, indeed, read TEHL back in the day. As I was reading it I would describe some plot twist to her and she would have a vague memory of it. We both are certain that we read Eye of the Needle, but as we re-read it recently, it felt almost entirely fresh to us. Likewise The Man From St. Petersburg. We’ve read thousands of thrillers between us, so it’s understandable that we don’t have a photographic recall of every book we read back in the 70s or 80s (or March of 2026). If anyone knows of a late 1970s thriller that ends with the words “As promised” please let me know. (See update below.)

Here’s an example of how bad my memory has gotten lately. A year or two ago, when I reviewed Daniel Silva’s great WWII thriller, An Unlikely Spy, I mentioned that one of the most interesting things in the novel for me was learning about German Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who loathed Hitler and the Nazis and, as head of the Abwehr (the Nazi intelligence agency) secretly undermined the German war effort whenever he could (not secretly enough, however; Hitler eventually had him executed). But as I have gone back and re-read some of my favorite old Nazi thrillers, I have found myself encountering Canaris again and again. He is an important minor character in Eye of the Needle. He is an even more important character in TEHL. Thus, I must have known about him at some point in the past. Of course, I also encountered plenty of other real-life Nazis in 1970s thrillers – Jurgen Stroop, Eduard Roschmann, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Hitler, etc. – so perhaps I can be forgiven for having forgotten about Canaris. But seeing as how Canaris was pretty much the only “good” (his reputation is complicated and still being debated) real-life Nazi I probably encountered in a novel, I’m ashamed of myself for not having preserved his memory in my mind. I point this out so that if you see inconsistencies between my essays you won’t assume bad faith on my part (“Aha! He claimed to have read Eye of the Needle back in 1979 but he only learned about Admiral Canaris when reading An Unlikely Spy in 2025. He’s a liar!”). Now, on to The Eagle Has Landed.

I believe I argued in another essay a few years back that TEHL was heavily indebted to both The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File. I still believe that to be true, but it is not meant as an insult to Higgins (and is far from an original observation). Jackal was a 1971 novel about a (fictional) attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle back in 1963. Forsyth had trouble getting it published because several publishers insisted that there could be no suspense in such a book because everyone knew that de Gaulle had lived until 1970. After the book’s massive success, all sorts of similar books began finding their way into print. The most prominent of these was TEHL, which was about a fictional (or was it?) attempt made by the Nazis in 1943 to kidnap Winston Churchill. Most readers back in 1975 knew that Churchill had never been kidnapped by the Nazis, but that didn’t make Higgins’s novel any less suspenseful. Forsyth’s The Odessa Files is what is sometimes called a “false document” or “documentary thriller” novel because it employs fake diary entries, newspaper articles, passport applications and so forth to add authenticity to the story. Higgins does some of this in TEHL. In fact, the entire story is a bit of a false document. It opens with a framing story in which a writer named Jack Higgins is wandering through a cemetery attached to an old church in rural Norfolk (apparently, in the British edition of the novel, this writer is named Harry Patterson). He is surprised to come across the hidden grave of a Nazi soldier who was buried there in 1943. When Higgins asks the parish priest about the grave he is told to leave the churchyard at once. When he wanders into town and asks the regulars at a local pub about the dead Nazi, he is physically threatened and run out of town. Being a writer, Higgins decides to investigate the matter and spends the next year or so doing just that. The novel purports to be a nonfiction account of Higgins’s findings. In a coda, Higgins returns to the church and tells the priest that he has unearthed the truth about the dead Nazi and the fantastic plot that earned him a secret grave in a British churchyard. The priest concedes that Higgins’s discoveries are mostly true. In a brief prologue to the novel, Higgins asserts that, “At least fifty per cent of it is documented historical fact.”

In his 1981 study, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s, author John Sutherland (who is largely dismissive of his subject) writes, “A good percentage of the part of Higgins’s novel which is not documented historical fact would seem to be indebted to the master of this kind of research thriller, Frederick Forsyth. Forsyth was a journalist before he was a bestselling novelist, and the convention underlying his fiction is that he has a bombshell story to reveal…We are in a grey area here between journalistic veracity and fictional authentication games; games which go back at least as far as the ‘found manuscript’ of gothic fiction. But what is important here are the roles assumed and the poses struck which insist that the writer is something other than a mere novelist.” Sutherland calls this type of work the “privileged information” novel, because it claims to be presenting secrets that the author alone has uncovered. But he also places TEHL in the category of books attempting to tell “The Secret History of the Second World War.” He writes: “A multitude of bestsellers and would-be bestsellers of the 1970s have alleged to give us a rewritten and absolutely authentic history of the 1939-45 hostilities. They disclose hitherto ‘best-kept secrets of the war.’ Beneath the frustratingly slow mass-movements of ‘open’ history there is opened up an ‘action-packed’ narrative. In the secret history, alarmingly close calls for the forces of international order and decency are revealed – near disasters which were only just averted by acts of undercover individual heroism and desperate remedies. The style of this kind of secret history and the claims it makes are evident from the back blurb to the American paperback of the superseller in the genre, Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed. (Higgins, of course, is a British writer: one of the interesting features of the secret history is that it is an area where British writers – often originally little thought of in their home market – have made it very big in America and become international bestsellers. Higgins, Frederick Nolan and Ken Follett are the most famous examples.” (Frederick Nolan was a British writer best known for his novels set in the American west, but he never produced any international bestsellers, as far as I can tell. I wonder if Sutherland meant to reference Frederick Forsyth. In any case, it’s true that Higgins, Forsyth, and Follett were only moderately successful in Britain until their books became bestsellers in America, at which point they became better appreciated at home).

An academic snob, John Sutherland (a professor of English at the University of London when his book Bestsellers was published), doesn’t seem to think much of the writing of men like Follett, Forsyth, Higgins, et al. I think time has established that, at the very least, Follett and Forsyth aren’t likely to vanish from the British or American pop-culture scenes any time soon. Follett is still a prolific bestselling author, and his 1989 novel, The Pillars of the Earth, has become an all-time classic of pop fiction. The late Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal is regarded by many as the best British thriller of the 20^th century, rivaled only by such household names as Rebecca and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It has been adapted for the cinema on several occasions and was the source of a recent TV miniseries that starred Academy Award-winner Eddie Redmayne and had a successful run on Peacock. Higgins, on the other hand, is no longer a household name, in spite of the fact (or maybe because of the fact) that he produced about eighty novels under a variety of pseudonyms. Nonetheless, I believe that The Eagle Has Landed is every bit the equal of such Nazi thrillers as The Odessa File and Eye of the Needle, perhaps even a touch better. It’s well written, intelligent, and populated with fascinating characters. What’s more, most of its major characters are Nazis (or Nazi-adjacent) and yet, for the most part, they remain not just sympathetic but, often, downright honorable, something few contemporary authors would dare to attempt. According to Mike Ripley, an authority on the British thriller novel of the mid-to-late 20^th century, Higgins specialized in creating “good guys fighting for rotten causes” – i.e., likeable protagonists who were Nazis or IRA gunmen or involved with some other unsavory group. Although the novel is now 51-years-old, and is set roughly 83 years ago, it still has some interesting parallels to contemporary world affairs.

In July of 1943, the Allied bombing of Rome caused Italy’s Grand Council of Fascism to pass a motion of no confidence against fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. Mussolini, a close ally of Hitler’s, was removed from power and imprisoned in a hotel (pictured above) located on Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain range. On September 12, a German commando team stormed the hotel and liberated Mussolini, taking him with them back to Berlin. The world press trumpeted this extraction as a great success for the Nazis (in fact, the security around Mussolini was so lax that the extraction wasn’t all that difficult). In The Eagle Has Landed, Hitler, emboldened by the surprising success of the Gran Sasso raid, decides that Germany ought to try to pull off another raid, this time to extract Winston Churchill from England. Most of his cabinet of advisors are horrified by the idea, especially Wilhelm Canaris. They know that extracting Mussolini, a deposed and disgraced dictator from a country that had turned its back on him was child’s play compared to what it would be like to extract a heavily guarded and beloved Prime Minister like Winston Churchill from a country that is ever on the alert for Nazi attacks. But Hitler can’t be dissuaded. He orders Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler to make it happen. Himmler tells Canaris to do a feasibility study on the matter. Canaris, who finds the whole thing preposterous, assigns a trusted aide, Oberst (a German term for Colonel) Radl, to carry out the study, assuming that the level-headed Radl will produce a report that will conclude that kidnapping Churchill on English soil would be a fool’s errand.

I find most attempts to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler to be ridiculous and offensive, but I couldn’t help being reminded of Trump when reading these early pages of TEHL. Earlier this year, Trump authorized a military operation that executed a surprisingly easy and bloodless (and probably illegal) extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from his home country and into American custody. Soon thereafter, apparently emboldened by the ease of this operation, Trump allowed himself to get talked into joining Israel in attacking Iran. Most of America’s top military and intelligence personnel warned the president that Iran would be much more difficult to bring to heel than Maduro had been. But, swayed by war hawks such as Benjamin Netanyahu, Lindsey Graham, and Pete Hegseth, Trump went ahead and instigated a war of choice against Iran, which has now been grinding on for five months with no apparent end in sight. In TEHL, when Canaris tells Radl that Hitler wants them to kidnap Churchill, Radl responds: “Good God, he can’t be serious.” Canaris tells him, “This business with Mussolini has gone to his head. Now he seems to think anything is possible. Bring the Devil from Hell, was a phrase he quoted with some feeling.” That’s probably what Trump was thinking after the Maduro extraction.

Alas, Colonel Radl, though an intelligent and level-headed man, comes across several surprising facts that eventually lead him to believe that it might be possible to kidnap Churchill on British soil. He learns that, on November 7, 1943, Churchill is scheduled to take a few days’ rest at a quiet Norfolk country house owned by a wealthy Brit named Sir Harold Willoughby. He also learns that Germany has a sleeper agent who not only lives near Willoughby’s estate but is, in fact, very friendly with Willoughby. This agent is a woman in her 60s, Joanna Grey, who was born in South Africa and saw her entire family killed during the Second Boer War. She has hated Great Britain ever since. Later she married a British doctor who lived in South Africa. When he died, she learned that he owned a small estate in Norfolk which she has now inherited. Thus, in the early part of the twentieth century she moved to Norfolk and reinvented herself as an upper-crust British noblewoman. She has been living in Norfolk for twenty or more years when WWII breaks out. Slim, attractive, and involved in a lot of volunteer work, she is close to the local priest, largely beloved by the local community who see her as a grande dame, and is engaged in a sort of romantic relationship with Harold Willoughby. But she is also a Nazi spy, who communicates via radio with German operatives, informing them of various military operations that are being staged in the Norfolk area. When Radl learns these facts (and a few others) he suspects that an abduction of Churchill might be possible as long as it can be ready to execute on the evening of November 6^th. When he completes this feasibility study, Canaris tells him to pass it along to Himmler, assuming that Radl’s study will show the impossibility of such an abduction. But Himmler, like Radl, is convinced that it will work. Already, however, Canaris is suspected of having anti-Nazi sympathies. So Himmler cuts Canaris out of the loop and puts Radl in charge of the operation.

Until its final act, TEHL has surprisingly little violence for a Nazi thriller. Much of the book consists of Radl’s efforts to put together a sort of Dirty Dozen-like team of rogues and misfits to carry off the mission. And Higgins really shines at bringing these characters to life. One of them is, Liam Devlin, an Irish poet and IRA member who is in Germany to help the Nazi war effort because, like most Irish Republicans, he hates the British. He is fluent in both German and English (as well as Gaelic) so he will have no trouble passing himself off as a British soldier when he gets to Norfolk. Likewise we have Colonel Kurt Steiner, a German officer whose mother was American and who speaks fluent English. Steiner served in Poland during the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. He was disgusted by what he saw there and committed an act of insubordination to protect the life of a 14-year-old Jewish prisoner. For that he was court-martialed and sent to Britain’s Channel Islands, which were occupied by the Nazis during WWII. There, he and his men are forced to work as human torpedoes in an attempt to disrupt British shipping in the channel. If, like me, you’ve never heard of the human torpedoes of WWII, you will be shocked to learn about them. Running low on U-boats, by 1943, the Germans were attacking enemy ships using a device called a Neger (meaning “Negro,” and a play on the name of its inventor, Richard Mohr, whose name means “Moor” in German). The Neger was essentially just two torpedoes, strapped one on top of the other. The warhead was removed from the top torpedo and that space was hollowed out so that an operator could sit in it and steer. Below him was an armed torpedo. When he saw a target worth attacking, the operator would fire up the propeller of the armed torpedo and then just steer the device towards an enemy ship. When the Neger was about fifty yards from its target, the operator would detach the top torpedo from the armed one below him and steer sharply away from it. The armed torpedo, ideally, would go straight and blow up the target. The unarmed torpedo could be paddled back to the shore. In practice, the two torpedoes often failed to separate and the operator ended up blowing himself sky high along with his target. Something like 70 percent of all Neger operators ended up dying this way. Thus, Colonel Steiner and the men he commands on the Channel Islands are all pretty much on a suicide mission, sort of like water-borne kamikazes. When Radl comes to meet Steiner and offers him a chance to lead a mission to kidnap Churchill on English soil, Steiner sees it as a sort of reprieve. Sure, he’ll probably die in the effort, but he will certainly die if he continues to serve as a human torpedo.

Radl, Devlin, and Steiner are all portrayed as honorable men. They all hate the Nazis. But Radl has a wife and three children and he knows that if he fails to serve Himmler faithfully, the Reichsfuhrer will have his family murdered. Likewise, Steiner’s father is a German General who has had a falling out with the Nazi high command. Steiner is told that Himmler will spare General Steiner from the gallows if Steiner agrees to lead the assault on Sir Harold Willoughby’s country estate. Devlin has no love for Germany. In fact he loathes the Nazis. But he loathes the British who have colonized his homeland even more, and he is willing to do anything to weaken them. By 1943, the Germans were in retreat. They had lost the invasion of Russia (always referred to as the Winter War in TEHL), and were also losing in North Africa and elsewhere. Except for absolute zealots like Hitler and Himmler, the members of the German high command no longer really believe that they can totally rout the Brits and Americans. But they are hoping that, if they can capture Churchill, they can use him as a bargaining chip in an effort to force a negotiated settlement to the war.

I have mentioned only a small handful of the characters who play important roles in this novel. Higgins is excellent at creating characters who are neither black nor white but painted in shades of gray. Arthur Seymour is a Norfolk resident and a rapist, but he also shows incredible courage in defending his town from Nazi attack. One of the Nazi invaders gives up his own life to save two young British children from drowning. Norfolk native Molly Prior, a teenage victim of Arthur Seymour’s, falls in love with Liam Devlin, and refuses to turn on him even after she learns of his connection to the Nazis (he rescued her from Seymour’s rape attempt, and Higgins makes it perfectly understandable why Molly might side with Devlin against her own countrymen). Joanna Grey is portrayed as a fine and upstanding woman, who helps the Nazis only out of loyalty to her own family members, who were all killed by the Brits in the Second Boer War.

There are very few totally bad or totally good characters in TEHL – Himmler being a notable exception, and you can’t blame Higgins for having created him. Another one-dimensional character is an American colonel who seeks only glory for himself and ends up paying a steep price for his hubris.

The book is also full of fascinating details and information. As mentioned, I learned about human torpedoes from this book. I also learned what a lychgate is and a rood screen. I learned about the Fallschirmjager (Germany’s elite paratroopers) and the British Free Corp (a unit of Nazi soldiers comprising British POW’s who had been convinced to turn against the Allies).

Higgins makes one weird misstep in the book. When Kurt Steiner is in the Warsaw ghetto, he interferes with a German officer who wants to murder a fourteen-year-old girl during the sweep of the Jewish neighborhoods. The girl is named Brana Lezemnikof. The German soldier who wants to murder her is named…Otto Frank! Otto Frank was the name of a man who famously lost his fifteen-year-old daughter, Anne, to Nazi murderers. I can’t imagine what Higgins was thinking by giving that name to a Nazi. It would be like naming a concentration camp director Simon Wiesenthal.

A snob would probably say that Higgins’s prose was workmanlike at best, but I disagree. It seems entirely calibrated to the story and the characters that people it – simple down-to-earth dialog, punctuated by the occasional idiomatic phrase from the Irish or the German or the Norfolk dialect of England. Every now and then someone almost accidentally says something epigrammatic: “Won’t the same bad old roads all lead to hell in the end?” Higgins is especially good at describing bad weather and gloomy landscapes. He is capable of waxing poetic at times but usually does so for only a sentence or two, never laying it on with a trowel like a lot of “serious literary” authors. At one point he writes: “The parachute opened like a strange, pale flower and carried him gently down into darkness.” He excels at describing violent actions in poetic ways: “The Thompson gun rattled, a short burst only, but it caught Becker full in the back, driving him headlong through the curtains at the base of the [church bell] tower. He grabbed at the ropes in dying as if trying to hang on to life itself and somewhere overhead, a bell tolled sonorously for the first time in years.”

Weirdly, one of the many pop-culture properties it reminded me of was the 1966 Norman Jewison comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. In that Cold War-era film, a Russian submarine runs aground in a peaceful New England town. The Russian sailors come ashore and try to pretend to be ordinary Americans, and fail spectacularly. The tensions between the ordinary American townspeople and the hapless Russian “invaders” run high until a tragedy involving a child forces the two groups to act together. Something similar happens at one point in TEHL. In the movie, a local hothead named Fendall Hawkins (played by Paul Ford) seeks glory by trying to lead some of his VFW buddies in battle against the Russians. His character is reminiscent of the American colonel whose hubris leads him into an unwise confrontation with the Nazis in TEHL. In the film, Police Chief Link Mattocks (Brian Keith) is one of the few locals who keeps his head during the invasion. In that sense, he is somewhat reminiscent of Father Vereker in TEHL, the local priest who tries to keep his parishioners from panicking during the attack.

I could be wrong, but I get the feeling that The Eagle Has Landed is no longer as highly regarded as such 1970s thrillers as The Day of the Jackal and Eye of the Needle. On Amazon.com, Eye of the Needle has about 32,000 reader reviews. The Eagle Has Landed has 4,250. The Day of the Jackal has about 15,000. On Goodreads.com, TEHL has fewer than a thousand reader reviews. Eye of the Needle has more than five thousand, and Jackal has close to four thousand. This strikes me as odd, because all three books were among the seminal thrillers of the 1970s. TEHL’s reader-review numbers are closer to those of Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil and William Goldman’s Marathon Man, two solid 1970s Nazi thrillers that few people would probably rank among the top ten pop fictions of that decade.

In 2017, British spy novelist and pop-fiction scholar Mike Ripley published a compelling nonfiction book called Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers From Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed. The book’s tagline is “How Britain lost an empire but its secret agents saved the world.” His thesis is that, even though the British Empire was largely lost after WWII, international thrillers – particularly spy thrillers – written by Brits became the Gold Standard for literary novels of intrigue and adventure between the years 1953 (when the first James Bond novel was published) and 1975 (when The Eagle Has Landed was published). The book celebrates the fiction of writers such as Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, John le Carre, Graham Greene, Alistair MacLean, Gavin Lyle, Lionel Davidson, Anthony Price, Frederick Forsyth, Jack Higgins, and many others. This British invasion roughly paralleled the more famous British invasion of the pop-music scene. To be sure, plenty of American writers published bestsellers in that era, but they tended to be fat historical dramas (Hawaii by James Michener), cop novels (The Choirboys), technothrillers (The Andromeda Strain), supernatural tales (Rosemary’s Baby), and industrial thrillers (Airport). The globe-hopping international man-of-mystery genre was dominated by Brits until the mid 1970s, at which point authors such as Robert Ludlum and, later, Martin Cruz Smith, Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, and Stephen Coonts began getting into the act (although Brits like Forsyth, le Carre, Follett, and even Higgins, whose thriller Storm Warning, was the fourth bestselling novel of 1976, would continue to produce high quality international thrillers well into the 21st century). It is telling that Ripley chose The Eagle Has Landed as the capstone of this era of British dominance. I suppose he could just have easily chosen Eye of the Needle, which was published in 1978 and would have given his Golden Era a nice neat 25-year run. But having just finished reading The Eagle Has Landed, I can sort of understand why Ripley chose to make it the era’s high-water mark. Higgins may not have had the literary chops of le Carre and Graham Greene. Nor did he have any actual espionage experience, like le Carre, Greene, and Fleming, and he was too young to have served in WWII the way that Alistair MacLean, Eric Ambler, John Gardner, Adam Hall, Lionel Davidson and many other British thriller writers had (according to Ripley, “[A]t least a third of the British thriller writers in the boom period of the Sixties and Seventies had seen active service during WWII.”). But what Higgins did have was an incredible work ethic. As Ripley writes, “The most prolific thriller writer of the 1960s, with something like twenty-eight novels to his credit since his debut in 1959, was far from a household name, mainly because he wrote under so many different ones. Though he was to become very well known as Jack Higgins, in the Sixties Harry Patterson chose to write mostly under his real name or the pen-names Martin Fallon, Hugh Marlowe and, from 1970, James Graham, and the novels he turned out were a mixture of crime novels, adventure thrillers, several with historical settings, and spy stories…It was in the mid-Sixties that Patterson also began to write thrillers with Irish settings, with characters who were…closely and perhaps sympathetically associated with the Irish Republican Army…[T]his was a sensitive area and possibly a brave move on Patterson’s part, who was to go on in a long career to write many thrillers featuring good men fighting for bad causes…though it was to be the mid-1970s before the eagle landed to make Jack Higgins an international brand.”

Working hard in a variety of different genres eventually paid off in spades for Higgins. The Eagle Has Landed is one of those Frankenthrillers (like Lionel Davidson’s brilliant Kolymsky Heights) that seem to successfully combine numerous genres of popular fiction: romance, war story, historical tale, espionage, action and adventure, suspense, crime, mystery, a contemporary framing story about journalistic investigation, police work, the exploits of antiheroes, nautical thrills, aviation thrills – you name it, without stinting any of them. It is peopled by Germans, Irish, Americans, Brits, Afrikaans, and Danes, with cameo appearances by a few others. Its characters include cold-blooded Nazi killers, Irish patriots, priests, Norfolk farm girls, Lords and Ladies, politicians, soldiers, aviators, human torpedoes, publicans, mobsters, rapists, abortionists, and many others. Its story is a fabulous piece of invention with dozens of interlocking parts and plot twists that keep on coming until pretty much the final paragraph. It could pretty much stand in as the quintessential novel of the Golden Age described by Mike Ripley. Higgins followed it up a year later with another massive hit, Storm Warning. Higgins and Forsyth were so prominent among British thriller writers of the Seventies that Ripley named his chapter about that decade “The Storm Jackal Has Landed – The Seventies.” Being a big fan of Ken Follett’s, I would probably have titled it “The Eye of the Jackal Has Landed.” But you get the picture.

So there you have it: my argument that The Eagle Has Landed is possibly the greatest thriller novel of its era. As promised.

UPDATE: The novel that ends with the words “As promised” turns out to be the 1977 Jack Higgins thriller The Valhalla Exchange.

Despite my good intentions, I rarely complete any of the ambitious reading projects I set out to accomplish each year. One of this year’s projects was to re-read Ken Follett’s first five bestselling novels and see how they compare to my memory of them. Those five novels are Eye of the Needle (1978), Triple (1979), The Key to Rebecca (1980), The Man From St. Petersburg (1982), and Lie Down With Lions (1986). These books are especially important to me because Ken Follett was the first author that my avid-reading wife and I shared a mutual interest in when we first got together. We read each of those first five bestsellers (Follett had published about ten non-bestsellers prior to the publication of Eye of the Needle) usually as soon as they appeared in paperback. I have long wanted to see if these books were as special as I remembered. Miraculously, I have just finished re-reading Lie Down With Lions, which means that I actually completed a five-book reading project that I set for myself earlier in the year. That almost never happens!

My recollection of those early days of Kevin and Julie and Ken is that, though they liked all of Ken’s first five bestsellers, Kevin and Julie felt that none of the subsequent four novels was ever quite as good as Eye of the Needle. And this may have had something to do with why Kevin and Julie drifted apart from Ken after reading Lie Down With Lions. The timing was a bit of a shame, because Ken’s very next novel, 1989’s The Pillars of the Earth, would become his biggest bestseller and one of the bestselling novels of all time. According to Google’s AI: “Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth is widely regarded as an all-time bestseller. The novel has sold more than 26 million copies worldwide and ignited a massive resurgence in the historical fiction genre…It spent years at the #1 spot on various international bestseller lists, including six years on the German bestseller list.” Julie would eventually read (and love) the book around 2009, about twenty years after it was published. Kevin, to his shame, hasn’t read it yet, but he has an ambitious plan to read (or re-read) all of Follett’s fiction over the next year or so.

For now, however, it is time to revisit those first five bestsellers and see how well they have held up in the nearly fifty years since the first of them was published. I have already reviewed four of those five novels over the course of the past few months. I don’t plan to do a detailed review of Lie Down With Lions here but I will give you a brief rundown of its pros (many) and cons (if any).

When Follett published LDWL, in 1986, its subject, the Soviet-Afghanistan war (1979-1989), was still raging. This was the first of his bestsellers that was not a historical work. The previous four included a novel set at the outset of WWI, two WWII thrillers, and a novel about Israel’s efforts, in the late 1960s, to obtain an atomic weapon. I am not a fan of dreary war news (who is?), and the Soviet-Afghanistan clash had been all over the news for seven years by the time LDWL was published. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the reason that U.S. President Jimmy Carter forced the U.S. Olympic team to boycott the 1980 Olympics. The Soviet-Afghanistan war was fraught with war crimes and the newspapers of the day were filled with stories about young Afghan children who had picked up what they thought was a toy lying on the ground only to have their hands blown off by a Soviet landmine. Thus, although I dutifully purchased a copy of LDWL and began reading it, I can’t be certain I ever finished it that first time around. I may have found the whole subject just too bleak.

But, nowadays, LDWL is another of Follett’s historical novels. When Follett published Eye of the Needle in 1978, WWII had been over for 33 years. The Soviet-Afghanistan war has now been over for 37 years. LDWL is more of a historical novel now than Eye of the Needle was when I first read it in the late 1970s. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (which has some parallels with the current Russian invasion of Ukraine) is still a very dark and dreary subject, but enough time has passed to make it seem safely in the past and not some ongoing crime against humanity (though its repercussions still continue to poison our present world). Perhaps the best thing (or even the only good thing) to come out of the war was that it appears to have directly led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which, at the time at least, seemed like an unalloyed good for the world. As many as two million Afghan civilians died in the war, and hundreds of thousands of others, many of them women and children, were made invalids by it. Millions more became refugees in Pakistan and other countries. The war contributed to a huge rise in guns, drugs, and jihadism in Afghanistan which persists to this day. This may seem like a tragedy too bleak to inspire any sort of exciting or uplifting work of popular fiction. But the two World Wars were much bleaker and more tragic and they have both produced plenty of thrilling and uplifting works of popular fiction. In the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors, a pretentious character played by Alan Alda notes that, “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.” (That’s an old saw that predates the twentieth century). Follett’s Lie Down With Lions demonstrates that tragedy plus time can also equal damn good popular fiction.

The novel begins with a brief prologue set in Paris, in 1981, where an American CIA operative (and Vietnam War veteran) calling himself Ellis Thaler has infiltrated a group of radical leftist terrorists. Ellis is 33-years-old and has a girlfriend named Jane, a British woman, who is ten years his junior. Jane is a medical student whose companionship Ellis first cultivated because, though she was no terrorist herself, she hung out with a very leftwing crowd, young students who actively campaigned against nuclear power, apartheid, and other leftwing bugaboos, and some of these young people were also terrorists. Somewhere along the way, Ellis made the mistake of falling in love with Jane. Through Jane, Ellis has also made the acquaintance of Jean-Pierre, a young French doctor who desires Jane and (secretly) hates Ellis for having won her affections. However, when Ellis sets up a sting operation that lands many of Jane and Jean-Pierre’s leftwing pals in jail, Jane turns against him. She dumps Ellis and marries Jean-Pierre, in large part in order to spite Ellis for his betrayal.

One year later, newlyweds Jane and Jean-Pierre are in the Panjshir Valley (often referred to by Westerners as “the Five Lions Valley”) of Afghanistan, sponsored by an organization that is a fictional version of Doctors Without Borders. Jane and Jean-Pierre are there to provide medical care to the Afghan rebels who are fighting off the Soviet invasion. The newlyweds also look after the wives and children of these freedom fighters. Jane and Jean-Pierre are embedded in an extremely harsh and inhospitable part of Afghanistan (to a Westerner, pretty much all of Afghanistan seems harsh and unforgiving). After about a year’s time, Jane and Jean-Pierre have been largely welcomed into this small Afghan community. Jane is particularly popular because of her kindness and consideration for others. Jean-Pierre likes to play the self-sacrificing doctor who gave up his cushy career in Paris to tend to the poor and beleaguered of Afghanistan, but the local Afghans can see that this is a bit of an act. Jean-Pierre thinks very highly of himself. What’s more, he has an ulterior motive for being in Afghanistan that the locals (and Jane) don’t know about but which the locals, at least, somewhat suspect.

This is a tough milieu, and frequent aerial attacks by Soviet fighter jets and bombers regularly kill or maim both the Afghan rebels and their wives and children. Jean-Paul and Jane have limited medical equipment, but they both do their best to keep the victims of these Soviet attacks alive. Complicating matters is the fact that Jane has recently learned that she is pregnant. This angers Jean-Paul, and he demands that Jane allow him to abort their unborn baby, but she won’t allow it. This creates a rift between the couple, who were already experiencing various marital problems.

Into this hotbed of war and mayhem, Ellis Thaler shows up one day. He has been sent as an emissary of the U.S. government. The CIA and others in the government would like to secretly funnel money to the Afghan rebels to help them fight off the Soviets (any enemy of the U.S.S.R. is perceived during the Cold War era as a friend of the U.S.). But the Reagan administration fears that if they send money and arms to individual Afghan warlords, the warlords will merely waste it by fighting against their ancient enemies in other Afghan tribes. Ellis has been sent to Afghanistan to meet with several of the most powerful rebel leaders, all of whom are from different tribes and don’t get along well with the others, and convince them to work together against the Soviets in order to receive help from the U.S. Ellis wants to organize a peaceful summit between the major warlords and get them all to sign an agreement obligating them to use any material assistance provided by America only against the Soviets and not against each other. This won’t be easy to do because, as noted, the warlords have longstanding grudges against one another. One warlord may have caused the deaths of another warlord’s beloved brother, or son, or father. Ellis knows that his mission will be nearly impossible, but he is determined to pull it off.

Neither Jane nor, especially, Jean-Pierre is happy to see Ellis again. Although they know that the U.S. would sincerely like to see the Afghan rebels win the war with the U.S.S.R., they still don’t trust either Ellis or the CIA. Jane and Jean-Pierre consider the CIA to be the world’s biggest terrorist organization. Nonetheless, Ellis manages to convince at least Jane that American support for the Afghan rebels will be a boon for the people whose lives she is trying to save. Jean-Pierre, for reasons of his own, isn’t buying it. He wants Ellis dead. And at one point, he will get an opportunity to kill Ellis himself.

To demonstrate how useful American arms can be, Ellis has brought TNT and other explosive materials with him to Afghanistan. In one scene, he leads Masud, a top warlord (and the only character in the novel who isn’t fictional), and several of his rebel soldiers to a bridge that Russian troops regularly use to cross a certain river. Ellis teaches the rebels how to use TNT, blasting caps, and waterproof fuses to destroy a bridge. And then they wait for a day or two until a unit of Soviet soldiers shows up to cross the bridge in their tanks. When the Soviets begin to cross the bridge, Ellis blows it apart. Multiple Soviets are killed. Several Soviet helicopters then land in a nearby field to provide cover for their comrades, but the field has been planted with landmines. As the troops dash out of the helicopters, many of them are blown apart by landmines. The remaining soldiers are shot dead by Masud and his men, who are armed with machine guns. This successful demonstration of American power convinces Masud to arrange a meeting with the other powerful warlords in the area. Unfortunately, during the skirmish at the bridge, Ellis took a bullet in the butt from a Soviet weapon. He cannot return right away to the village. So Masud sends a runner to the village to fetch Jean-Pierre. When Jean-Pierre hears that he is being summoned to remove a bullet from Ellis, he is thrilled. He plans to inject Ellis with an overdose of insulin and then just tell Masud that Ellis died of an infection from the bullet. But as he is sitting beside Ellis and preparing his fatal injection, he hears Ellis and Masud discussing a matter that Jean-Pierre finds integral to his own ulterior motive for being in Afghanistan. He decides to let Ellis live a bit longer, so that he can gain further information about this plan.

I don’t want to give away too much more of the plot, but the last quarter of the book includes an absolutely hair-raising attempt by some of the characters to escape from Afghanistan into Pakistan by traversing the Hindu Kush, a 500-mile long mountain range that is nearly as high as the Himalayas, on foot. The book combines elements of the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, the film Charlie Wilson’s War, and the adventure stories of Jack London. Perhaps because I’m a dumbass pop-fiction junkie, I found Lie Down With Lions much more compelling and intelligent than both the Hemingway novel and the Mike Nichols film (nobody tops Jack London in the outdoor adventure milieu, though Ken Follett equals him here). The characters are very well drawn, even the animals and children. I grew especially fond of a recalcitrant packhorse called Maggie, even though I’m not really a horse person myself. (SPOILER ALERT: Maggie’s death was the only one in the book that made me shed a tear.)

As with most Follett novels, the toughest person in this book is a woman, Jane. She does just about every difficult thing the men have to do in the novel, but she does it while either pregnant, or nursing a newborn. She is easily the book’s best and most sympathetic character, and the fact that she is a female is not incidental to her personality. Follett demonstrates an insanely acute ability to tell his story from the POV of a pregnant woman, a nursing mother, and a tiger mother determined to keep her tiny baby alive no matter what stands in her way, even if it is the entire Soviet Army.

During the peak woke era (roughly 2015-2024) some readers took to Goodreads and other online forums to accuse Follett of anti-Afghan bias in this book. Here’s an example: “This book (written in the 1980s) was clearly not intended to be read by Afghans or others persons of color. His descriptions of things ‘all Afghans’ wore or did made me yawn…There was a real shortage of books on Afghanistan in the 1980s. That’s been rectified. Skip this and read #ownvoices.”

In addition to being lazy and stupid, that type of woke criticism is just flat-out wrong. The main Afghan characters in LDWL are well drawn and fleshed out. They are not magic brown people. They have flaws – quick tempers, sexism, pig-headedness – but they are also capable of great wisdom, kindness, and generosity. One of the main Afghan characters lays down his life for his comrades in a key scene late in the novel. As is his custom, Follett doesn’t even portray the Russians as entirely villainous. Some of them are downright sympathetic, just as Follett’s Nazis are rarely just purely evil beings with no feelings whatsoever. No thinking person could read LDWL and think it exposes Follett as prejudiced against Afghans or any other “people of color.”

So, how does Lie Down With Lions rank with the other early Follett bestsellers? My plan was to simply rank the books from one to five, but now that I have re-read them all, I don’t think that is entirely fair. Lie Down With Lions is probably the most impressive achievement of them all because the war Follett was writing about was still ongoing, its outcome uncertain. It wasn’t ancient history and Follett couldn’t rely on a massive amount of historical material to research it with. He provides a bibliography at the end of the novel listing the dozen or so books that he used to research Afghanistan and the war, but these books were published in the early 1980s and probably written a year before their publication dates. As a result, Follett’s novel takes place entirely between 1981 and 1983. But it is at least as believable and authentic-feeling as any of his WWI or WWII thrillers.

Here, then, is my assessment of the first five Follett bestsellers. The best of the lot are Eye of the Needle, The Man From St. Petersburg, and Lie Down With Lions. If you want a gritty war novel with a realistic, almost documentary feel, then Lie Down With Lions is your best bet. If you want nonstop thrills, then Eye of the Needle is probably what you should choose first. If, like me, you like a mix of melodrama, thrills, romance, and history, then The Man From St. Petersburg will satisfy your needs. All three of these novels provide drama, action, romance, history, and thrills in various measures. I don’t believe that any one of them towers over the others. I was most impressed by Lie Down With Lions. I was most entertained by The Man From St. Petersburg. And I found Eye of the Needle to be the most exciting of the three. All were superbly researched and paced and populated.

After those three, I would rate The Key to Rebecca as the best bet. Its plot and historical milieu and story beats all very closely resemble those of Eye of the Needle. In some ways you could say that he took the story of Eye of the Needle and transferred it from the U.K. in WWII to Egypt in WWII. Still, the way WWII played out in occupied Egypt and the way it played out on the British Isles are very different things. The characters in The Key to Rebecca all felt fresh and original and not like retreads of the (great) characters in Eye of the Needle. If you like desert warfare then you will probably prefer Rebecca to Needle. It’s a great piece of pop fiction but struck me as slightly less brilliant the top three.

Though I enjoyed it, Triple was my least favorite of these five books, but it is nonetheless a compelling novel and filled with fascinating facts about Israel’s quest for an atomic weapon. Like almost all Follett novels, it included a romance, but it was the least convincing romance of the lot. All of these first five bestsellers could be (and almost always are) described as spy novels, but Triple felt the most like a classic spy novel, the kind of book that really delivers not just thrills and chills but also a lot of actual spycraft: dead drops, honey traps, blackmail, surveillance, fake ID papers, double-crosses, detailed info about recondite subjects such as how to get a commercial ocean vessel registered in Liberia, how to conceal bank transactions in Luxembourg, how to transfer yellowcake uranium in and out of Holland, how to sabotage the fuel pump of an ocean-going vessel, and so forth. If you are a fan of Le Carre or Deighton or even Forsyth, you might find Triple the best of the five novels under discussion here.

If, like me, you are a longtime Follett fan but haven’t revisited any of these early novels in many years, do yourself a favor and give them a re-read. Time has not withered nor custom staled their infinite variety in any way. Those critics who hailed them as instant classics when they were published have been fully vindicated. Few pop-fiction writers have ever produced a five-book run as impressive as this one was. And Follett was just getting started. He would follow these five with The Pillars of the Earth, Night Over Water, A Dangerous Fortune, and A Place Called Freedom. I’ve read all of those but Pillars and I think they can hold their own with his first five bestsellers. And he would go on to produce some other excellent pop fictions. In fact, he appears to be far from done as a writer. He has a novel called The Deep and Secret Things scheduled for release in 2027.

I can hardly wait.

I stayed up till nearly midnight last night reading to the end of Ken Follett’s 2002 Nazi thriller, Hornet Flight. As far as I could tell, it wasn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it was nonetheless a terrific read. The story is set mainly in Denmark during the summer of 1941. The Nazis invaded the country a year and a half earlier, but unlike in Poland and elsewhere, they have established a relatively light presence in Denmark. They have allowed King Christian to retain his throne. They have allowed the national government to go on meeting. And, as yet, they have largely left the Jewish community alone, partly because it isn’t very large and partly because they can’t spare the resources just now to deal with the Danish Jews. The Danes and Germans have a lot in common. Most Danes speak German. Plenty of Danes have relatives in Germany and vice versa. The two countries have always had economic ties. Before the war, Danes frequently vacationed in Germany, and Germans frequently vacationed in Denmark. Thus, the Nazi occupation is oppressive but it hasn’t yet created the kind of warlike situation that pertained in Poland, the Sudetenland and elsewhere. Nonetheless, Danes are forbidden to leave the country without the approval of the Nazis, and the Nazis rarely approve.

The book was interesting to me, in part, because I know little about Denmark. The country controls somewhere around 1,400 islands (not including either the Faroe Islands or Greenland, which are far away from the mainland). Only 409 of these islands are big enough to be named and only about 70 of those are inhabited. But much of the action in Hornet Flight takes place on various small islands – such as Hvide Sande (which means “White Sand,” though Follett refers to it only as Sande Island) and Bornholm, a major tourist destination (when no world wars are raging) which lies about 23 miles from the Swedish mainland. About 60 percent of Denmark’s population live on islands (such as Zealand, where Copenhagen is located), thus it was nearly impossible during the German occupation to travel around Denmark without the Nazis knowing your location. They kept an eye on all the ferries carrying people from island to island or from the mainland to an island. Denmark’s only land border is with Germany. Thus, any member of the Danish resistance whose identity became known to the Nazis would find it almost impossible to hide from them. The islands were generally small and close knit. And if a resistance member tried to hide on, say, Sande Island, which covers an area of less than a square mile, it was usually easy to track them down using dogs, door-to-door searches, and by bribing snitches.

The main characters in Hornet Flight are mostly young Danish resistance members involved in a group called the Watchmen, which was formed and is operated by a young British MI6 operative named Hermia Mount, who spent her childhood in Denmark (where her father was a British diplomat) and speaks fluent Danish. She mostly communicates with her watchmen via the radio. Since the German invasion, Brits can no longer travel to Denmark and Danes cannot travel to the U.K. In June of 1941 the Royal Air Force was suffering huge losses whenever it tried to attack the German mainland. Nearly half of the planes that went out on each bombing raid never returned to Britain. As the novel opens, the Brits have figured out that the Germans have built a secret and very sophisticated radar station somewhere in Denmark that allows them to detect incoming British warplanes, so that the Germans can scramble their own warplanes and meet them before they ever reach their targets. Winston Churchill (a character in the novel) realizes that if this keeps up, Britain will soon be running out of airplanes (at this time, the U.S. wasn’t directly involved in the war). Because the Nazis are having such an easy time downing British warplanes, they have sent much of their Air Force to Russia where the German invasion appears to be close to bringing the Soviet Union to its knees. In order to help defend the U.S.S.R. (a wartime ally of the Brits and, later, the Yanks), the Brits need the watchmen to find the secret radar site in Denmark and photograph it, so the Brits will know its exact location and what exactly makes it so sophisticated.

Several brave Danish resistance members die horribly in the attempt to get this info to MI6. Eventually, the radar station is found and photographed by one of the youngest resistance members, 18-year-old Harald Olufson. But Harald can’t get out of Denmark in order to hand over the photos to Hermia Mount and her task force. Hermia flies to Sweden and, using a fake Swedish passport, she travels to Bornholm, posing as a tourist, where she hopes to collect the info she needs from one of the watchmen. Unfortunately, the Nazis throw a spanner in this plan. Eventually, Harald realizes that the only way he’ll be able to get the photos to the Brits is if he flies them there himself. This may seem farfetched, and it is, but Harald’s girlfriend, 18-year-old Karen Duchwitz (a Jew from a wealthy family), owns an old de Havilland Hornet Moth two-seat airplane (see above). When I bought the book, I assumed that Hornet Flight referred to the flight of a warplane. But the Hornet Moth isn’t a warplane at all. It runs on automobile fuel and was meant to be used as supplemental transportation for wealthy people, when an auto journey would be too long and arduous. Karen’s wealthy father bought it so he could island-hop around Denmark in it. But he was always too busy to fly it. He allowed Karen to take flying lessons for a year when she was fourteen. After that the old biplane was garaged (its wings fold back towards the fuselage making it possible to store it in a decent-sized auto garage). And now it is in a state of disrepair. Fortunately, Harald is a wizard at tinkering with cars, motorcycles and just about every other motorized machine. He believes he can get the Hornet Moth airworthy in just a few days. When he does, he wants Karen to fly the two of them to Britain with the canister of film that will help the Brits defeat the German radar station (a canister of film is also an important McGuffin in Follett’s Eye of the Needle). Karen hasn’t flown the Hornet Moth in three years, but she is brave and, as a Jew and a Dane, eager to help defeat the Nazis.

Flying the Hornet Moth from Denmark to Britain will be almost impossibly risky. It has a maximum range of about 630 miles, provided the winds are favorable. From where the Hornet Moth is housed in Denmark (a grand estate owned by Karen’s parents but now also occupied by a regiment of German soldiers), the coast of Great Britain is about 600 miles away. If they face a strong headwind, they’ll run out of fuel somewhere over the north sea and probably crash or freeze to death. What’s more, I haven’t even mentioned their main obstacle yet. He is Peter Flemming, a relentless Danish police inspector and once a childhood friend of Harald’s brother Arne. The father of Harald and Arne is a very strict Christian pastor and he once humiliated the Flemming family by criticizing Peter’s father in front of the entire congregation for having been caught scamming the Danish government. As a result, the entire Flemming family turned against the entire Olufson family. Peter has long wished to destroy the Olufson’s, and when he begins to suspect that both Arne and Harald are involved in the Danish resistance, he sets out to catch them in a compromising act and then arrest them and turn them over to the Gestapo back in Germany. Like many Follett villains, Peter Flemming has a few admirable qualities. His pretty young wife was rendered seriously mentally impaired by a careless driver who crashed into her car. The driver was from a wealthy family and got off with a mere six-month sentence for turning Inge into a virtual vegetable. But Peter still dearly loves his wife, even though she no longer even knows who he is. He feeds her and bathes her and looks after her with a great deal of tenderness.

All of these various plot threads (and a few I haven’t mentioned) come together in the final 100 or so pages of the novel in very exciting and unpredictable ways, leading to a fantastic climax. Hornet Moth can hold its own with the great historical thrillers that first made Follett an international bestselling author: Eye of the Needle, The Key to Rebecca, The Man From St. Petersburg, and so forth. The great heyday of the Nazi thriller was the 1970s, when thrillers like The Odessa File, Eye of the Needle, Marathon Man, The Eagle Has Landed, The Rhinemann Exchange, The Boys From Brazil, and many, many others were a staple of the bestseller lists. Reading Hornet Moth in 2026 was a strange experience for me. Not only did I constantly feel as though I had traveled back to the early 1940s (long before my birth), but I simultaneously felt as though I had traveled back to the 1970s, my first full decade as a pop fiction fan and the era in which I first fell in love with Nazi thrillers. That’s two overlapping trips back in time for the price of a single book.

As usual Follett did his homework on this novel, providing the reader with all kinds of fascinating facts about airplanes, Denmark, the Danish resistance, radar, and so forth. He has sometimes been criticized for creating characters who are not fully fleshed, but I had no trouble believing in all of the book’s major characters and most of its minor ones. And I feel confident that the book paints a realistic picture of the heroism and craftiness of the Danes who risked their lives to defeat the Nazis who had invaded their country.

Lately I have been seeing a lot of editorials about how selfish it is of Baby Boomers to hang on to their longtime homes rather than move to some Del Webb-style “senior community” and sell their homes, on the cheap, to some young person (or couple) who can’t afford to buy a house in today’s real estate market. The latest of these essays appeared just today, in the New York Times, and was written by economist Kyla Scanlon (pictured above). She writes, “A home has stopped being just a place to live – it has also become an asset that has to appreciate in value to underwrite the homeowner’s retirement…But this creates a trap. Young Americans want to be homeowners, too. So owners need housing prices to rise to provide for their retirement; buyers need them to fall…The link between retirement and home prices is pitting the old against the young. Break that link, and housing can become something you live in, because it no longer has to double as a nest egg.” Ms. Scanlon sees it as scandalous that, “Of the housing wealth in America added since [2010], two of every three dollars now sit with Americans 55 and older. Empty nesters own about 28 percent of large homes in the U.S. Millennials with children own about 16.” Ms. Scanlon thinks the government should force the AI companies that are currently booming to set up a fund that would help supplement the Social Security benefits of old people like me. Then, armed with both Social Security and a steady AI dividend, us old farts will be willing to give up our longtime houses and move into senior-living facilities (or some other downsizing arrangement) like the one spoofed in the recent NetFlix hit The Burroughs. Her advice to older homeowners seems to be: “Get thee to a Del Webbery.”

Many things about this make no sense. If attractive senior-living facilities can be built cheaply enough for seniors on a fixed income to buy into them, why not make them for young people as well? Why not manufacture junior-living facilities that can serve as starter homes for young people and which can allow older people to remain in homes that they love? What’s more, the psychological toll of moving from one’s beloved longtime home is likely to have negative effects on many seniors, effects that may create long-term mental and physical issues that may be costly to deal with (not just for seniors, who are covered by Medicare, but by all taxpayers, including young ones).

But the biggest problem with this scenario is that it simply goes against the American grain, as anyone who has ever read a serious amount of popular fiction can tell you. Almost since its inception English-language popular fiction has celebrated the idea of a home as more than just a building but rather as a place to live and die for. Much of that fiction is about the idea, for good or ill, of having a longtime home and refusing to give it up no matter what hardships arrive. Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, The House of the Seven Gables, I Capture the Castle, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Spencer’s Mountain (source of the TV series The Waltons), The March home in Little Women, The Starrett family homestead in Shane, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Jane Eyre’s Thornfield Hall, Maxim de Winter’s Manderley in Rebecca, Tara in Gone With the Wind, The Foxes of Harrow, The Drohega Sheep ranch in The Thorn Birds, the Nebraska log cabin in With a Lantern in Her Hand, a Georgia plantation in Beulah Land, a grand British estate in Singapore in Noel Barber’s Tanamara, another once-grand British estate in Brideshead Revisited, A family ranch in Mildred Walker’s The Curlew’s Cry, Susan Howatch’s Penmarric and Cashelmara, Seventrees by Janice Young Brooks, Paloverde by Jacqueline Briskin, various sagas by Willo Davis Roberts: Days of Valor, Keating’s Landing, Destiny’s Women, etc. – the list is pretty much endless. Baby Boomers, especially, were raised on this literary tradition, as fifty years ago, during the country’s bicentennial, countless books were published – such as John Jakes’s Kent Family Chronicles series – about American families trying to carve homes out of the vast American frontier. We were also raised on TV shows such as Bonanza, The Big Valley, The Walton’s, Little House on the Prairie, and countless others in which a home was more than just a place to stay until you are ready to retire, but rather a representation of its occupants’ souls and hopes and dreams.

In 2024 I read a novel called The Southwest Corner, written by the great Mildred Walker and published in 1951. It tells of an 83-year-old woman named Marcia Elder who has lived all her life in a big, three-story house situated in a rural area outside Rutland, Vermont. She has long prided herself on her independence, but lately she has found it more and more difficult to get by on her own. As a result she places an ad in the local newspaper: “WANTED: agreeable woman to share pleasant living with able-bodied, vigorous old lady of eighty-three with small capital, in return for all property at her death.” The ad is answered by a 55-year-old woman named Bea Cannon. When she comes to interview with Marcia, Bea Cannon doesn’t seem especially agreeable. She is talky and a bit pushy but otherwise not too objectionable. Reluctantly, Marcia signs a contract, giving Bea the role of her companion and caretaker in exchange for all of Marcia’s worldly wealth when she dies. Alas, Bea Cannon will turn out to be a bit of a villain, setting up a battle between two strong-willed women that will play out over the majority of the book’s pages. I’m surprised that the book was never adapted as a stage play, because it would make a great two-hander. Bea is only slightly less terrifying than the Annie Wilkes character in Stephen King’s Misery. But Marcia, even at the eighty-three is still pretty resourceful. This is a novel about the importance of a longtime home to an elderly person. Marcia Elder clearly owns more home than she needs. A family of six could probably live comfortably in her old home. But she isn’t portrayed as greedy or selfish for wanting to hang on to it long enough to die in it. And Walker’s novel does a fantastic job of showing the emotional and psychological toll of losing one’s home in old age. To economists like Kyla Scanlon, a home is merely an economic asset. It takes an artist like Mildred Walker to demonstrate how untrue that is. A home can also be a spiritual asset, a repository of all one’s hopes, dreams, sorrows, and memories. But don’t expect an economist like Scanlon to come around to that way of thinking. If she emptied out all of her pockets, she couldn’t make that change.

The first home my wife and I owned was purchased in 1980 and lost in foreclosure a year later during a time when interest rates on home loans averaged about 20 percent. After that we rented about a dozen different homes or apartments over the next fifteen years. We rented in towns all over northern California: Truckee, Grass Valley, Fairfield, Roseville, Loomis, Auburn, and so forth. In 1995, we finally bought another house, for $88,000, in Placerville, CA. It was a 1,000-square-foot fixer upper. The electricity was so archaic that you could turn on only one light at a time, otherwise you’d blow out a fuse. But it was situated on two acres and we loved it. We were only around forty years old when we bought it and were strong enough to look after a property that size. We hoped to live there until we died. Alas, after ten years, we realized that it was more property than we could be expected to maintain as we moved into our fifties. In 2004, we sold our Placerville home and moved into a 1,235-square-foot, one-bathroom home on a small lot in Sacramento. We have been here ever since. And we hope to be here until we die. The house was built in 1925 and over the last 22 years we’ve had to replace or repair practically every part of it, from the plumbing, to the wiring, to the heating and air system. We’ve had it repainted twice. We have completely replaced the perimeter fence. After a home invader kicked in our front door a couple of years ago, we spent nearly $4,000 having a new door and security screen installed. Our backyard was a wasteland when we moved in. Over the years my wife has turned it into a secret garden, with a turtle pond, a gazebo, a cat sanctuary, planter boxes, porch swings, and dozens of other amenities. There isn’t a square inch of the interior that looks the way it did when we moved here. We may not have built this house, but we built the home that it has become. And we don’t want to ever leave it, at least not vertically. It has nothing to do with being greedy, selfish Baby Boomers. It has everything to do with the great American tradition, reinforced by thousands of popular novels, that a man’s home is his castle and he ought never give it up without a fight. Snobbish critics have often sneered at the idea of an American production home being anything more than just a ticky-tacky box stamped out in great numbers by Corporate America. But those same critics will wax poetic about literature that celebrates what homeownership means to people of other cultures. They rave about books such as V.S. (“Wifebeater”) Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas or Gabriel Garcia (“Whorechaser”) Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Here’s a scholar waxing poetic about family homes in Marquez’s work:

“The houses in Gabriel García Márquez’s novels are architectural objects that seem to withstand common processes of aging and to escape time. Their courtyards and verandas not only store heat or moisture, they witness not only the raging of apocalyptic storms; above all, they accumulate stories. In the courtyard of the house of the family Buendía in Macondo, tied to the chestnut tree and under a provisional roof of palm leaves, the ancestor José Arcadio Buendía spends his last years on a shimmering border between life and death, for some people not even visible anymore. He has been sitting there since the week in which for him, time stood still on an everlasting Monday. Here, in this house, children were born and parties were held, here was sadness and decay, letters were read and written, inventions were made, here people suffered, celebrated, lived and died. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the house is respectively (or simultaneously) newly built, inhabited by family members, bastards and visitors; it is a twilight place where phantoms rule, some living, some dead for ages; it is the feverish place where desperate lovers long for ungraspable women; it is well maintained and in perfect shape with its white washed walls and swiped courtyard; and it is half gone and eaten by ants. The house of the Buendía family is a place where generations do not succeed one another but they intertwine in ever changing order, while characters merge. It is a space, which can hold time and reverse time, and where, when the stories break loose, time disappears.”

Often, if the house at the center of a novel belongs or belonged to some grand and wealthy family – as in Brideshead Revisited or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – critics and academics swoon over it. When it is carved out of the American wilderness, as in various books by Louis L’Amour and Elmer Kelton and other novelists of the American West, the critics pay no attention.

And now we appear to be arriving at an age when hanging onto your house for as long as possible is not only not being celebrated, it is being disparaged as the behavior of greedy Baby Boomers determined to deprive younger people of the joys and responsibilities of homeownership.

I bought my current car, a Corrolla, brand new in September of 1997 (it was a 1998 model). At the time it was considered an environmentally-friendly vehicle because it got roughly thirty miles per gallon of gas. Lately, various people have encouraged me to get rid of my car and buy a Tesla or some other electric vehicle instead (as if I could raise enough money for a Tesla by selling a 29-year-old Toyota!). They suggest that I am part of the greenhouse gas problem because I continue to burn fossil fuels in my car. But I have kept my car running for nearly 30 years. If every American kept their vehicles running for thirty years, we would have far fewer cars on the road. My friends who have traded in their old gas-guzzlers for Teslas or some other electric vehicles seem proud of themselves. But it isn’t as if they parked their gas-guzzlers permanently in the backyard. No, they traded them in or sold them. And most of those guzzlers are probably still on the road, still burning fossil fuels, and being driven, no doubt, by less affluent Americans.

We’ve reached a strange point in history when fairly liberal people – the kind who were championing recycling and reusing long before those ideas were popular – are now arguing that it is selfish and destructive to hang on to your 30-year-old car or the house you have lived in for nearly a quarter of a century. Hanging on to your possessions and maintaining them in good shape was once considered a sign of good character. Now everyone wants me to give my money to Del Webb or Elon Musk and surrender the house and the car that I’ve spent much of my life maintaining. I may not have built this house with my bare hands the way that Pa Ingalls built his house. And I may not have built my car with my bare hands the way that Pa Ingalls built his wagon. But if you plan to come and take them away from me be prepared to pry them from my cold dead fingers. This place ain’t Brideshead or the Buendia estate, but it’s mine, and I plan on dying here. Now get off my damn lawn!

Today I offer another installment of my list of the 100 (or so) essential popular novels of the Baby Boom era. But before I share my latest addition to the list, I want to explain a bit about the criteria I have used to put this list together. This will not in any way be an objective list of the highest regarded or bestselling novels of the Baby Boom era. We’ve all seen lists of the best post WWII novels in English and they all include many of the same old suspects: The Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Lolita, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, Portnoy’s Complaint, etc. I’ve read each of those seven novels. I liked some, disliked some, and found others merely okay. But I don’t think I can come up with anything original to say about any of them, because they have been written about by far too many other reviewers. I want to put together a list of books that I think of as sort of the understory to the traditional tale of The Post-WWII Novel in English that you find in many textbooks and Norton Anthologies. I have no official credentials that could lend my list any sort of authority. In fact, I have some serious flaws as a reader that will almost certainly cause some readers to dismiss my list altogether.

The first of these flaws is this: I have absolutely no ability to appreciate high fantasy. I’m not just talking about the plethora of contemporary YA novels about witches and sorcerers and such. I mean that even the most highly regarded high-fantasy novels (and series of novels) in English – The Once and Future King, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Unicorn, Mary Stewart’s Merlin Quartet, Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire – have never been able to work their magic on me. I have started all of those series/books and have never finished a single one of them. Don’t get me wrong. I am not immune to all fantasy fiction. I love many of Ray Bradbury’s fantastic stories. Ken Grimwood’s Replay and Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic and Thomas Berger’s Being Invisible and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and Mary Stewart’s Thornyhold and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and plenty of other low fantasy novels are favorites of mine. But I have never once found myself enjoying any novel with a unicorn, a dragon, or an elf/gnome in it. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps I was menaced by a dwarf as a child and have blocked out the memory. I can rarely make it through a film that contains any of those mythical creatures (Elf, starring Will Farrell, being a rare exception). I couldn’t make it through even the first of Peter Jackson’s LOTR films, much less the entire...trilogy? I couldn’t make it past the second episode of the TV series A Game of Thrones. I have good friends whose literary tastes I greatly admire who are huge fans of Narnia, Middle Earth, Westeros, and the like. I trust them when they tell me that these are great works of literature. But, for the life of me, I cannot endure them (high-fantasy tales, that is, not my friends). Just as some people (not me, fortunately) are unable to bear the taste of cilantro, I am unable to bear a tale featuring elves, gnomes, unicorns, dragons, wizards, fairies, or mythical quests. This is a serious handicap for anyone trying to put together a list of essential books of the Baby Boom, because high-fantasy literature has been a huge part of that era’s canon. I thought of including some fantasy literature by Tolkien or C.S. Lewis on my list so as to make it more conventionally inclusive. After all, I don’t have to have read all those books in order to understand how important they are to the popular culture of the last 75 years or so. But I don’t feel like writing about any books that I have absolutely no personal connection to. Thus my list will be completely free of high-fantasy tales. Sorry, not sorry.

At first, I thought I could justify ignoring books like Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint by noting that, although they were/are massive bestsellers, they are widely regarded as serious literature rather than popular fiction. This struck me as an easy way to avoid various books that were enormously influential during the formative years of the Baby Boomers but which I have no desire to write about. Alas, I realized that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to apply the serious-literature-vs.-pop-fiction test consistently. For instance, I plan on including Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove on my list because I consider it one of the greatest genre/popular novels in the American canon. But Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer Prize, which tends to suggest that it is every bit as much a piece of serious literature as either Catcher or Portnoy, neither of which was awarded a Pulitzer, and neither of which I plan to mention except in passing. Thus, you are just going to have to allow me to employ my own highly subjective process for determining what is serious fiction and what is popular fiction. I am a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s work. If he were currently in some danger of being forgotten, I would certainly list Slaughterhouse-Five on my list (as well as Mother Night, Bluebeard, and several others). Lonesome Dove isn’t in any danger of being forgotten in my lifetime, but I plan to include it because it strikes me as closer in spirit to the popular Western novel than Slaughterhouse-Five is to the popular war novel. I can’t imagine too many Louis L’Amour fans disliking Lonesome Dove. But I can easily imagine fans of The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone disliking Slaughterhouse-Five.

I also plan to mostly avoid so-called “fix-up” novels. In general, these are novels stitched together from various short stories that share some sort of thematic (or other kind of) connection. Famous examples of this type of novel included Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and I, Robot, Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven and The Red Pony, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Good Squad, and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. These almost always read like story collections to me and not like true novels. I will make exceptions only for the rare fix-up novel that reads like a single, continuous work of fiction. Having said that, I am about to write extensively about two novels – Shane and Hondo – that began life as short stories and then were expanded into novels. Technically, Hondo probably qualifies as a fix-up novel because it was cobbled together out of a short story by L’Amour and a screenplay by James Edward Grant. I consider it more of a film novelization than a fix-up novel, and I am not prejudiced against novelizations, despite the fact that they are held in low regard by most critics. And now for today’s essential Baby Boomer book…

SHANE by Jack Schaefer. Not many books influenced Boomer pop culture more than Jack Schaefer’s 1949 Western novel, Shane. The subsequent film adaptation, directed by George Stevens and released in 1953 was also hugely popular and is still widely considered a classic.

It is difficult to exaggerate just how influential both the book and the film were in America and elsewhere. In their 1982 book Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook, Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain, write: “Everyone knows Shane. It may not be the most famous western novel; it is arguable that titles such as The Last of the Mohicans, The Virginian, or Riders of the Purple Sage are more recognizable. But Shane is a book people have read – and continue to do so. By 1978 over 4 million copies were in print in more than seventy editions and thirty-one languages. More recently, a committee of British readers selected it as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century. Everyone knows Shane.”

In his introduction to the University of Nebraska’s 1984 critical edition of the novel, Marc Simmons writes, “By any standard of measurement, Jack Schaefer’s Shane rates as a classic in the literature of the American West…The fact is that Shane, the novel, addressed an entire generation: post-World War II Americans who did not quite comprehend, during the unsettling 1950s, that one age was crumbling around them and new, tense, faster-paced time was at hand. Schaefer wrote of people – of Shane and the Starrett family – cut from noble cloth. They were strong, hardworking, brave, self-disciplined, responsible, honest; ungalled by self-doubt or any sense of inferiority. In short, they possessed those virtues that, by the mid-twentieth century, were increasingly being dismissed as outdated or unattainable.”

In Shane, Schaeffer’s point of reference is the Johnson County War, a shameful chapter in Wyoming history wherein wealthy cattle barons went to war against smaller family-run cattle ranches – chasing them off the land, murdering some, burning their houses, killing their cattle. The War (1889-1893) is never mentioned by name in Shane, because it wasn’t recognized as such until a few years later. When Shane rides into town, the Starretts and a dozen other small ranching families are being threatened by a large open-range cattle operation owned by Luke Fletcher (the name is changed to Rufus Ryker in the film), an unscrupulous tyrant who’ll stop at nothing – even murder – to rid himself of his smaller competitors. When Shane stops at the Starrett ranch to water his horse, Joe Starrett asks him to stick around for a while and help him with the cattle and farming. This is a tempting offer to a man like Shane, who has been a loner for most of his life. Joe has a wife named Marian, and her beauty and womanly softness seem to attract Shane as well. Thus, Shane entwines his fate to the fate of the Starretts and their neighbors for a few months. He puts away his pistol and for the longest time eschews gunplay entirely. Alas, he eventually realizes that he and Luke Fletcher are headed for a showdown from which only one man is likely to come out alive. And so he reluctantly takes up his gun again.

Shane was hugely popular and it seems to have influenced dozens and dozens of books and films that followed in its wake, including John Farrow’s Hondo, a film that starred John Wayne and was released just a few months after film version of Shane. In fact, John Wayne may have tried to acquire the rights to Shane and, when that failed, purchased an unrelated story by L’Amour and then instructed Grant to shape it into something resembling Shane. The similarities between L’Amour’s Hondo and Schaefer’s Shane are numerous. Both have a five-letter, single-word title, and that title is the name of the main character. We never learn Shane’s full name, but Hondo’s last name is Lane, which rhymes with Shane. This isn’t unusual. After the publication of Shane, lots of cinematic and literary gunmen came along bearing Shane-like names. In the 1952 film High Noon, Gary Cooper plays a lawman named Will Kane (the film is based on a 1947 short story in which the lawman is named Doane, not Kane). In the 1954 film Vera Cruz, Cooper played a gunman named Ben Trane. In the 1957 film Outlaw’s Son, Dane Clark (Dane!) played a gunman named Blaine. Also in 1957, James Stewart starred in a Western called Night Passage, in which he played a character named McClain. In 1955, Western novelist Will Cook produced a book called Sabrina Kane, giving the Shane phenomenon a distaff twist. In 1958, L’Amour published a book called Utah Blaine. Plenty of other 1950s Westerns featured lead characters with single-syllable names that contained a long A vowel sound: Slade, Wade, Cade, Clay, Hayes, Blake, Tate, etc. Of course, as a child, Schaefer was a fan of Zane Gray novels. He was also a big fan of the cinema. When looking for a handle for his hero, he may have been inspired both by Zane Gray’s first name and John Wayne’s last name (he and Wayne were both born in 1907, about six months apart; L’Amour was born in early 1908, less than a year from Wayne’s birthdate – quite a twelvemonth for the American Western). In Kung Fu, a 1970s TV Western, actor David Carradine played Kwai Chang Caine, an Asian-American variation on the Shane character. Earlier, in 1966, Carradine had starred in a short-lived TV series called Shane, based on the novel but despised by Schaefer, who told the producers, “Please take my name off that-piece-of-crap show.” (At least he asked politely). Carradine told TV Guide that he perceived Shane as “the first folk-rock cowboy.” That couldn’t have thrilled a fuddy-duddy like Schaefer. The character of Shane was so iconic that the Batman TV series (1966-1968) spoofed it with a cowboy villain named Shame, played by Cliff Robertson. Both Evil Roy Slade, a 1972 TV movie, and Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’s 1974 theatrical release, feature Old West gunslingers trying to reform, and appear to have been conceived, at least in part, as spoofs of Shane. Clint Eastwood’s 1985 film Pale Rider was partially inspired by Shane, as was James Mangold’s 2017 film Logan, which directly references it. Plenty of other Eastwood films, from High Plains Drifter to Unforgiven, seem to be in conversation with Shane as well. Ernest Tidyman, who wrote High Plains Drifter, also created the character of Shaft, a bad-ass African-American variation on Shane with a similar-sounding name (although the name Shaft was clearly intended to convey sexual connotations not hinted at in Shane). Nearly forty years after the publication of Schaefer’s novel, when Dean Koontz was creating a bad-ass gun-toting female protagonist for his 1988 novel Lightning, he gave her the name Laura Shane, obviously trying to evoke the memory of another gun-toting bad-ass. Two years later, thriller writer Michael Prescott (using his birth name Douglas Borton) published a sort of anti-Shane novel called Kane. On the cover of the most recent edition (on which Prescott’s name is given as the author), the publisher has printed, “A Stranger Comes To Town…,” an accurate description of Shane, as well. This is an anti-Shane novel because, whereas Shane arrives in a small Wyoming community in 1889 and becomes determined to help out its small-time cattle ranchers, Kane arrives in (fictional) Tuskett, California in 1989 determined to kill all twenty-three of its residents. Here’s how the novel Shane opens:

“He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89. I was a kid then, barely topping the backboard of father’s old chuck wagon. I was on the upper rail of our small corral, soaking in the late afternoon sun, when I saw him far down the road where it swung into the valley from the open plain beyond.

“In that clear Wyoming air I could see him plainly, though he was still several miles away. There seemed nothing remarkable about him, just another stray horseman riding up the road toward the cluster of frame buildings that was our town. Then I saw a pair of cowhands, loping past him, stop and stare after him with a curious intentness…As he came near, what impressed me first was his clothes. He wore dark trousers of some serge material, tucked into tall boots and held at the waist by a wide belt, both of soft black leather tooled in intricate design.”

And here is how the novel Kane opens:

“Where the desert met the sky there was a man.

“A tall man dressed in black, a distant figure shimmering like a mirage behind a tremulous curtain of heat. He was out there alone, and he was walking slowly, deliberately, crossing the bleak stretches of gray shale and alkaline sand, coming toward the town.

“At first he’d been no more than a smudge on the landscape, a wavering shadow amidst the ghost flowers and skeletonweed, like the shadow of a hawk cast by the westering sun; but there had been no hawk. There had been only the shadow, creeping over the pinkish, blistered desert soil that looked so much like sunburnt, peeling skin, moving closer, ever closer, until at last it resolved itself into a human form, tall and dark, smoky with distance, but unmistakable now.”

I can’t prove it, but it seems clear that Michael Prescott, a Baby Boomer, was influenced by Schaefer’s classic novel, which was published 41 years earlier. (Clearly, he also chose the name Kane in order to evoke the Bible’s first murderer, Cain, but his opening page resembles Shane more than it resembles Genesis.) It makes perfect sense that Prescott would want to evoke Shane, because Shane has been influencing pop culture since practically the day it was published. (After writing this essay, I sent it to Michael Prescott to see if Kane was inspired by Shane, and he responded: “My old horror novel undoubtedly owes a debt to Shane, but to the movie, not the book, which I’m afraid I’ve never read. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was a book! I was only familiar with the movie. So to the extent that there are similarities between my opening paragraphs and those of the novel Shane, it’s just coincidence. The trope of a mysterious stranger appearing on the horizon is pretty common in Westerns.”)

Not only were plenty of fictional characters named for Shane, a lot of real-life Baby Boomers were also named for Schaefer’s character. In his introduction to the critical edition of Shane, Marc Simmons writes, “I think it is safe to declare that today the many men and boys (and even a few girls) who are graced with the given name of Shane bear witness to the influence that Schaefer’s hero exerted upon their parents.” I grew up in an Irish-American Catholic family. My oldest sibling, born in 1955, is named Shauna, a feminine variant of Shane/Sean. Had I been born first, I’d have probably been called Shane or Sean. I was educated exclusively in Catholic schools, and I have met a fair number of Baby Boomers named Shane, Sean, Shawn, Shana, and the like. The novel Shane was so ubiquitous by the early 1960s that Arthur C. Clarke included a reference to it in his 1961 sci-fi novel, A Fall of Moondust. Set in the 21^st century (like Clarke’s most famous work), the novel details the plight of some tourists trapped in a “dust cruiser” (basically an ocean liner that floats on the ultrafine moon dust Clarke invented for the story) that has sunk beneath the moon’s surface. While awaiting rescue, the crew tries to entertain the passengers by reading from the few books aboard the ship, one of which is “a Harvard Press edition of Shane with scholarly annotations.” Clarke intended it as a snarky indication that literary and scholarly standards will have fallen dramatically by the century we now live in. A contemporary version of the joke would probably posit a Harvard Press edition of Fifty Shades of Gray. By sheer coincidence, the name Shane is scrambled inside the names of roughly twenty film characters played by John Wayne, including Sean Thornton (The Quiet Man) and Ethan Edwards (The Searchers).

If this essay sounds like the special pleading of a die-hard Shane fan, then I have misled you. I am not a big fan of Shane. Jack Schaefer was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and had never been west of his hometown prior to the publication of Shane. His parents were prominent members of the community and close friends of three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sandberg. Schaefer had an elite education, having attended Oberlin College and Columbia University (he dropped out of Columbia’s masters program when his advisor refused to let him write his thesis about Hollywood movies, which were deemed anti-intellectual at the time). Growing up, his favorite novelist was Zane Grey, a New York dentist whose Westerns are only slightly more convincing than Schaefer’s. Though barely longer than a short story, Shane seems to contain a lot of false notes in it, beginning with that opening paragraph where Bobby Starrett claims that he can see Shane clearly while he is still – not one, not a couple, but several miles away! At the time Shane was written Schaefer had never been out on the open range, so perhaps he had no idea of how difficult it would be to see a man clearly who is at least three miles away.

Louis L’Amour’s 1953 novel, Hondo, was less an expansion of his short story “The Gift of Cochise” than a novelization of James Edward Grant’s screenplay for the John Wayne movie (which was allegedly based on the short story but bears almost no resemblance to it). As noted, the film seems to have been heavily influenced by Shane and, thus, L’Amour’s novel was too. But in many ways, Hondo is the better novel. Literary snobs preferred Shane because it was written by a highly educated east coast journalist for United Press. L’Amour had little formal education and his prose could be rough, but he knew the cowboy life better than almost any other writer born in the twentieth century.

There are no dogs and no fishing in the novel Shane (though there is a dog of some importance in the film). But, like a true outdoorsman, Hondo Lane is fond of fishing and is devoted to his pet dog. What’s more, L’Amour seems much more interested in horses than was Jack Schaefer, who rarely describes any of them.

As entertaining as it is, Shane is less a Western than it is a crime novel in a historical setting. Schaefer’s lack of firsthand experience in the West is on full display in Shane (later in life he would move to a ranch in New Mexico and his Western fiction would become more authentic; though he never said so, he probably also learned a great deal from reading Louis L’Amour books). Shane is a book born of Schaefer’s love of Zane Gray novels and Hollywood movies. He originally titled the story “The Man From Nowhere,” which is appropriate, because the West he describes in Shane doesn’t seem to be any specific place; rather the story appears to be set on a Hollywood studio’s Western back lot. Hondo, on the other hand, is positively steeped in Western detail. Schaefer rarely bothers to describe any particular horse, probably because he wasn’t much familiar with the various types. But L’Amour knew all about horses. He knew that the Comanche Indians preferred pintos, believing that the striking coloring of the horses would bring them good medicine. Less knowledgeable Western writers have their characters refer to these horses as “paints,” but L’Amour knew that that term came later. Likewise, his cowboys refer to quarter horses as steeldusts, which is what they were called in the Old West. Hondo, we are told, rides a “lineback,” a type of dun-colored horse that features a dark stripe down its back. He rides this type of horse because “the lineback’s dun color shaded into the desert as did his own clothing.” L’Amour also tells us that Hondo “wore nothing that gleamed,” because he didn’t want the glint of the sun to strike a bright belt buckle or hat ornament and give away his location to his enemies. Shane rides into town wearing a ridiculous all-black outfit, like the villain in a Hollywood film. Bobby Starrett describes Shane’s pistol as having a bright and shiny ivory plate attached to the outer grip, “showing sharp and distinct against the dark material of the trousers.” L’Amour must have hooted at that (although he claimed he never read anyone else’s Westerns). No Western gunman who crossed the dun-colored plains or sea-green pasture lands of the West in black silk clothing at midday, and flashing a gleam of ivory from his gun handle, would live long enough to have much of a career as a gunfighter. Sure, the Indian Wars were largely over by 1889, but if you had any outstanding enemies – and what gunfighter didn’t? – you learned to make yourself as invisible as possible when you traveled. In fact, L’Amour seems to be talking directly to Schaefer when, in Hondo, he writes: “Nobody but a fool or a tenderfoot wears bright, shiny stuff on his clothes. Only a fool would ride a white horse. See it too far off. That bright, shiny stuff is for sissies, townfolk. You wear it out here and some Injun see you ten mile off by sun reflectin’. You’d lose your hair mighty quick.”

City slickers like myself have always been attracted to L’Amour’s novels by the authentic Western details. They give us a sense of traveling back in time. In Hondo alone I learned a wide array of facts about the life of a Western outdoorsman of the nineteenth century:

Wild game will not step on fallen branches. Neither would an Indian. Only a horse, a cow, or a white man would be so foolish.

***

“Was I you, I’d walk on the sunny side of that rock. When it’s hot the snake will be in the shade, when it’s cold he’ll be in the sun.”

***

“It’s a Gambel’s quail, Johnny. Drinks a lot, so you never find him too far from water. Thing to remember.”

***

Johnny straightened in his saddle and peered at the tracks. “What are they?”

“Wolf. Bigger than a coyote.”

“Maybe it was a dog.”

“No. Dog walks right up to something. A wolf is suspicious. He circles around, stops, smells, smells the air. Wolf’s more careful.”

***

“Bees can take you to water. Need water, an’ they go often. So you watch where they go.”

***

“Man walking in tall grass, he kicks the grass away from him in the direction he’s travelin’. Horse or cow, their hooves have a circular, swinging motion, so they knock the grass down and back. With them it points in the direction they come from.”

Before I read Hondo, I thought cowboys cut fringe into their buckskin coats for ornamentation. But, according to L’Amour, that has nothing to do with it. The buckskin fringe helps the coat shed water more quickly, because it shakes as the cowboy walks or rides. It also provides him with a ready supply of leather thongs he can cut free in an instant, in case he needs to tie a splint to a broken finger, or string together some fish by the gills. None of this information is in the film Hondo, but L’Amour’s novelization is full of such cowboy lore. As Old West scholar Robert Phillips once noted, in L’Amour’s books you can get information about “the making of Madeira wine, the building of fires, the production of nails, the moisture in cacti, patronage in Elizabethan England, buffalo behavior, bird calls, Swiss militia, vagaries of the weather, and, above all, frontier facts, of which he had an inexhaustible supply.” He was particularly good when writing about horses and dogs, two animals he had a lifelong fondness for. Cleveland-native Schaefer tries to put some cowboy wisdom into Shane’s mouth, but it mostly sounds like Hollywood hokum:

“A man who watches what’s going on around him will make his mark.”

***

“Take care of a horse, Bob, and it will take care of you.”

Alas, Schaefer was the kind of literary man whom the east coast book critics were trained to identify and appreciate. He had an elite education, had lived in New York, and had worked at several east-coast newspapers. One reviewer of Shane wrote, “That Schaefer could turn out such a Western before he ever saw the West is a tribute to his dogged research, devotion to facts, and storytelling ability, all honed by his newspaper work.” Actually, all it took was a devotion to cowboy movies.

Decades later, another generation of American book critics would be heaping praise on another phony Western writer, this one by the name of Cormac McCarthy. In a (rare) takedown of McCarthy’s shallow work, writer and musician Shane (!) Kimberlin wrote:

Louis L’Amour was what’s often called a genre writer. Genre is an untranslatable French word meaning (approximately) ‘readable and enjoyable.’ Think ‘joie de vivre,’ think ‘genre de vivre.’ If L’Amour’s sentences are workmanlike, at least they are grammatically correct and he clearly identifies who is speaking. His hard violent men are full of depth, like the pools of the Arizona oases they kill for in one of L’Amour’s best, Last Stand at Papago Wells. Here is L’Amour setting the scene for the climax of the novel, which occurs in a sandstorm:

‘And so the sun shone...but now the high dust carried by the winds above the mountains obscured the sun but took away no heat. It lay heavy on the land, and although the heat waves were gone and the yellow pall covered the higher heavens, there was silence everywhere.

‘No birds flew, no lizard moved upon the ground…no quail called from the distant trees, for there was silence, and only silence.

‘There is upon the great sand wastes no more terrifying thing than a sand storm…the driving grains of sand wipe out the earth and sky, obscure the horizons, and close one in a tight and lonely world no more than a few feet square. Until one has experienced a sand storm upon the desert one cannot know horror; until one has felt the lashing whips of sand one cannot know agony; and until one has felt that heat, that terror, that feeling that all the world has gone wrong, one has not known hell.’

Here is a sample of Cormac’s landscape description, which I had to read three times to grasp.

‘He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so spent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less.’

That last sentence in particular is a real head-scratcher. Maybe Cormac should have taken an MFA to polish up his prose. But it’s alright, because in contrast to L’Amour, McCarthy is a literary writer, which means he’s not obligated to invite or seduce you, but has a license to bludgeon.”

Wittily, Kimberlin refers to McCarthy’s most famous Western novel as Bludge Meridian. Another Substack book critic, who, like Shane goes by a single syllable (Krug), negatively cites this example of Western writing, from All the Pretty Horses:

“[The cowboys] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddle-legged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they’d ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.”

Krug notes, “It is a rare passage in a rare book that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake the sound of human retching for the call of wild animals. But ‘wild animals’ isn’t epic enough; McCarthy must blow smoke about ‘some rude provisional species,’ as if your average quadruped had table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses’ perspective to the narrator’s, though just what ‘something imperfect and malformed’ refers to is unclear. The last half-sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the ‘thing smirking in the eyes of grace’ the same thing that is ‘lodged in the heart of being’? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if even McCarthy can even explain any of this. He just likes the way it sounds.”

Fake Western writers like Schaefer and McCarthy tend to write about horses as if they are nothing but dumb beasts. Real Western writers, like L’Amour, are able to differentiate their equine characters as well as their human ones. In L’Amour’s 1960 novel Flint, a character named Kettleman is hiding out after dark in a New Mexico wilderness area when a stranger on horseback calls out to him. Kettleman knows that the stranger cannot have possibly seen him, so he makes no answer, hoping the stranger will figure he is mistaken and ride on. But the stranger sits still and keeps talking to the unseen Kettleman, explaining how he knows that someone must be there.

“The horse,” the soft drawl continued, “is a good night horse. Broke him from a wild bunch, and he’s worth his weight in gold to a night-riding man. He spotted you first off. If you’d been a horse he would have whinnied, if you’d been a cow-critter he would have cut out after you, and he’d shy from a bear or a lion, so you’ve got to be a man.” The rider paused. “Something different about you, too. I can tell that by his attitude.”

Reading the work of Schaefer and McCarthy, one gets the feeling that neither author ever spent much time on horseback. But L’Amour was practically raised in the saddle, and it shows in his work. Alas, the critics have spoken. L’Amour will forever after be categorized as a genre hack by elite academics, while McCarthy will be celebrated as our foremost novelist of the Old West. And as a result, future generations of American readers will become dumber and dumber about that part of our history.

Until the publication of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove in 1985, Shane was largely perceived as the definitive American Western. On the blog Saddle Bums Western Review, Western novelist Richard S. Wheeler calls it “easily the most famous of western novels, and the one that made the most history…It became the watershed novel that changed western fiction into men’s literature featuring the gunman hero. Its success was so phenomenal that publishers thereafter wanted gunman stories and little else.”

Throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s Shane sat atop almost every list of the best western novels ever written. I can only imagine that this must have chapped Louis L’Amour’s fanny something awful. It sure chaps mine.

But there’s no denying that Shane influenced popular culture more than almost any other book of the Baby Boom era. Shane’s offspring are many, including the famous character of Rambo, a classic lone combat warrior. Rambo first came to life in David Morrell’s 1972 thriller First Blood. Back in 1953, Jack Schaefer published his second novel, a book called First Blood. Clearly Morrell knew of Schaefer’s work and was acknowledging that.

Will Louis L’Amour manage to secure a spot on this list of 100 (or so) essential books of the Baby Boom era? Stick around to find out.

As you know, I have lately been returning to the early books of Ken Follett’s career, the five bestsellers he published between 1978 and 1985 (Eye of the Needle, Triple, The Key to Rebecca, The Man From St. Petersburg, and Lie Down With Lions). Follett published about ten novels before the release of Eye of the Needle, but even he refers to these novels as “my unsuccessful books.” Most pop fiction fans of the 1970s had never heard the name Ken Follett until Eye of the Needle hit the scene and made a household name of him. But what about his follow-up novel, Triple? Was it one of those books, like The Odessa File (follow up to The Day of the Jackal) and The Blue Knight (follow up to The New Centurions) and ‘Salem’s Lot (follow up to Carrie) that managed to be roughly as good as its predecessor? Or was it like The Ninth Configuration (follow up to The Exorcist) and Something Happened (follow up to Catch-22) and The Little Friend (follow up to The Secret History) that were largely perceived as disappointments?

Sales-wise, Triple appears to have been as successful as its predecessor, placing at number eleven on the Publishers Weekly list of the bestselling novels of 1979 – an impressive feat considering that the novel wasn’t published until October 22 of that year. The New York Times reviewed the book on October 3 and noted: “Readers apparently remember Ken Follett’s first novel, Eye of the Needle, with pleasure, for although his second one will not be officially published until October 22, Triple is already in fifth place on the bestseller list.” That phenomenon was probably due to preorders and book club purchases. The Times continued: “It is eminently qualified for such popularity, for its behind-the-scenes interpretation of contemporary events includes everything in the political and emotional spectrum, as well as what someone [i.e., a character in the novel] calls the hijacking of a holocaust.” The review, by Anatole Broyard, is sloppily written and occasionally snarky, but largely positive. Broyard apparently found the idea of an attractive young airline stewardess being able to assist in a dangerous bit of spy business ludicrous, writing, “Suza is more believable in bed than in sabotaging a ship, but if she were to be played by Claudia Cardinale or Jacqueline Bissett, who would care? While she is performing her particular heroics, her legs get burned and her promiscuity and other bad habits peel off.” Suza won’t strike a contemporary reader as particularly promiscuous, and compared to the male heroes of the era’s commercial spy novels – Matt Helm, James Bond, etc. – she is downright demur. I’m too lazy to track down every original review of Triple online, but the blurbs in my old paperback edition suggest that it was highly praised in numerous venues. Time magazine called it “one of the liveliest thrillers of the year.” The Boston Globe (somewhat incoherently) called it, “A real page-turner…paced with a racing heartbeat for a metronome.”

I read the novel when it first came out and I remember finding it a bit less thrilling than Eye of the Needle. I just today finished re-reading it and was impressed by how strong it is and how well it holds up. But I also see what might have bothered me back in 1979. Last year, in a review Charles Cummings’s highly praised spy novel Box 88, I wrote: “Personally I prefer the spy novels of Frederick Forsyth to those of le Carre, because Forsyth’s books contain tons of spycraft and tons of violent action. Le Carre was great with the details of spycraft but not so great with violent action sequences. Call me a bonehead, but I generally like violent action sequences in my thrillers. Charles Cumming’s Box 88 clearly seemed to be more heavily influenced by the work of le Carre than by the work of Forsyth, which is fine. Again – I enjoyed it. The spycraft was top-notch (Cumming has often denied ever working as a spy, which has generated some suspicion that he must have once worked as a spy). But the book was mostly about the process of spying and not about the excitement of the trade. I realize that real-life espionage is often dull and unglamorous. So too is much real-life police work. Nonetheless, if I am going to read a spy novel, I want a lot action and adventure with my spycraft.”

For much of its 340-page length, Triple focuses intensely on spycraft and features very few frightening action sequences. But I was largely okay with that, because the spycraft itself was fascinating and struck me as not the usual run of fictional espionage tropes. In fact, the details of Follett’s triple-cross tale were so realistic that at times I felt that I was reading a work of nonfiction. Not until I finished the novel, and began investigating it online, did I learn that it was based on an actual covert operation by Israeli intelligence, a mission executed back in 1968 to steal hundreds of tons of uranium for the purpose of producing nuclear bombs (you can read about it on Wikipedia under: Operation Plumbat).

The novel is set in 1968. Israeli intelligence operatives believe that Russia is helping Egypt to develop its own nuclear weapons. If that happens, Israel would likely be blown off the map. Thus the Israelis begin looking for a large shipment of uranium to steal in order to build their own nuclear weapons. Mad magazine used to have a famous series of cartoons called Spy vs. Spy. Triple could just as easily have been called Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy. In fact, you can even throw a few more spies into that title. The main character is Nat Dickstein, a forty-something vet of WWII and former concentration camp internee who now works for Mossad. Dickstein was born in England and educated at Oxford, but his father’s life and livelihood were ruined by British anti-Semitism. Thus, after the war, Dickstein moved to Israel, believing it to be the only place on earth where a Jew could be free from anti-Semitism. Like many a fictional spy, Dickstein is a bit of a loose cannon/lone wolf (chose your own cliché). He prefers to operate on his own, without a lot of oversight from Mossad or anyone else. He spends a lot of time studying how shipments of uranium are moved around the globe. He learns that a large commercial cargo ship called Coparelli will soon be carrying several hundred tons of uranium from Holland to a port in the Mediterranean. His ingenious plan is to purchased one of Coparelli’s identical sister ships, this one known as Stromberg, and then seize the Coparelli at sea, kill its crew members (or, if feasible, take them to some inconvenient location where they can’t easily alert anyone of the hijacking), rebrand the Coparelli as Stromberg, and then sink the real Stromberg and sail the Coparelli, with its hold filled with uranium, to Haifa, where the Israeli’s will be waiting for it. It is a plan with a lot of moving parts and, naturally, plenty goes wrong. For one thing, while he is in Luxembourg setting up some initial financing, he has a chance encounter with Yasif Hassan, a former classmate from Oxford. Yasif is one of the Arabs who was displaced from Palestine when Israel was established. He is now a citizen of Egypt though he works for a Lebanese bank that is headquartered in Luxembourg. He also occasionally provides information to the Egyptian military intelligence service if he thinks it will be helpful to them in their ongoing dispute with the Israelis. When he learns that his old college pal Dickstein now lives in Israel and occasionally travels to Luxembourg, Hassan becomes convinced that Dickstein is a spy for Mossad. He reports this fact to his handlers in Egypt. Suspecting that Dickstein may be looking to finance the purchase of fissionable materials, the Egyptians, along with their colleagues in the KGB, decide to keep tabs on Dickstein and see what he is up to. The KGB puts an experienced Russian agent named Rostov in charge of the operation. Hassan is not highly experienced as a spy but, because he knows Dickstein personally, Rostov has no choice but to give him a role in the operation. Like most KGB agents, Rostov has no respect for Egyptian intelligence operatives. At first he treats Hassan dismissively, which Hassan resents bitterly. But when he sees that Hassan is actually an intelligent man with good instincts for the espionage racket, Rostov warms up to him a bit (but only a little bit; Rostov and Hassan remain wary of each other throughout the novel).

At this point we’ve got our Spy (Dickstein) vs. Spy (Hassan) vs. Spy (Rostov). Although it seems as if Hassan and Rostov are working together, each is secretly working against the other’s best interests. Though he is now an Egyptian citizen, Hassan remains an Arab at heart. Rostov and the U.S.S.R., as well as the Egyptians, want to catch Dickstein and his crew in the act of hijacking a boatload of uranium at sea. They believe that this will bring international opprobrium down upon, not only Israel, but its biggest financial backer, the U.S.A. But Hassan doesn’t want the Israeli hijacking to be stopped in the act. He wants to alert his allies in the Palestinian resistance of the voyage of the Coparelli so that they can get to it first and hijack the uranium for the Palestinian cause.

This is a complicated set up and it only gets much more complicated from there. The book is filled with the kind of granular details about international affairs that is a hallmark of Frederick Forsyth’s books. And, like Forsyth, Follett can sometimes sound like he’s reading to you from an encyclopedia. Here’s a sample: “Correct,” Pfaffer said. “The member countries hand over control of fissile substances to Euratom. We have, first of all, a complete list of civilian establishments where stocks are held – from mines through preparation and fabrication plants, stores, and reactors, to reprocessing plants…As an example, take a factory making fuel elements from ordinary yellowcake. The raw material coming into the factory is weighed and analyzed by Euratom inspectors. Their findings are programmed into the Euratom computer and checked against the information from the inspectors at the dispatching installation – in this case, probably a uranium mine. If there is a discrepancy between the quantity that left the dispatching installation and the quantity that arrived at the factory, the computer will say so. Similar measurements are made of the material leaving the factory – quantity and quality. These figures will in turn be checked against information supplied by inspectors at the premises where the fuel is to be used – a nuclear power station, probably. In addition, all waste at the factory is weighed and analyzed.”

That description, like several other data dumps in the novel, goes on and on. Some of these data dumps are more interesting than others. One section of the novel deals with how easy it is to set up an international shipping corporation in Liberia. Liberia earns a lot of money by allowing just about anyone to set up a shipping company just so long as you provide them with a P.O. Box and the names of the company’s owners. Liberian officials won’t look into the authenticity of any of the information provided. Thus, Dickstein sets up a bogus shipping company and then buys the ship known as Stromberg through it. After that, he dissolves the shipping company, making it impossible for anyone to track down the current ownership of Stromberg. Some may find these details tedious but I found them fascinating. Much of the book deals with international shipping. At one point, I learned so much about the fuel pumps on an ocean-going cargo carrier that I felt confident that, in a pinch, I could probably repair one myself.

While reading Triple I found myself convinced that the book had been written under the influence of Frederick Forsyth, because international shipping also plays a role in several of Forsyth’s novels. Only afterwards did I realize that most of the Forsyth books in which shipping plays a big role (primarily, The Devil’s Alternative and The Cobra) were published after Triple. Still, I feel confident that Follett was heavily influenced by Forsyth’s 1974 thriller The Dogs of War. In that novel, illegally obtained minerals, cargo vessels, and nefarious alliances between the U.S.S.R. and an African dictatorship are all major elements. The Dogs of War is widely regarded as one of Forsyth’s best books. But it isn’t a favorite of mine. I believe the overabundance of minutiae about mining, chemistry, weaponry, and so forth bogs it down. For me, Triple is the better of the two novels.

I have now re-read four of Follett’s first five bestsellers. I believe they are all equally impressive. If you like spy novels with granular details about intelligence work, Triple is likely to be your favorite. If you prefer nail-biting thrillers, Eye of the Needle would probably be number one on your list. I would rank them in this order:

Eye of the Needle

The Man From St. Petersburg

The Key to Rebecca

Triple

I liked Triple a lot but nearly every important character in the book is in the intelligence business. I prefer novels in which spies interact with ordinary citizens. The hero of Eye of the Needle is Lucy Rose, a young stay-at-home wife and mother. Eye of the Needle features only one main character who is acting as a spy, the titular character Henry Faber, a Nazi agent whose nickname is The Needle. Some of the Brits trying to catch him are intelligence operatives but they aren’t engaged as spies in the novel. They operate more as police officers, trying to track down a murderer. Likewise, The Man From St. Petersburg and The Key to Rebecca each feature only one major character who is a professional spy. Those stories are not set entirely in the world of spycraft, and I enjoyed that about them. But if you want to be immersed in espionage, Triple is the book for you.

Although Triple is now nearly fifty years old, its portrait of the Middle East still feels sadly contemporary. At one point Dickstein expresses concern about Israel obtaining nuclear weapons. He fears that Egypt and Israel might just end up blowing each other to smithereens. His boss, Borg, says, “We can’t go on fighting a war every few years – one of these days we might lose one.”

“We could make peace,” Dickstein says.

Borg snorted, “You’re so fucking naïve…This is the real world, and the people in this country won’t vote for peace-at-any-price; and in your heart you know that the Arabs aren’t in any great hurry for peace either. So, in the real world, we still have to fight them; and if we’re going to fight them, we’d better win; and if we’re to be sure of winning, you’d better steal us some uranium.”

NOTE: A shorter version of this review appeared in Quillette a few months ago.

Back in the 1960s and 70s you could still find serious music lovers who claimed that the Beatles were a passing fad and that their music would largely be forgotten in another fifty years. Likewise, in the 1980s and 90s, you could find plenty of serious fiction lovers who claimed that Stephen King was a writer of ephemeral novels that would soon be forgotten. In the 1970s, when King began his amazing run of bestselling novels with Carrie (1974), Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), and Firestarter (1979), few serious book reviewers took any note. And those who did were often dismissive. Who were these reviewers praising instead? Well, there was Larry Woiwode (pronounced WHY-would-he), whose 1975 novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, was one of the most critically praised books of the decade. Writing in The New York Times, American novelist John Gardner (not to be confused with the Brit who would later continue Ian Fleming’s James Bond series) wrote: “It seems to me that nothing more beautiful and moving has been written in years.” He called it “a first-rate novel,” “ simply brilliant,” and a book of “unbelievable sensitivity and power.” Other reviewers compared the book to the work of Dickens, Melville, and Tolstoy. Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley included it on a list of the 20 best books of the 20^th century, along with Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, and The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award. Nowadays, for better or worse, the book and its author are largely forgotten. Beyond the Bedroom Wall was last republished in 1997 as part of Greywolf Press’s “Rediscovery” series. But few people seem to have rediscovered it. To date, the book has garnered 31 reviews on Amazon.com and 28 on Goodreads.com. Needless to say, no 50^th anniversary edition was ever published.

I don’t mean to pick on Woiwode (and I promise to give him the final word here), because he was just one of many authors who were wildly overrated by the serious critics of the 1970s. Ann Beattie, born two weeks before King, was hailed by many as the voice of her generation when she first began publishing stories in The New Yorker. Her reputation has been slipping ever since. In 2011, Michiko Kakutani called her book Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, “preposterous,” “narcissistic,” and “self-indulgent,” “the sort of pretentious volume that makes people hate academics.” Bobbie Ann Mason would be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, Ellen Gilchrist would win a National Book Award, Alice Adams would win a special O. Henry Award For Continuing Achievement In the Short Story, James Alan McPherson would win the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – but none of these writers is widely read or influential anymore. King’s stature, on the other hand, simply seems to grow and grow with each passing decade.

In 2024, King’s first novel, Carrie, was republished in a 50^th anniversary edition, featuring a forward by Margaret Atwood. Atwood’s essay, which was also published in The New York Times, noted that Carrie is “one of those books that manage to dip into the collective unconscious of their own age and society.” She added: “King is a visceral writer, and a master of granular detail…He writes horror, the most literary of forms…” Hundreds of Times readers expressed love for both King and Carrie in the comments for Atwood’s essay. One of those comments was from Mary Leonhardt, the author of the book Parents Who Love Reading, Kids Who Don’t, a book about the difficulties of passing on one’s love of reading to one’s children. Leonhardt wrote, “Stephen King’s novels, esp. Carrie, were books that I could usually get my students, who thought they hated reading, to love. And from King they would eventually go on to other authors, and pretty soon we had a literate high school student. He did more to push up reading scores than all of the phonics programs in the country.”

Back in 1974, ordinary readers, as is often the case, were much savvier about American culture than most scholars and serious critics. They made a smash hit out of Carrie, long before the snobs finally managed to see its virtues. Even after the success of Carrie, the New York Times didn’t bother reviewing his follow-up, ‘Salem’s Lot, a book whose value ordinary readers recognized immediately. But it has been a long time since the country’s scholars and serious reviewers could afford to reflexively dismiss King and his work. The late David Foster Wallace was a big fan of King’s. Literary author Karen Russell has cited him as a direct influence. Novelist Tom Perrotta (Election, Little Children, etc.), who has an English degree from Yale, considers King a master of colloquial English with a genius for tapping into the “collective unconscious” of Middle America. I asked several AI programs to estimate the number of books written about Stephen King’s work, but none could give me an exact figure. Google’s AI told me: “The body of work focusing on King is extensive, reflecting his massive influence on modern literature…While Stephen King was historically dismissed by early academic circles as a purely commercial genre writer, there are between 30 and 50 formal, standalone book-length critical and academic studies dedicated entirely to his work.” The list includes Stephen King: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom (1998), The Road to The Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King’s Magnum Opus by Bev Vincent (2004), Respecting The Stand: A Critical Analysis of Stephen King’s Apocalyptic Novel, by Jenifer Paquette (2012), The Linguistics of Stephen King: Layered Language and Meaning in the Fiction, by James Arthur Anderson (2017), and Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s It (University of Mississippi Press, 2022).

And now, wading into these already crowded waters, comes Caroline Bicks, a Shakespearean scholar whose recently published book, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear With Stephen King (no true scholar would ever publish a book without a subtitle), examines in granular detail the process by which five early King bestsellers were produced. The publisher, Hogarth, somewhat inaccurately describes the book as “A fascinating, first-of-its-kind exploration of Stephen King and his most iconic early books…” In fact, King’s early books – as well as his mid-career books, his late-career books, his pseudonymous books, his short stories, his nonfiction, the films made from his books, and just about everything else connected to him – have received plenty of scholarly attention by this time. But Hogarth isn’t completely wrong about the book. Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. Born in 1968, Bicks first read King’s work in the 1980s, as a teenager, and has remained a fan ever since. What’s more, Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha, granted Bicks unfettered access to his vast personal archive of materials related to his work, including, most valuably, every existing draft of his early novels. Thus, Bicks’s book may well be the first academic study to examine in detail how Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Pet Sematary, and the story collection Night Shift evolved from first draft to final published version. She applies to King’s work the kind of deep reading that scholars once used to apply only to the likes of Shakespeare, Homer, Milton, Blake, and other stalwarts of the Western Canon. But does the effort pay off? Well, sort of.

It should be noted that had this book been written about the early drafts of any other contemporary novelist – John Irving, Alice Hoffman, Isabel Allende, Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan – it would never have been commercially published. It would have languished in the realm of the small university press. Even granular studies of the works of other mega-bestselling authors such as Danielle Steel (whose books have outsold King’s), Dean R. Koontz (ditto), J.K. Rowling (ditto), George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, or Ken Follett probably wouldn’t have been given the kind of star treatment that Bicks’s book has received. In the UK, a special edition signed by the author and featuring sprayed edges was made available to hardcore fans. The New York Post listed it as one of the “Most Anticipated Books of the Year.” At Amazon, the book is listed number one in Horror and Supernatural Literary Criticism, number six in Fiction Writing Reference Books, and number fifteen in Author Biographies. The book was published only last month but has already garnered 606 ratings and 179 reviews at Goodreads as of this writing. Only Stephen King has that kind of clout in the publishing world. And he has possessed it for nigh on half a century now.

There’s an old joke among booklovers that a novel consists of a beginning, a muddle, and an end. Though not a novel, Monsters in the Archive sort of fits this pattern. For me the most interesting part of the novel was the introduction, in which Bicks discusses how she became the first scholar to hold the Stephen E. King Chair in literature, her early encounters with King himself, and how, at the age of twelve, in 1980, she first discovered his work. Bicks’s own journey to modest success as an author and academic is fairly interesting. In August of 2010, her personal essay, “Is The Husband Going To Be A Problem,” appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times. It’s a fascinating tale of how difficult it is for two young, married academics to find tenured positions anywhere close to each other. Eventually, after Caroline found a tenured position, her husband gave up academia and became a Hedge Fund guy, managing a portfolio of hundreds of millions of dollars. None of what is disclosed in the Modern Love essay appears in Monsters in the Archive, but I think it would have made the opening section of the novel even more interesting. Still, Bicks’s account of her childhood fears and anxieties, and how they were both mirrored in, and somewhat alleviated by, King’s stories is very engaging. Likewise, the early chapters of the book, detailing early negotiations with King and his people for access to his archives, and the solo car trips around Maine that she takes in order to see some of the real-life places that inspired his fictions are also fascinating. In Chapter Two, she writes, “As I drive down Route 15 after Thanksgiving weekend – past the Orrington house where King imagined Pet Sematary – it occurs to me that this would have been the first Monday of Church the cat’s undead return. Louis had sent Rachel and the kids to spend the holidays with his in-laws in Chicago, while he stayed behind in Ludlow and secretly buried the family pet.”

At one point, Bicks even travels to Estes Park, Colorado, to visit the Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for the haunted Overlook Hotel, where most of the action in The Shining takes place. She writes, “The Stanley Hotel runs a robust business off this piece of Stephen King lore. There are daily Shining Tours that take you to all of the book’s haunted sites. When I go to see the hotel for myself, I recognize all of them, the big white double doors that open onto its gracious lobby; the large ballroom to the left; and the Colorado Lounge with its batwing doors to the right.”

I would have been happy to read an entire book about Caroline Bicks traveling around the country and writing about houses, businesses, and geography with a connection to the works of Stephen King. I’m far more interested in reading personal accounts of a booklover’s encounters with a favorite author than granular accounts of the writing process. Thus, for me, the middle of the book in which Bicks reads her way through the five early books in question were not terribly thrilling. Those chapters are smart and well-written but felt a bit too much like homework to me.

I was among the first fans of Stephen King’s books. I went to see Brian DePalma’s film version of Carrie with my sister Brenda and several of her high school friends on opening night, November 3, 1976, and I still remember all five of us leaping out of our seats when that hand reached up from the grave at the end of the film. I went out the next day and bought a copy of the movie tie-in edition of King’s book, the same one that Bicks read in the early 1980s. For my 19^th birthday, on August 16^th, 1977, I was given a paperback copy of ‘Salem’s Lot, and I was sitting in the backyard of my parents’ Sacramento home when my mother came racing outside to tell me that Elvis Presley had just died. Presley and ‘Salem’s Lot are now forever connected in my mind. Once, in my twenties, I sat up in bed until two a.m. reading to the end of The Stand. When I finished I was terrified of getting out of bed, but I had to work the next day and I badly needed a shower. I crept to the far end of the house and quietly turned the shower faucet. But it was an old house and this happened to be one of those occasions when air was trapped in the water pipes and the entire plumbing system roared like a monster until the water came out. I shut off the water immediately and decided it wouldn’t be so bad if I stunk at work the next day. To this day, my wife’s favorite King novel remains Christine (1983). She raved about it so much that, when the film came out, my stepdaughter Andrea went to see it on opening day. It became one of her favorite films and is the reason that my first grandchild is named Christina. Like millions of people across the globe, I have countless memories connected to King and his books. The five books examined in Monsters in the Archive all loom large in my early years as a pop-fiction junkie. So, too, do such later books as Different Seasons, Firestarter, Cujo, The Dead Zone, Christine, Thinner, and Misery. I remained a devoted reader of King’s work until about 1990, when it began to lose its hold on me. But as fond as I am of early King, while reading Monsters in the Archive even I couldn’t work up much excitement about the small changes between the first draft of, say, Carrie, and the final draft that Bicks enthuses over. Bicks is shocked – shocked! – when she discovers that the first draft of Carrie is set, not in Maine, but outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Perhaps because I’m a lifelong resident of the West Coast and have never visited either Maine or Massachusetts (except in pop-fictions) I don’t find this revelation all that startling. Maine and Massachusetts used to be one state and they are both part of New England. I can’t make myself care much that King moved the setting of his first novel 108 miles north at one point during the writing process. Nonetheless, I will concede, that given the magnitude and intensity of King’s fandom, this type of minutiae will probably fascinate plenty of readers.

For me, an even bigger problem with the bulk of the book is Bicks’s determination to demonstrate numerous connections between King’s work and the works of Shakespeare. Bicks is a Shakespearean scholar and probably a very good one. They say that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Apparently, when you are a Shakespearean scholar, everything looks like Macbeth or Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. A more accurate subtitle for Bicks’s book might have been How Shakespeare Shaped the Work of Stephen King. But such a change might have scared away legions of King fans (moi, for instance). Don’t get me wrong; King has been heavily influenced by the Bard. But so has pretty much every other writer of the past four hundred years or so. King’s work is filled with both overt references to Shakespeare and subtle gestures towards his writings. But I imagine that a Shakespeare scholar such as Bicks could easily discern evidence of Shakespeare’s influence on J.K. Rowling, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, or any other writer you care to name. Were she a biblical scholar, Bicks could probably find hundreds (if not thousands) of subtle connections between King’s work and the Bible. She writes, “[W]hen the King Chair position came up, and I saw that the English Department was looking for a Renaissance specialist, it felt like Kismet. I’d been researching, teaching, and writing about Shakespeare for decades. He and Stephen King each had enormous claims on my imaginative life, and I’d discovered them both at nearly the same time.”

One of the things I first loved about King was how willing he was to admit to his pulp-fiction roots. Most writers, even the cheesiest of pop-fictioneers, like to wax poetic about how Shakespeare or Dickens or perhaps even Hammett and Chandler were the lodestars of their early days as a reader and writer. From the beginning, King acknowledged that his writing was largely informed by various staples of an American Baby-Boomer’s upbringing: The Twilight Zone, the movies of William Castle and Roger Corman, the short stories of Richard Matheson and Jack Finney, Night of the Living Dead, the novels of Ira Levin, TV Westerns, the Dark Shadows soap opera, the TV movie The Night Stalker, paperback crime novels by Jim Thompson and John D. MacDonald and Michael Avellone, The Wizard of Oz, H.P. Lovecraft, Peyton Place, rock and roll songs, EC Comics. This is the Stephen King that I fell in love with. He was unashamed of his literary populism. In Danse Macabre, his 1981 nonfiction study of the horror genre, King famously proclaimed, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion, so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out.”

But in the last twenty or thirty years, King seems to have morphed into a Grand Old Man of American Letters, and now his proclamations about writing often sound like your high school English teacher’s. Like King, I am a longtime fan of Richard Matheson. But even I will acknowledge that no one reads Matheson for his brilliantly drawn characters or his prose. Matheson is an absolute master of the clever plot twist, and virtually the only reason to read one of his tales is to be surprised by the brilliant surprises in store for you. King obviously knew this when he proclaimed, long ago, that Matheson was “the author who influenced me most as a writer.” But, by the year 2000, King was embracing the standard MFA school advice that plot is the enemy of great fiction. In On Fiction, he wrote that plot was “the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.” What does that say about Richard Matheson? In Danse Macabre, King raved about the books of Ira Levin, writing, “Every novel he has ever written has been a marvel of plotting. He is the Swiss watch-maker of the suspense novel; in terms of plot he makes what the rest of us do look like those five-dollar watches you can buy in the discount drugstores…Levin’s books are constructed as neatly as an elegant house of cards; pull one plot twist and everything comes tumbling down.” King doesn’t rave about Levin’s prose (which is generally workmanlike) or even his character development (Rosemary Woodhouse is one of the best-drawn characters in 1960s pop fiction); no he elevates Levin to the top of the pop fiction pyramid solely on the basis of Levin’s brilliant plots. Does that mean that King now considers Levin a dullard?

For much of the middle part of her book, Bicks focuses on Shakespeare’s influence on King. And when she asks King specifically whether Shakespeare’s work had an effect on some piece of his early writing, he usually plays along like the Grand Old Man of American Letters and agrees that it did. I found this kind of sad. If Richard Matheson’s name was mentioned anywhere in this book, I must have missed it. Likewise Ira Levin’s (one of my complaints about the book is its lack of an index). But finally, towards the latter part of the book, the old Stephen King begins to assert himself and let his freak flag fly. Being a typical academic, Bicks gloms onto any slightest reference in King’s work to “serious literature” in an effort to justify her jones for his books. It would no doubt be embarrassing for her to admit at the annual gathering of the Modern Language Association that her favorite novelist is a man whose biggest influences were Richard Matheson and The Twilight Zone. Thus, when she comes across references to the Wallace Stevens poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream” in ‘Salem’s Lot she is ecstatic and emails King to ask him about the importance of the poem to the novel. Fortunately, she is honest enough to report exactly what King responded: “Before I can compliment him on his literary dexterity, however, he adds a dismissive caveat: ‘But let’s face it, Caroline, I was working to a large extent in an EC Comics pulp horror vein, and I wanted to class up the joint a bit. Both to show I wasn’t stupid, but also to suggest that the story is a little deeper than it might seem at first glance.” Elsewhere, when King is asked about an early draft of Carrie, in which the title character has powers that suggest she might be a space alien, he once again lets his old persona show: “When I talk to King about this early version of Carrie, he tells me that ‘for a lot of the book I was thinking about a movie that made a big impression on me when I was a kid called The Brain from Planet Arous.’” Alas, by this point, we are only about ten pages from the end of Bicks’s book. But this is where the real Stephen King, the 1970s Stephen King really comes across.

Although Bicks is sensitive enough to pick up even the slightest echoes of Shakespeare in King’s work, she seems to miss more obvious echoes of other writers. When writing about Pet Sematary, for instance, she notes that massive trucks play a pivotal part in the story because King, in his early days, lived alongside a busy highway on which trucks frequently roared by. He was terrified once when he thought his young son Owen (now a novelist himself) might run out into the highway and be hit by a truck. This is all fine, but I might have asked him if Richard Matheson’s story Duel, about a terrifying truck whose anonymous driver menaces an ordinary motorist on the road, might have helped inspire the truck that kills a child in Pet Sematary. Matheson’s story, and the subsequent Steven Spielberg film of the same name (scripted by Matheson), are now both regarded as cult classics. But Bicks seems unaware of them. Bicks also mentions in passing two separate characters in King’s work with the last name Masterson. The name sounds suspiciously similar to Matheson, whom King considered his literary master. The name also sounds similar to the surname of horror novelist Graham Masterton, whose work King has praised and whose breakout book, The Manitou, was published in 1976, right around the time when King was first making a name for himself. Could King have been referencing either Matheson and/or Masterton with these two Masterson characters? Bicks, too focused on finding Shakespearean references, doesn’t explore question.

Likewise, when King was in college, he wrote a regular column for the school newspaper called King’s Garbage Truck. Bicks writes about (and even provides a mimeographed copy of) a column published on May 15, 1969. The column is about student unrest on campus and some of its uglier aspects. Bicks writes: “He divides the column into four vignettes, introducing each one with the word UGLY in increasingly large fonts.” I was immediately reminded of Horace McCoy’s 1935 pulp crime novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, which is divided into twelve chapters, each of which is introduced by the sentencing statement of a judge reproduced in increasingly larger fonts. King is an absolute encyclopedia of American pulp fiction and I feel confident that he was trying to mimic McCoy’s book. But Bicks never asks.

In her chapter devoted to Night Shift, she says this about King’s introduction: “The opening is a creepy invitation to the reader that recalls the classic storytelling frame to which so many of his works pay tribute: ‘Let’s talk, you and I. Let’s talk about fear.’” Far be it from me to out-snob a tenured professor, but I always assumed this was intended to evoke the opening of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table

That is probably the most Stephen King-like line you can find in all of Eliot’s work.

When discussing King’s famous story “The Children of the Corn,” she notes that one early version of it bears the title “Nebraska Death Trip.” This title later gets crossed out by King, but Bicks writes, “for the record, I love that title: It’s like John Belushi and Freddy Kreuger had a baby.” I have no idea what that means. It never seems to occur to her that King’s title is almost certainly a reference to Wisconsin Death Trip, a cult classic 1973 nonfiction book that has had a huge cultural impact and which King has cited as the inspiration for his story “1922.”

In a way, I don’t blame Bicks for not wanting to query King about every discovery she makes. Although she is given unfettered access to his archive, she is granted only intermittent emails back and forth with King, some of which he doesn’t bother to respond to. And King at times seems prickly when Bicks is certain she has discovered some long-buried connection between King’s work and the wider world. Going through King’s Garbage Truck columns, she finds him recommending a long-forgotten story by Michael Avellone called The Coffin Things. King described it thus: “In the small town of Heaven’s Veil, Minnesota, Old Man Griffiths dies of lung cancer. His body is exhumed, and old man Griffiths is found with his hands folded peacefully on his bosom – and his mouth stuffed full of Winstons.” Bicks writes, “When I ask King if this book inspired his Night Shift story ‘Quitters Inc.,’ about a mafia-run quit-smoking clinic, he tells me no (so much for my Great Literary Discovery), but he seems pleased to have been reminded of Avellone’s story (‘A good yarn!’).”

Assiduously reading her way through entire back issues of Kings old campus newspaper, Bicks finds “what I consider to be a real treasure.” It is an article noting that, while King was a student, an epidemic of the Hong Kong strain of A2 influenza sickened many of the university’s students. She writes, “A few months later, King would publish another story in Ubris, ‘Night Surf.’ This one was about a group of college kids on a beach in Maine who have survived a global pandemic that began as an A2 strain of Hong Kong flu…I’m convinced that the Hong Kong flu pandemic must have inspired King to write his nihilistic ‘Night Surf,’ and that I’ve discovered the real-life origins of what is arguably King’s greatest epic novel [The Stand].” But once again King shoots her down, writing back: “I’m sure I was aware of A2 flu…but I doubt if it or [the article in the school paper] had any influence on ‘Night Surf.’” This seems almost churlish. If King can’t remember the origins of the story, why not give Bicks her tiny victory?

I should note that Bicks never finds King surly or churlish. In fact her book contains nothing but praise for him and his work, which is one of its weaknesses. Bicks needed King’s participation in order to write her book, but her reverence for him sometimes borders on obsequiousness. At one point, when she discovers that some of the original pages of King’s first draft of The Shining are missing, although photocopies still exist, she is horrified, and babbles on about how this is like losing the Mona Lisa. At another point she writes, “I decide that it’s time to find out from King himself if I’m just imagining things, or if there was a particular Shakespearean play he was thinking of when he wrote The Shining. His response is quick and pithy. ‘Short answer: It was Hamlet. Jack never decides to leave.’ This has to be the best short answer in the history of short answers.” Bicks is clearly unaware of the famous incident in which King Philip II of Macedon sent a message to the leaders of Sparta declaring, “If I enter Laconia, I will level Sparta to the ground.” The Spartans responded with a one-word message: “If.” Philip moved on. Elsewhere Bicks compares Carrie to Macbeth (she compares practically everything to Macbeth) and finds the Bard’s work paling besides King’s. “In this final iteration of Carrie, King recognizes the power of her brain – of a girl’s mental puberty – to convey this truth, making her a far more awesome conduit for it than Shakespeare’s protagonist. In a nod to the latter, King includes a moment in his last draft where Sue realizes the magnitude of Carrie’s destructive reach: ‘Macbeth hath murdered sleep,’ she thinks, but ‘Carrie hath murdered time.’” Bicks concludes that Carrie “takes Macbeth’s nihilism one terrible step further.”

As noted, Bicks portrays King as incredibly kind and generous and I have no reason to believe that he is anything but. If you hang out with sci-fi, fantasy, and horror geeks, as I have, you will sometimes hear poorly sourced stories about how King was once awful to someone, but these never ring true. King has been widely hailed for remaining a plain, down-to-earth good guy despite his unprecedented success. Recently The Atlantic published one of the buzziest personal essay of the year when writer Caity Weaver wrote about her cross-country quest to find the best free restaurant bread in the country. In preparation for her story, she contacted numerous American celebrities and asked them to recommend their favorite free restaurant bread. She writes, “There is only one good celebrity in the world: the author Stephen King. According to Mr. King, the best free bread in America is ‘crusty and warm’ and served at Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse in Sarasota, Florida. Given the fact that no other star, out of the scores I contact via their representatives, successfully manages to answer this question, I can conclude only that America’s celebrities consider it their unholy mission to ensure that her masses – their fans – die ignorant of the identity of the best free restaurant bread.”

One of the best recent Boomer-bashing essays is Aaron M. Renn’s May 12 piece for Substack entitled “There Is No Boomer Succession Plan,” in which he points out that the geriatric baby boomers in Congress have not trained up a corps of replacements. Neither have boomer heavyweights in the business world, the arts, or academia. But Stephen King, the ur-boomer can’t be accused of not trying to produce a younger generation of horror writers. He produced two of them himself (with a bit of help from Tabitha), his sons Joe Hill and Owen King. But he has blurbed the books of hundreds of younger pop fiction writers. Even back in the 1980s, it was rare to find a paperback horror novel without a helpful blurb from King on it. Some of his books were written in collaboration with younger writers, such as Owen King, Stewart O’Nan, and Richard Chizmar.

In Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, he concludes with a list of books that he thinks aspiring writers ought to read in order to see what good writing looks like. One of the books he recommends is Richard Bausch’s In The Night Season. Bausch didn’t return the favor. In a 2007 interview with Memphis Magazine, he said, “When people come back 50 or 60 years from now to see how people actually lived their lives here, they won’t come back to the authors some people are reading today…They probably won’t come back to Stephen King. If they’re concerned with how people lived day to day and dealt with their problems, they’re going to come back to William Maxwell, George Garrett, Charlie Baxter, and Ann Beattie.” Despite that, King still recommends Bausch’s work. Not only was Bausch’s dis rude, it isn’t even accurate. Bicks does an excellent job in Monsters in the Archive of pointing out how accurately Stephen King depicts the American working class, the class from which he himself sprung. And Atwood celebrates the same aspect of King’s work in her introduction to the 50^th anniversary edition of Carrie.

Unless you’ve been following pop-fiction for as long as I have it may be difficult to see the immense impact King has had on popular culture. In addition to the countless TV shows and films that are actually based on his work, I see his influence in probably half or more of the films and streaming series I view these days. And not just in intellectual properties like Stranger Things and the recent Apple-TV series Widow’s Bay, which overtly advertise their debt to King. Almost every film or TV show that features a kid with some sort of special powers appears to have strong echoes of Carrie or Firestarter or one of the many other King stories that employ the trope. Films like the recent Oh, Hi and the upcoming Over Your Dead Body, and TV shows like the recent Vladimir, all of which feature characters bound to a chair or a bed by a deranged lover, seem to have been inspired by King’s 1992 novel Gerald’s Game (which became a film in 2017, directed by Stephen King superfan Mike Flanagan). King is mentioned frequently in Dan Sinykin’s 2023 nonfiction work Big Fiction, in which he claims that brand-name bestselling authors like King began to dominate fiction sales in the 1980s to such a degree that even serious literary writers like Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and the abovementioned John Gardner began turning towards the tropes of horror in order to build their own brands (Morrison’s Beloved is a ghost story, as is Gardner’s Mikelsson’s Ghost, while McCarthy’s The Road is a post-apocalyptic nightmare).

King was one of the first major authors to celebrate the talents of horror-film director George Romero. The two men collaborated frequently, on films such as Creepshow and The Dark Half, as well as the TV series Tales From the Darkside. King wrote a graphic novelization of Creepshow that was released simultaneously with the film. This collaboration did King no favors with serious critics of the 1980s, as Romero himself was widely considered to be just another schlockmeister, and novelizations had no serious lit cred at all. But the fact that the most recent Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Daniel Kraus’s Angel Down, a supernatural horror novel set in the trenches of World War I, is an illustration of just how immensely King has altered the American cultural scene. Just six years ago, MacMillan published The Living Dead, a zombie thriller co-written by Daniel Kraus and George Romero (Romero left the novel unfinished at the time of his death in 2017 and Kraus was brought in to complete it). Prior to that Kraus co-wrote a novelization of Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water. In the 1980s, it would have been unthinkable for the Pulitzer committee to award its Fiction prize to a writer known for novelizations and collaborations with horror-film directors. But King has reordered the entire literary landscape. And Monsters in the Archives demonstrates just how hard he worked to accomplish all of this.

If you are only a casual fan of Stephen King, you should probably give Monsters In The Archives a hard pass. Much of it will make sense to you only if the storylines of the five featured books are permanently imprinted on your memory and you care about how each and every sentence of those books was crafted. If you are a hardcore fan of King’s you owe it to yourself to read the book. Part of King’s appeal has always been the accessibility of his work. Most of his fictions sound as if they are being told to you by someone you know. His folksy, New England narrators sound like they are speaking to you off the cuff, which often gives the reader the impression that King simply speaks these books into a Dictaphone. Bicks completely dispels this notion. She shows how King’s somewhat casual-sounding diction is, in fact, the result of years of hard work, and numerous extensive rewrites. Even at the very beginning of his career, when he didn’t have the clout he does now, he would refuse to accept many of the minor changes to his manuscripts suggested by his New York editors. When a copyeditor wanted King to change his description of a child’s “rattly” lungs to “congested,” King refused. He liked the sound of “rattly.” When a copyeditor seemed to think that “clittered” (as in “Fingerbones clittered.”) is a typo for clattered, King assured him that it was not. When a copyeditor wanted to change a stuttering character’s pronunciation of the word “shouting” (shuh-shuh-shouting) to “sh-sh-shouting,” King refused, telling them “the sound of that particular stutter really is ‘shuh.’ Say it out loud, you’ll see.” Bicks does a great job of illustrating how King employed a soundscape of words (dirt, grit, gritting, grating, grave, gravel) to create unique aural effects for Pet Sematary, a book in which grave-digging and body exhuming are major motifs. Likewise, she shows how he uses unique visual descriptions in The Shining to imprint each scene in the reader’s imagination. She also shows King wrestling with his own word choices. In Pet Sematary, a character notes that “sometimes dead is better” than to go on dwelling in some sort of torment. Originally King wrote “sometimes death is better.” Bicks notes, “A two-letter edit may seem small, but listen to what it does: the –ed sound in “dead” and “better” creates an echo that wasn’t there before. Say it out loud, you’ll see.”

As noted, King isn’t the world’s bestselling pop fiction writer. But he is almost certainly the most loved, and his fans are the most passionate. Visit the online site of the American Book Exchange and you can easily find signed copies of books by the likes of Danielle Steel, Ken Follett, John Grisham, Dan Brown, Dean Koontz, and just about any other living bestselling author (not including J.K. Rowling) selling for $25 or less. Rowling’s signed books sell for a lot more than that because she signs so few of them. But King has signed thousands upon thousands of books over the course of his fifty-plus years as a bestselling author, and yet the cheapest signed Stephen King novel I could find at ABE.com was a hardcover edition of the 2001 thriller From a Buick 8, which was listed at $625. Bicks’s book helps to explain why King inspires such passion, such obsession among his readers. It isn’t luck or salesmanship or nostalgia for the likes of The Twilight Zone or Night of the Living Dead. It’s the incredible amount of hard, grinding labor that King puts into everything he writes, something that he has been doing for more than a half century now and, let us hope, will keep on doing for another decade or two. King is one baby boomer whom nobody wants to see retire. Why would he?

A few months back, I mentioned in passing here that I am putting together a list of 100 (or so) essential popular novels published between World War II and The end of the twentieth century. My plan was to write brief essays explaining what makes each of these titles essential to an understanding of the pop culture of the Baby Boom generation. I was going to write these essays chronologically by publication dates. The only problem with that plan was that I found it boring and difficult to stick with. If I woke up and wanted to write about a book that was published in, say, 1983, I didn’t want to have to put off that work until after I had written about dozens of other books published prior to that year. My new plan is to simply look at my list of 100 (or so) books, which I have already compiled, and then write about whatever titles I feel like exploring that day. This makes things more fun for me but it may make it a bit chaotic for you, because these essays now have no real order. (Dylan Thomas once observed that, “The memories of childhood have no order and no end.” This essay collection of mine may prove to be a similar deal.) My first entry, Johnny Got His Gun, is indeed the first book, chronologically, on my list. After that, all order is abandoned. Enjoy.

JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN by Dalton Trumbo. This novel, about an American soldier seriously wounded in World War I, was published two days after the start of World War II, and became a cult classic in the 1960s and 70s, particularly cherished by the anti-Vietnam War left. The novel was originally intended to discourage the U.S. from getting involved in the coming war in Europe. Trumbo was an isolationist and a staunch member of the Communist Party USA. Before Hitler broke the non-aggression pact between Germany and the U.S.S.R., American Communists were opposed to any U.S. intervention in European conflicts (excluding the Spanish Civil War, which ended before Johnny Got His Gun was published). When the pact between Germany and the U.S.S.R. was violated by Germany in June of 1941, Trumbo and his publisher decided to pull the book from store shelves until after the war. When the war ended in August of 1945, many Americans felt a sense of triumph, and a novel meant to discourage American intervention in foreign wars was out of step with the times. In 1947 the U.S. Congress demanded that Trumbo testify about his involvement with the Communist Party. He refused and was eventually jailed, in 1950, for contempt of Congress. After that he was forever associated with the McCarthy-Era blacklisting of prominent Hollywood leftists. All of these things conspired to keep Johnny Got His Gun from ever receiving the mainstream acceptance it deserved. Timing was also a problem for JGHG. Had it come out after WWII, like, say, The Naked and the Dead or The Caine Mutiny or Catch-22 or many another book critical of the U.S. military, it might have been welcomed as a corrective to all the heroic tales of American military glory told by Hollywood during the 1940s and 50s. But Trumbo had been critical of the military before America’s “triumph” in WWII, which, for some readers, made the book feel less like constructive criticism and more like anti-Americanism. Not until the 1960s did the book become widely known in America. At that point, the rise of youth culture and opposition to the Vietnam War had made anti-war books such as Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 huge bestsellers in paperback. Seizing the moment, Bantam Books published a paperback edition of JGHG in 1967. At that point the book became a staple of paperback racks throughout the country. It was particularly popular in college towns, and my used paperback copy, like many another, is filled with marginal notes and underlinings by whichever 1960s college student owned it first. Bantam anticipated this youthful enthusiasm for Trumbo’s novel and marketed it as countercultural: “Long treasured by a select few, carefully ignored by the Establishment, JOHNNY has become an ‘underground’ classic. Today, more than two decades and an atomic age later, this extraordinary book is as exciting, gripping and meaningful as it was on the day it was written.” Leaving aside the fact that it probably took Trumbo more than a day to write it, Bantam turned out to be correct in its assessment of the book. It was, indeed, deserving of reassessment, it was anti-establishment, and it did become a sort of underground classic. “Underground” not in the sense that few knew about it (it was a massive bestseller in paperback) but in the sense that even today, 87 years after its original publication date, the book remains largely unembraced by the literary establishment and untaught in American universities. Though published six years before the official start of the Baby Boom, the book had to wait until Boomers were old enough and numerous enough to create huge commercial successes just by embracing a particular product, regardless of whether or not it was embraced by the members of any other generation. By the late 1960s, the Boomers were a demographic juggernaut and Corporate America did everything it could to woo them and their disposable income. Subsequent generations haven’t had to face the possibility of being conscripted into an unpopular war, and thus JGHG seems to be less meaningful to younger readers. They tend to prefer fantasy. But JGHG was one of the earliest published books to become essential to Boomer culture.

PEOPLE LIKE US by Dominick Dunne. The murder victim of the so-called Golden Age of Crime Fiction (roughly 1920-1945) was often some person of prominence – an industrialist (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), a retired army officer (And Then There Were None), a businessman (Pocket Full of Rye), a lawyer (Toward Zero), a member of Parliament (Appointment With Death), an Heiress (Death on the Nile), a vicar, a banker, a philandering husband, a landlord – someone who lived in a fairly tight community, which tended to narrow down the list of suspects to a small handful of neighbors and associates, lovers and loathers. Often the victim was detestable and his death was no great loss. But even when the victim was liked by all, the reader rarely felt much for them. The purpose of the victim in Golden Age crime stories was usually just to set the plot in motion. The murder in a Golden Age story can generally be solved merely by being perceptive and applying logic. In post-war crime fiction, on the other hand, the victim often has only the slightest connection to the murderer. The murderer is often just a psychopath and doesn’t need a lot of motive or premeditation. A lot of post-war fiction was inspired by the senseless real-life crimes of men like Ed Gein, Charles Starkweather, Charles Whitman, and Charles Manson (that’s a lot of Charleses!). In real life, young Baby Boomer women and girls were frequently murdered senselessly in the post-war years, so much so that a subgenre of fiction arose that was often based upon the real-life murder of a female Baby Boomer (or near-Boomer). Judith Rossner’s Looking For Mr. Goodbar, the fifth bestselling novel of 1975, was based on the real-life murder of Roseann Quinn, a New York City schoolteacher who was born in November of 1944 and died in January of 1973. Dorothy Uhnak’s 1977 bestseller, The Investigation, was inspired by the killing of four-year-old Baby Boomer Marie Crimmins, by her mother, Alice Crimmins, in 1964. Alice was eventually convicted of manslaughter in that case. (She was convicted of also murdering her Baby Boomer son, five-year-old Eddie, but that conviction was later overturned.) The deaths of Alice Crimmins’ two children were also the inspiration for Mary Higgins Clark’s 1975 monster bestseller, Where Are The Children? (the book sold modestly in hardback but was a massive success in paperback). Dominick Dunne’s 1990 bestseller, An Inconvenient Woman, is a fictionalized account of the murder of Baby Boomer Vicki Morgan (born 1952). Morgan, most famously, was the mistress of department store heir Alfred Bloomingdale and sued him for “palimony” after their breakup. She was murdered by a roommate in 1983 at the age of 30. Dunne’s 1993 bestseller, A Season in Purgatory, is a fictionalized account of the 1975 murder of Baby Boomer Martha Moxley (she was born on August 16, 1960, my second birthday). Sadly, Dominick Dunne came by his interest in murdered Baby Boomer females in the most tragic way possible. His daughter, actress Dominique Dunne, born in November 1959 (nine months before Martha Moxley), died at the age of 22, having been strangled by her boyfriend (she lingered for six days in a hospital before being taken off life support). Her murderer was convicted only of assault and voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to six years in prison but was paroled after two. In his anguish and his outrage, Dunne wrote a fictionalized account of Dominique’s murder called People Like Us (actually the book deals with the way the murder victim’s father copes in the wake of the tragedy). Dunne’s brother, John Gregory Dunne (True Confessions, Dutch Shea, Jr.) and sister-in-law, Joan Didion (Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer), were both respected novelists and journalists – much more respected than Dominick, certainly, who was regarded in serious literary circles as a populist hack. But neither of them ever produced the kinds of bestsellers that Dominick did, books that clawed their way into the public sensibility because of their immediacy and their luridness and their heartfelt sense of anger at blatant social injustice. Dominick’s writing lacked the cool, ironic distance that John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion’s work was famous for. His work was filled with passion, often of a very destructive kind. Didion was one of the pioneers of New Journalism, and she left behind some of the best nonfiction of her generation. John Gregory Dunne is rapidly becoming forgotten. But Dominick Dunne’s fiction may well outlive the fiction of his famous brother and sister-in-law. Dominick didn’t invent the senselessly-murdered-female-baby-boomer novel but he pretty much became the king of the genre. And People Like Us, published in 1988, is probably his best book. Literary snobs tend to dismiss the genre because its victims are usually white women of privilege. And, in another quarter century, nearly every female Baby Boomer is likely to be dead and gone, which may further diminish interest in books about those who died too soon. But, a hundred years from now, if there is a novel by the Dunne-Didion clan that is still widely read, I suspect it will be one of Dominick’s.

THE EXECUTIONERS by John D. MacDonald. The murdered-baby-boomer-female novel is an offshoot of the gritty domestic crime drama, a genre that eclipsed the so-called Golden Age crime stories in the 1950s and thereafter. The genre has many offshoots. It came to prominence after WWII because, suddenly, millions of ex-G.I.s had returned to the United States with experience in fighting and killing and handling weapons, and there was a lot of uneasiness among America’s ruling class that many of these men suffered from PTSD (usually referred to as “shell shock” back then) and might not be willing to give up the killing skills they learned in the military without a fight. What’s more, at least a small percentage of those ex-G.I.s may well have been sociopaths before being drafted into the Army. Now they were back in the U.S.A., still sociopaths, and well-trained in killing. Numerous novels of the 1950s and 1960s tapped into these anxieties. One of the most influential was John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel, The Executioners, better known now as Cape Fear, the title that has been used on two highly regarded movie adaptations as well as a current streaming series on Apple-TV.

The Executioners created the template for many of the stalking thrillers that came in its wake. What’s more, this is one of the best post-war novels to tap into fears about innocent, suburban, middle-class lives being upended by dangerous sociopaths. The protagonist of The Executioners, Sam Bowden, age forty, is the kind of American who shouldn’t have to worry overmuch about the dark side of the American Dream. He is a successful lawyer and a happily married family man living in a world of white picket fences and regular churchgoing. But, over the course of its relatively short length (about 220 pages), the novel shows Bowden’s world unraveling as decent, American civic values and societal laws prove insufficient to protect Bowden and his family from the attentions of a ruthless predator determined to destroy them all. The predator is an ex-GI named Max Cady. Back in 1943, while they were both in the U.S. military and serving in Australia, Bowden, a JAG for the Navy, witnessed Cady, an Army sergeant, beating and raping a fourteen-year-old girl. Bowden intervened. Cady was arrested and court martialed. He was sent back to the states to spend the rest of his life in a Kansas prison, presumably Leavenworth. Unfortunately, after thirteen years of hard labor, Cady is released from prison and goes looking for Bowden. To punish Bowden, he threatens Cady threatens his wife, Carol, and his children, Nancy, Jamie, and Bucky. He starts out small by poisoning the family dog. But the stalking escalates. He visits a summer camp where 11-year-old Jamie is spending the month of July and, from a distance, shoots the boy in the arm (presumably, he was aiming for his heart). Later, he loosens the bolts on Carol’s family station wagon, causing the tire to fall off as she is driving. The car flips and Carol and her children are nearly killed. Sam reports all these incidents to the police, but they can’t find any evidence linking Cady to these crimes. Eventually Sam is forced to operate outside of the law himself, leaving the reader to form a horrifying conclusion: In post-war America, societal norms are shattering and you may be forced to adopt an every-man-for-himself, kill-or-be-killed attitude if you want to continue to maintain the illusion of living the American Dream (and to keep your Baby Boomer daughter from becoming another murder statistic). At the beginning of the novel, when Carol suggests that Cady should just be arrested and thrown in prison under some false pretense, Sam, feeling self-righteous, makes a noble speech about the majesty of the Law. He tells her, “Honey, listen to me. I always use the light touch, I guess, when I talk about the law business. All we moderns shy away from any hint of dedication. But I believe in the law. It’s creaking, shambling infuriating structure. There are inequities in it. Sometimes I wonder how our system of law manages to survive. But at its base, it’s an ethical structure. It is based on the inviolability of the freedom of every citizen. And it works a hell of a lot more often than it doesn’t. A lot of very little people [a reference to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunts for communists in the government] have been trying to whittle it into a new shape during these mid-years of our century, but the stubborn old monster refuses to be altered. Behind all the crowded calendars and the overworked judges and the unworkable legislation is a solid framework of equity under the law. And I like it. I live it. I like it the way a man might like an old house. It’s drafty and it creaks and it’s hell to heat, but the timbers are as honest as the day they were put up. So maybe it is the essence of my philosophy that this Cady thing has to handled within the law. If the law can’t protect us, then I’m dedicated to a myth, and I better wake up.” Sadly, thanks to Cady’s escalating threats to the family, Sam does wake up, and he faces the realization that the only way to protect his family from Cady is to kill him.

The novel is an interesting time capsule. Fearful that Cady might come after his kids when they are at home alone on the family’s ten-acre ranch, Sam takes 14-year-old Nancy, eleven-year-old Jamie, and, yes, even six-year-old Bucky out to a makeshift shooting range in his backyard and insists that they practice target shooting with a .22 automatic pistol. Nowadays, a parent arming a six-year-old with a loaded gun would likely be arrested.

At one point, Sam tells his wife that he thinks the rise in juvenile delinquency in the 1950s will be on its way out soon thanks to the Baby Boom generation. He tells her, “I suspect we’re near the end of the glamour days of juvenile delinquency. I think a very unusual crop of kids is coming along. Good kids, but strange. They’ve become bored with the dissipations of their elders and the animal philosophies of their contemporaries. They are tired of using the bogeyman of military service as a built-in excuse for riot and disorder. This is a very moral crop of kids. They are sophisticates but they practice moderation by choice. They seem to have a sense of moral purpose and decent goals, which, God knows, are all right. But they appall me a little. They make me feel like a doddering degenerate…The pendulum is swinging back.” The book was set in 1957. By 1967, Sam Bowden might well have changed his mind about the Boomer generation.

The word “psycho” as a slang term for a psychopathic personality first appeared in print back in 1919. But it didn’t enter common usage until the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho became a cultural touchstone. That film was based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same name. But MacDonald’s 1957 novel also uses the term “psycho,” to describe Cady. It’s possible that Bloch was inspired by that usage.

In some ways, The Executioners/Cape Fear feels like a transitional book, one that still remembers the “Here’s lead in yer liver, copper” crime novels that preceded it, but also anticipates the more psychologically nuanced crime novels of the future. In one scene, Sam Bowden ad libs a spoof of the cheap pulp crime fiction that Mickey Spillane had been producing for the previous ten years: “So this dish saunters in and I can see right away that nobody ever has to tell her the time of day. She makes a production out of sitting down and crossing her gorgeous legs, and then she dives down into a pocketbook as big as a phone booth for midgets and comes up with a wad of green stuff that would gag a hippo. Then she leans over and starts counting out hundred-dollar bills on the corner of my desk. I was so busy counting with her I didn’t even take time to look down the front of her dress.” But much of the novel deals very realistically with the strains of even a good marriage, the pressures of upper-middle-class American life and the struggle to maintain it, the vulnerability of even those children who come from functional homes and families, and the way that the American social fabric seemed to be unraveling a bit in post-war America.

The Executioners is one of the many popular novels – Jaws, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather, etc. – to have inspired a film that is even better than the source material. This is not meant as an insult. Often the synergy between pop fiction and pop cinema has produced a great film. That’s certainly the case with The Executioners. MacDonald’s title was generic and confusing (it refers to the Bowdens; not Cady). The film title is iconic. Back in the early 1970s director Peter Bogdanovich bought the rights to a novel by Joe David Brown called Addie Pray, the story of a father/daughter team of con artists. But he hated the title. After hearing the 1933 song “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” which is about phoniness, Bogdanovich asked his mentor Orson Welles what he thought of Paper Moon as a title for his film about con artists. Welles told him, “That title is so good, you shouldn’t even make the film, you should just release the title!” Cape Fear is another one of those titles. It sounds perfectly sinister without really saying much. Curiously, nowhere in the novel is a place called Cape Fear ever mentioned. There is, however, a headland in North Carolina called Cape Fear. In the 1962 film, Peck’s character sends his family to hide out at a family cabin on the fictional Cape Fear River, which is presumably somewhere in Georgia, while he pretends to go off to Atlanta for a legal matter. After fooling Cady into thinking he will be spending several days in Atlanta, Sam Bowden (Peck’s character) secretly goes to Cape Fear himself, hoping to kill Cady in a swampy wilderness area near his family’s houseboat. But in the novel, Sam Bowden sends his wife and kids to a fictional town called Suffern. Thus, the words Cape Fear have nothing to do with the contents of the novel that now bears that title, but it certainly adds value to the package.

The 1962 film is set in southeast Georgia. The 1991 film version makes good use of its North Carolina setting. And the current Apple-TV series makes excellent use of its sultry Savannah, Georgia, setting. But MacDonald’s novel seems to be set in Anywhere, USA. It takes place mostly near a city called New Essex, but if a state is ever mentioned, I must have missed it during my recent re-read (and I was looking for it). I asked two different AI programs what state John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners was set in. One told me that it was “set in the fictional town of New Essex, Florida. The author famously based many of his works, including this 1957 novel, on his adopted home state.” The other said that the novel was set in Georgia. The first AI may have simply guessed at Florida because that’s where his Travis McGee series is set. The second AI may have simply guessed Georgia because that is where the Peck/Mitchum film version is set. While re-reading the novel I tried to figure out where it was located. Most of the city names mentioned turned out to be fictional. But Suffern is an actual village in New York State. Likewise, one of the characters is said to have recently done a stretch in the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, NY. At one point, when Cady has eluded their grasp, the local law-enforcement department sends out a six-state alert. I figured this alert would cover the Bowden’s home state and the five surrounding states. Unfortunately, both New York and Georgia are abutted by five states. Florida is abutted by only two, which would tend to eliminate it from possibility. The Bowdens spend a lot of time boating and fishing on calm, vacation-like waterways, which would suggest that they are somewhere near the coast of Georgia or Florida. MacDonald doesn’t give us enough clues (unless I missed a glaring one) to figure out where the novel is set.

Another advantage that all of the Hollywood versions have over the novel is the character of Max Cady. He is the most mesmerizing character in the 1962 film (where he’s played by Robert Mitchum), the 1991 film (where he’s played by Robert De Niro), and the current Apple-TV series (where he’s played by Javier Bardem). In all of those incarnations he is portrayed as a sexy alpha male. In the book he is a fat and bald gorilla of a man who rapes women because that seems to be the only way he can get them in bed. What’s more, he barely makes an appearance in the novel. For the most part he is like the shark in Jaws, terrifying but seldom seen. In the beginning he warns/taunts Bowden that he is coming after his family. After that, the family dog dies mysteriously, Jamie Bowden is shot, and the Bowden family car loses a tire and nearly wipes out all of its passengers. But Cady is never seen doing any of these things. He’s rarely seen at all. We get some of his backstory from various law-enforcement investigators, but Cady is almost always off screen. It was Hollywood that turned Cady into one of the greatest stalkers in pop culture. MacDonald didn’t seem to have much interest in Cady. His novel is an attempt to show how a pair of decent, law-abiding people – Sam and Carol Bowden – can, under the right circumstances, be turned into deadly hunters of men. The novel is surprisingly understated. Only one person is murdered in the novel. And Cady’s killing takes place off-stage (off-page?) where no one witnesses it.

The Hollywood versions are great. But they wouldn’t exist without MacDonald’s version, which remains a thrilling 200-page speed demon of a novel. Whether they’ve read it or not, the pop culture that the Baby Boomers grew up steeped in was influenced in many ways by The Executioners. Max Cady is a lone stalker, but he represents all of the evils that would come stalking the American family in the years to come – drugs, Vietnam, sexual promiscuity, cult leaders, and so forth. MacDonald didn’t invent this genre but, thanks to a big helping hand from Hollywood, his novel became pretty much the preeminent stalking thriller of its era. Thanks to its moral complexity, it remains as thought provoking today as it ever was.

THE DESPERATE HOURS by Joseph Hayes. This 1954 novel became the template for the home-invasion thriller in much the same way that, in 1957, The Executioners became the template for the stalker-in-paradise thriller. The book may be largely forgotten nowadays, but its impact was enormous. It is the story of a suburban family home in Indianapolis that is suddenly and violently invaded by three desperate escapees from prison. This was one of the first post-war novels to become a multi-media franchise. It was a successful novel in 1954. In 1955, Hayes adapted the story for a successful run on the Broadway stage, where it won a Tony Award for Best Play and starred, among others, Karl Malden, Paul Newman, and Robert Montgomery. Also in 1955, Hollywood released a major motion picture adaptation of the novel, starring Humphrey Bogart and Frederic March. Joseph Hayes won an Edgar Award for his screenplay to that film. According to Wikipedia, Hayes was the first person to write a successful novel, stage play, and screenplay, from the same story. In 1967 the story was turned into a TV movie that starred George Segal and Arthur Hill. Additional film adaptations were produced in the 1970s and 1990s (including a Hindi language version!). Joseph Hayes pretty much made a career out of writing terror-in-suburbia tales, and he was rather good at it. His 1974 thriller, The Long Dark Night, combines elements of both The Desperate Hours and Cape Fear, but it is darker and contains an invasion even worse than a home invasion, the sodomization of an eleven-year-old child. His 1963 novel, The Third Day, explores domestic trauma through the eyes of a 40-something man who wakes up one day on a street in New York without any memory of who he is or how he got there. As he tries to answer these questions, he discovers that the answers may say nothing good about him and how he has treated the loved ones in his life. His 1982 thriller, No Escape, is about an abused wife who takes her young son and tries to flee from her violent husband and start over again in a new place with a new identity. Joseph Hayes is largely forgotten nowadays, but almost any time you read or watch a home-invasion thriller you are experiencing his influence on American popular culture.

EYE OF THE NEEDLE by Ken Follett. Published in 1978, this is one of the best thrillers of the 1970s, a decade noted for its great thrillers (The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Eiger Sanction, Jaws, The Eagle Has Landed, The Great Train Robbery, The Marathon Man, etc.). But that alone wouldn’t make it essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the post-war popular novel. What makes it important is that it was the first novel written by a true Baby Boomer (born after the end of WWII) to make Publishers Weekly’s list of the ten bestselling novels in America for a given year. By 1978, plenty of Baby Boomers had published successful novels, most notably Stephen King, whose Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot had already achieved huge success, though not enough to land them on a PW list of the year’s bestselling novels (that wouldn’t come until 1979, when The Dead Zone finished at number six, five notches above Follett’s Triple). Boomers like King, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, and Follett himself would dominate the PW list in the coming decades. But Follett was the first to get there. He was the Neil Armstrong, the Sir Edmund Hilary of Baby Boomer popular fiction. And his arrival on the list signaled some genuine changes to the popular novel in English. For one thing, Boomers brought a more natural depiction of sex to the popular novel. Genuinely raunchy sex scenes were prohibited from popular fiction until the late 1950s. By the mid-1960s, readers were getting plenty of sex scenes in books from the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. But Robbins and Susann were born in 1916 and 1918, respectively. They didn’t grow up reading popular novels steeped in detailed descriptions of sex. They may have been pioneers of the raunchy sex novel, but they weren’t very good at writing them. But Follett, born in 1949, was a mere twelve years old when Robbins’s raunchy 1961 novel, The Carpetbaggers, was published (Wikipedia quotes a professor of literature who notes that, “The Carpetbaggers could have sent any retailer handling it to prison before 1960.”). And he was a teenager when Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls was published. Whether Follett read either of these novels is unknown to me. But Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset’s heroic battles against government censorship of books, combined with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, meant that writers born in the 1940s and afterwards came of age in an era when sex in novels and films wasn’t all that unusual. Thus, popular novelists such as Follett, Anne Rice, Erica Jong, Jackie Collins, and plenty of others were able to pepper their novels with sex scenes without coming across as demented old people making a tragically hip effort to come across as daring taboo-breakers (sort of like Madonna’s recent pathetic attempts to prove that she’s still a sex bomb). This isn’t to say that all Baby Boomer writers of popular fiction were comfortable writing explicit sex scenes. Stephen King, for example, is famously averse to writing graphic sex scenes. Michael Crichton (born, like Jong, in 1942, so not technically a Boomer) had little use for sex scenes in his novels. Eventually, titillating sex scenes began to seem old hat, and younger Boomer authors of pop fiction – Carl Hiaasen, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, John Grisham, etc. – rarely, if ever, bothered with them. Nowadays, the raunchy sex scene is gradually disappearing from pop fiction. Not only are young people today having less sex than the Boomers did, they often seem downright hostile to it. The term “pubic thatch,” was removed from a recent British reprint of The Carpetbaggers so as not to offend young readers. Eye of the Needle represents a specific era in the development of the popular novel in English, an era when it wasn’t necessary to insert sex into a commercial fiction in order to make it sensational and, thus, more likely to become a bestseller, but there was also no commercial reason for an author to shy away from it. The book features only one genuine sex scene. It isn’t embarrassingly transgressive but neither is it completely vanilla. Here’s an excerpt:

“He changed position, kneeling astride her chest, and she realized what he wanted her to do, and for the second time she was frozen by shock; it was just too big…but suddenly she wanted to do it, she needed to take him into her mouth; she lifted her head, and her lips closed around him, and he gave a soft groan.”

I don’t know about you, but that description of oral sex doesn’t make me want to poke my eyes out with a pencil. But compare it with this sex scene from The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1968), written by John D. MacDonald, who was born in 1916 and probably didn’t grow up reading a lot of sex scenes in popular novels (unless you count James Joyce novels):

“So into the tempos and climates of it again, bodies familiarized now. Fragments. Like things glimpsed at night from a moving train. Dragging whisper-sound of palm on flesh. Deep, deep, slow-thick into the clench of honey, clovery oils, nipples pebbled, lift-clamp of thigh, arrhythmic flesh-clap fading into tempo reattained, held long and longer and longest, then beginning quivorous hesitation at the end of deepening, richening beat, a shifting of her, mouth agape, furnace breath, tongue curl, grit of tooth against tooth, hands then cup and pull the rubberous buttocky pumping, her bellows breath whistling exploding the words against my mouth - ‘Love you. Love you. Love you.’ Then somehow opening more, taking deeper, pulling, demanding, a final grinding moaning agony of her, requiring me to drive, batter, cleave without mercy. Then slow toppling. The long slope. Hearts trying to leap from chests. Gagging gasps from the long run up the far side. Tumbling into the meadow. Tall grass. Clover and grass. Sag into sleep, still coupled, fall into sleep, while still feeling in her depths the gentle residual claspings, small infrequent tightenings like that of a small sleeping hand when the brain dreams.”

I would go on, but the sharpened Ticonderoga No. 2 lying next to me on the desk is starting to call out my name.

To the uninitiated, Eye of the Needle and The Day of the Jackal might seem like products of the same literary sensibility. They are both British thrillers, published in the 1970s, and filled with an almost documentary-like amount of detail of their subject matters (political assassination in Jackal; WWII on the British home front in Needle). But Forsyth, born in 1938, felt no need to populate his novel with any strong female characters. In fact, the book features almost no important female characters at all. Likewise, sex is barely a factor in Jackal. To my recollection, the book contains only a single, passionless sexual relationship, and it is described perfunctorily. Usually when a Forsyth protagonist woes a woman, she is a pathetic spinster and he seduces her solely to gain access to the corporate file room she oversees, or else she is a secretary to an important executive whose wall safe the protagonist would like to know the combination of. Love and passion almost never enter into the picture, at least not for the male protagonist. A pop-fiction writer who, like Forsyth, came of age in the 1950s, wouldn’t have felt much pressure to create strong female characters. On the other hand, almost all Follett novels contain strong female characters. Often the main female character is the strongest character in the novel. In his introduction to the 40^th anniversary edition of Eye of the Needle, Follett writes, “Only one feature of the book is strikingly original: the hero is a woman, Lucy Rose. This is commonplace now, but back then it was unheard-of. If there is an earlier thriller with a female hero, I have not come across it.” That final sentence is ridiculous. Clearly Follett has heard of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, because it plays a major role in his 1980 novel The Key to Rebecca. A brief internet search also turns up P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black (1940), Dorothy B. Hughes’s The So Blue Marble (1940) and its sequel The Bamboo Blonde (1941), and many other novels that feature heroines instead of heroes that Follett should have heard of. One of my favorite thrillers is E.D.E.N. Southworth’s 1888 pop classic The Hidden Hand, featuring the daring adventures of a young heroine named Capitola Black. The book was published sixty-one years before Follett’s birth and ninety years before Eye of the Needle. Still, his ridiculous boast aside, Follett’s belief that his foregrounding of a female character in a thriller novel is Eye of the Needle’s most important characteristic indicates just how different his (Boomer) sensibilities are from Forsyth’s more conservative Silent Generation sensibilities. The fact that Stephen King’s debut supernatural thriller, Carrie, revolves around a teenage girl’s first menstrual cycle, is further evidence of the changing of the guard that occurred when Boomers like King and Follett began colonizing the bestseller list. What’s more, Follett’s characters frequently fuck just for fun, something that is pretty much unheard of in Forsyth’s fiction. (Though John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee character fucks just for fun, it certainly isn’t fun for the reader). Alas, though strong female characters are indeed commonplace in thriller novels these days, fucking just for the fun of it seems to be on its way out of pop fiction. I, for one, am going to miss it.

Look, I realize that cultural pundits with elite backgrounds tend to be extremely tribalistic and are essentially required to (over)praise the same mediocre books and writers as the rest of their tribe, but the way they all revere The Great Gatsby as if it is the Rosetta Stone that unlocks everything that can be known about America’s various socio-economic classes has become incredibly tedious. The book itself is basically a naïve work of YA fiction that views all of working-class America as a desolate “valley of ashes” peopled by “men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” Fitzgerald seemed to believe that no workingman anywhere in America had ever been happy or content with his life. No doubt F. Scott believed they would be much happier if they could move to Paris, become raging alcoholics, and worry that their male equipage was too small to satisfy their women. Fine, whatever. But ever since Donald Trump arrived on the political scene, elite pundits everywhere seem to have fallen in love with Fitzgerald’s banal observation about the carelessness of Tom and Daisy Buchanan. You know the one I’m talking about, even if you are lucky enough to have never read the novel:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

In the last decade or so, I’ve regularly seen this quote applied to just about everyone in Donald Trump’s orbit, from his son-in-law to his Secretary of Def- oops – War to his former Treasury Secretary and would-be Bond villain Steven T. Mnuchin. What’s more, it tends to be lazily applied to any rich person who codes Republican or libertarian: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, etc. A recent book written about Zuckerberg and his Frankenstein’s monster, Facebook, is titled Careless People. Ask Google to find you a list of recent uses of the “careless people” quote and you’ll find more than you’ll care to read. In fact, this trend is so ubiquitous that New York Times contributor Ian Prasad Philbrick published an article about it way back on October 7, 2020. Philbrick claimed that the careless people quote had begun popping up in articles critical of Trump’s Republican allies only in the previous few days. He clearly hadn’t been paying attention. The quote began showing up as soon as Trump descended his golden escalator to announce his candidacy for president. I have several problems with this phenomenon.

For one thing, the quote isn’t exactly clever, nor does it have anything original to say. And it could be applied to just about any rich person in America (or elsewhere) that the speaker/writer doesn’t like, regardless of their race, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. Certainly it could be applied to that other famous Fitzgerald, John F. Kennedy, who engaged in dozens of extramarital affairs in his short life, bedding a whole host of women, including a teenaged White House intern, a suspected Soviet spy, movie stars, the wives and sisters of friends, and the mistress of a notorious gangster. The man was a pig (which reminds me that the quote could also be applied to his Bay of Pigs fiasco). His younger brother, Teddy, was an even more careless person. He once left a 28-year-old woman lying trapped in a pocket of air in an automobile he had carelessly driven off a road and into a pond. After about 45 minutes, she finally drowned. Kennedy carelessly forgot to report the incident to the authorities for about ten hours. Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, John Edwards, Eric Swalwell, Bill Gates – you could make the claim that any number of left-leaning politicians and business leaders were/are careless people, but mainstream pundits rarely do. You could also make the claim that you don’t have to be wealthy to be as careless as Tom and Daisy. There were probably not many rich people among the January 6, 2021 rioters in Washington, D.C., but those people were definitely gifted at smashing things up. Likewise, the Black Lives Matter rioters who burnt two of America’s greatest genre bookstores – Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore, both of Minneapolis, Minnesota – to the ground in May of 2020 probably weren’t wealthy, but they were incredibly careless and destructive and left their mess for others to clean up.

A literary critic (I forget which one), once noted that, “Deconstructionism, like existentialism before it, is merely the squiggle of fancy French mustard on the hotdog of banal observation.” Using the careless people quote to condemn Trump and his circle is currently just the lazy writer’s way of applying a squiggle of fancy Fitzgeraldian prose to the hotdog of banal punditry. And what most annoys me is that the Fitzgerald quote isn’t even well written. In fact, it doesn’t make much sense. Fitzgerald notes that Tom and Daisy smash things up and then retreat back into their vast carelessness. Does that mean that the smashing itself falls outside such carelessness? For, how could they have “retreated back” (a redundant choice of words) to carelessness unless, while smashing things up, they had departed from their carelessness (or “departed away from,” as Fitzgerald might have redundantly put it)?

The Great Gatsby is fiction with training wheels, which is why it is so popular among lazy academics, pundits, students, etc. You don’t have to think too deeply about the points Fitzgerald is trying to make, because he is always happy to (over)explain them to you. At this point in time, it is probably too late to try to convince any pundit with an elite education that The Great Gatsby is a vastly overrated book. They’d probably be kicked out of their Ivy League alumni association if they acknowledged that Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is actually rather mundane. This is ironic, because such elite pundits frequently use terms such as “late capitalism” to describe our current era, as if capitalism were on the brink of collapsing. Elites have been predicting this collapse since at least the mid 19^th century, but capitalism appears no closer to collapse than ever. What’s ironic about this is that The Great Gatsby is essentially a celebration of capitalism, just as, say, Clint Eastwood’s “anti-gun-violence” film, Unforgiven, is, in fact, a celebration of gun violence. Unforgiven preaches against gun violence while satisfying its audience’s appetite for it. Likewise, Gatsby preaches against the wretched excess of the wealthy while satisfying its audience’s lust for it (a fact that Baz Luhrmann clearly understands). But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the late, great Angela Carter writing about Gatsby back in 1980:

“The Great Gatsby is a romance, perhaps the most perfect romance, of high capitalism, which may be one of the reasons why the novel has proved so easy to merchandise. Because Fitzgerald is so upfront and unembarrassed – ‘Her voice is full of money’ – about this love story which is poignant solely because each word, each gesture, each caress of the two principals is determined by economic factors, it is easy to forget that he is but rehearsing a universal truth and doing so with a peculiar and remorseless lucidity.

“And it is one of the great middlebrow classics – a soft-edged production, in no way intellectually demanding: you lie back and have it done to you…It’s curious that this surgically anatomized can of worms should be popularly supposed to be a sort of bootleg ‘Dolce Vita.’ Certainly the consistency of tone – an unruffled elegiac irony – holds an exceedingly melodramatic plot in a firm, cool grip. And it is this consistency of tone that gives the novel its illusion of perfection, which is an illusion because, technically, The Great Gatsby is put together with a knife and fork. Formal qualities were never Fitzgerald’s strong suit and he wasn’t too handy with negotiating the limited viewpoint of a first-person narrative, either.”

The most famous line in The Great Gatsby, of course, is the final one: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” That line is like Holy Writ to most elite critics (although, given the masturbatory nature of much contemporary literary criticism, it should probably begin, “And so we beat off…”). This type of closing line is for writers who fear that the meaning of their book will remain unclear to the reader unless he beats them over the head with it one last time. I’m baffled as to why this line is so celebrated. Elite middlebrow critic Maureen Corrigan evoked it in the title of her 2014 book, And So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures, a book that nearly 100 years after the publication of Fitzgerald’s novel, put forth the bold thesis that the novel is a classic of American literature – perhaps THE classic of American literature.

Fine, whatever floats your beating boat. But to all of you elite pundits out there, I say: If you want to go on pretending that The Great Gatsby is some sort of mystical key to understanding socio-economic class in America, knock yourself out…please! But can we call a moratorium on the use of the careless people quote when referring to Trump and his circle? It’s not that I think Trump & Company are careful stewards of the ship of state. Clearly they are not. It’s just that the quote has been done to death by this time and wasn’t terribly interesting to begin with. If it were up to me, we would smash it to bits and not even bother cleaning it up.

For my Ken Follett reading (and re-reading) project, I wanted to start by re-reading the first five of his megabestsellers (Eye of the Needle, Triple, The Key to Rebecca, The Man From St. Petersburg, and Lie Down With Lions) and also by reading his four Michael Crichton-like technothrillers (The Third Twin, The Hammer of Eden, Code to Zero, and Whiteout), before moving on to his five-book Knightsbridge series and his Century trilogy. Just today, I finished reading Code to Zero (2000), which I chose primarily because it is set in the year of my birth, 1958.

I suspect that the films of Alfred Hitchcock have had a huge influence on Follett. I noted recently that his 1991 novel, Night Over Water, reads like a very good companion piece to Hitchcock’s 1940 film, Foreign Correspondent. The Key to Rebecca references a Hitchcock film (or, more accurately, the novel it was based on) right in its title (the film Rebecca was also released in 1940). Hitchcock films are referenced in several Follett novels. Early in Code to Zero, the protagonist and his future wife go to the movies to see Hitchcock’s 1941 film, Suspicion. Because the film is about a troubled marriage, the protagonist of the novel believes (accurately, as it turns out) that it is a bad omen for the relationship between himself and Elspeth, his date.

Our protagonist’s name is Dr. Claude Lucas, although no one in the book ever calls him anything but Luke, which is his nickname. Despite the reference to Suspicion, Code to Zero bears a much greater resemblance to Hitchcock’s 1942 film, Saboteur (not to be confused with his 1936 film, Sabotage). In Saboteur, Robert Cummings plays Barry Kane, a worker in a WWII-era Los Angeles defense plant who is wrongfully accused of being a traitor to his country and must go on the run to prove his innocence and thwart the real traitor. Something similar happens to Luke in Code to Zero. He is a rocket scientist who, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of its Sputnik satellite, is enlisted to help the U.S. put a satellite into space and prove to the world that America is at least as technologically advanced as the U.S.S.R. Code to Zero and Saboteur resemble each other in a lot of ways, but Follett throws in an additional complication that makes his story even more thrilling than Hitchcock’s. For, when the novel opens, Luke finds himself lying on a filthy bathroom floor in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station railroad depot, dressed like a bum and possessed of absolutely no memory of who he is or what he is doing there. Amnesia is one of those melodramatic plot devices – like suitcases full of cash and evil twins – that generally only exist in popular fiction. But handled correctly (as in The Bourne Identity, Random Harvest, Memento, etc.) it can be highly effective. And Follett handles it expertly (which isn’t to say that the book, like most amnesia tales, doesn’t require a willing suspension of disbelief at times). Fairly quickly, Luke figures out that he is a Harvard-trained rocket scientist who has worked at both the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, and the famous space flight center located near Huntsville, Alabama (the center is now called The Marshall Space Flight Center but in 1958 it was just a part of an Army base known as the Redstone Arsenal). Luke suspects that someone used a combination of drugs and electric shock to deprive him of his memory. He also suspects that he may have uncovered a Soviet spy working for the U.S. space program and had his memory wiped to prevent him from reporting his discovery. But another, even worse, possibility occurs to him: perhaps he is a spy for the Russians, and one of his patriotic American colleagues, not wanting to see Luke arrested for a capital crime, chose instead to wipe his memory and dump him far away from Cape Canaveral, where the U.S. is hoping to launch its first successful orbital satellite in just a few short hours.

When recently reviewing The Hammer of Eden, another Crichtonesque technothriller by Follett, I complained that the story unfolded over too long a period of time and that, if Crichton had written it, the action probably would have been compressed into just a few days. The action in Code to Zero is compressed into just two days, which you think would make me happy. Alas, the book contains almost too much action and too many plot twists for it to be believably compressed into forty-eight hours. This is especially true because of its 1958 setting. Nowadays, with thousands of speedy commercial jets flying to and from every major metropolitan area daily, and with smart phones making it easy to send text, photos, and audio recordings instantly from one city to another, the story just might work with a 48-hour timeline. But over the course of forty-eight hours in Code to Zero, Luke takes small airplanes and travels to rural airports to visit places like Newport News, Virginia, Hunstville, Alabama, and then back to Washington, D.C., and so forth. What’s more, he is able to get his hands on a large number of files, photos, newspapers, rocket specs – you name it – at a time when even television was still a relatively new phenomenon. Code to Zero would probably have gained credibility if Follett had lengthened his timeline by a couple of days. This isn’t a fatal flaw. The 48-hour ticking clock adds a lot of suspense to the plot (Luke needs to solve various mysteries before the satellite launch or the launch may result in a devastating explosion that will set back the American space program by months or even years). Certainly Alfred Hitchcock was no stickler for documentary realism and wouldn’t have had any qualms with Follett’s timeline.

What separates Follett from another great British master of suspense, Frederick Forsyth, is that Follett’s stories almost always include at least one major romantic subplot and at least a few strong female characters in prominent roles. Code to Zero is no exception to this rule. A Jewish neuroscientist named Bilhah “Billie” Josephson is the heroine of the story and at least as important to the outcome of the plot as Luke himself is. Another Jewish female, Elene in The Key to Rebecca, is probably the strongest character in that novel. And Follett’s females aren’t just men with boobs. They tend to have specifically feminine views of life. At one point in Code to Zero, Elspeth Twomey, laments the time she has to waste each morning making up her face. Follett writes: “She had a math degree from Radcliffe, but still she was expected to look like a mannequin at work.” What’s more, Follett characters – be they villains or heroes, male or female – are very often parents, which tends to humanize them in many ways and make them seem less like Hollywood lone-wolf superheroes. Billie Josephson is the single mother of a young son. The vicious Nazi, Major Franck, in Jackdaws, is a loving father of two young children, a boy and a girl, who live back in Germany with his wife, and whom he misses terribly from his outpost in occupied France (although frequent sex with his smokeshow French mistress helps him cope with his separation from his kids). Lucy Rose, the bad-ass heroine of Eye of the Needle is also a loving mother to a young boy. William Vandam, the hero of The Key to Rebecca is a loving father to a ten-year-old boy. Fatherhood seems to be a particular concern to Follett, who has two daughters from his first marriage and a stepdaughter from his second. Fatherhood (and, in a sense, stepfatherhood) is pretty much a major theme of The Man From St. Petersburg. That novel is as much about paternity as it is about espionage. Fatherhood is also a major motif in Code to Zero. Luke longs for children but the two women he has loved most in his life both deny him his chance at becoming a father in rather underhanded ways. To be honest, when reading Frederick Forsyth, I don’t really miss the presence of serious romance and badass women. His plots are too propulsive for me to quibble about that stuff. But, when reading Follett, I find myself appreciating how much romance and parenthood tend to make his characters come alive. I’m not a prude and I love a good sex scene as much as the next pervert, but Follett’s sex scenes can sometimes veer into Playboy Advisor territory, and thus they seem less believable than his depictions of romantic love and parenthood. Still, who doesn’t love a good blowjob with his Nazi-hunting.

Follett is famous for his meticulous research, but any writer as prolific as he is will slip up now and then. I recently noted that, in another novel, he had a character use the term Art Deco back in the 1930s. The Art Deco movement was active at that time but the term Art Deco didn’t come along until the 1960s. In Code to Zero, he refers to “comfort food” back in 1958. The term didn’t first appear in print until the late 1960s and wasn’t really popularized until the 1980s.

As pop-fiction writers go, Follett’s prose is very solid, and sometimes it is remarkably good. At one point he writes of a 1932 automobile, “It was a two-seater Ford Model A roadster, ten years old, its sit-up-and-beg shape looking antiquated beside the streamlined cars of the early forties.” At first I had no idea what Follett meant by this description. But then I Googled “1932 Ford Model A roadster” and discovered that, sure enough, the front end of the car looks like a dog begging for a treat from his master, the two front fenders substituting for the dog’s forepaws, and the headlights and grill and bumper comprising the features of its pleading facial expression. The book has plenty of other amusing touches such as that.

I chose to read The Hammer of Eden recently because it was set in and around my hometown of Sacramento. I chose to read Code to Zero because, except for a few flashbacks to the 1940s and a brief coda set in 1969, it is set entirely in the year of my birth. I enjoyed both books but Code to Zero, in my opinion, is much the better of the two. It has some faults (e.g., each one of its dozens and dozens of chapters begins with a tedious passage from some old textbook about 1950s rocket technology) but it is way better than the average spy thriller. I expect it would appeal to fans of both Mad Men and For All Mankind, because it taps into nostalgia for the era of the U.S.-Soviet space race. It also has elements of the TV show The Americans in it. Some of the scenes take place in budget motels in Cape Canaveral that are decorated in the Atomic Ranch style of the era, so as to attract tourists who are coming to the area to watch the first satellite launch. Curiously, prior to Mad Man and its offspring, that late 1950s and early 1960s era wasn’t all that popular in books and movies and TV. Thus, the cover of Code to Zero doesn’t take advantage of the current appetite for depictions of that era. The cover of my paperback has just a blurry photo of the back of a man in a trench coat. The title is written in lettering meant to mimic computer printouts of the early 2000s. The publishers seemed to be hoping that readers would mistake it for a contemporary technothriller. If it were re-released today, the publisher would almost certainly try to evoke the era of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Mad Men, For All Mankind and other famous depictions of the era.

Though published in the year 2000 and dealing with obsolete technology, the novel occasionally seems uncannily relevant to the present moment. At one point, Follett notes that, “The Eisenhower White House had been amazingly delighted by how cheap and bloodless [the CIA’s 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh had been], especially in comparison with the cost of a real war such as that in Korea.” Were he alive today, I wonder if Eisenhower would think the cost of Mosaddegh’s overthrow was still cheap. Later, a rightwing CIA man notes that the agency had to keep its involvement in the overthrow of the governments of Iran and Guatemala a secret in order to keep bleeding hearts in the Congress, the press, and the public from protesting. “Fucking politicians would be asking if we had the right, was it legal, and what about the poor Iranian shit-kicking farmers and spick banana pickers?”

Same as it always was.

Prior to the publication of Eye of the Needle, in 1978, Ken Follett published around ten novels (the exact number depends upon whether you include his novelization of the film Capricorn One, published under the pseudonym Bernard Ross, his YA novels, and books like The Big Needle, which are so slender as to barely qualify as novel-length), most of them fairly forgettable. Most pop-fiction junkies date his arrival on the scene to the publication of Eye of the Needle, which was a monster success and the first novel to earn him household-name status (as well as an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and a spot on the Publishers’ Weekly list of America’s ten bestselling books of the year). I’ve written before about popular fiction writers who seem to have begun their careers with a major hot streak. We have Joseph Wambaugh, whose career began with these four titles – The New Centurions, The Blue Knight, The Onion Field, and The Choirboys – all of them brilliant. Likewise, we have Frederick Forsyth who began his career as a novelist with The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, and The Devil’s Alternative. If Eye of the Needle truly had been Follett’s debut, his career would have begun with a major hot streak: Eye of the Needle (1978), Triple (1979), The Key to Rebecca (1980), The Man From St. Petersburg (1982), and Lie Down With Lions (1985). Lately, I’ve been re-reading my way through these five books, and, just today, I finished my re-read of The Key to Rebecca.

The Key to Rebecca arrived on the scene while Eye of the Needle mania was still sweeping the world of American pop fiction. That novel, which was a huge seller in hardback, was still a huge paperback bestseller in 1980 and could be seen on airport spinner racks, grocery store impulse racks, and in huge piles at bookstore chains such as Brentano’s and B. Dalton’s. In doctor’s offices, on airplanes, and in the stands at kids’ volleyball and soccer games, you would see pop-fiction junkies tightly gripping that ubiquitous white cover with the bloody stiletto and a swastika on it. A film version was in the works and was heavily anticipated by fans of adventure cinema. Follett’s immediate follow up was Triple, a novel of international intrigue that is set in the late 1960s. It sold very well (the eleventh bestselling novel in America for 1979) but wasn’t quite the instant classic that Needle had been. Thus, Follett may have been hoping to recapture the magic of Needle, by recycling many of its aspects – a World War II setting, the hunt for an almost supernaturally elusive German spy who has info that could doom the Allied war effort, a brave and beautiful female who will be enlisted to help snare him, a heartbroken British widower in charge of the spyhunt, etc. This isn’t to say that The Key to Rebecca is just Eye of the Needle with a few slight changes. Unlike Needle, which takes place all across Great Britain, The Key to Rebecca confines its action almost exclusively to Egypt. The opening line is, “The last camel collapsed at noon.” Needless to say, there are no camels in Eye of the Needle (although, metaphorically, camels and eyes of needles have long been connected). Follett’s opening line has become regarded as sort of a pop-fiction classic. Elizabeth Peters’ 1991 crime novel, The Last Camel Died at Noon, is almost certainly a nod to Follett. A 2016 article in the online publication SleuthSayers, about great opening lines in thriller novels, is entitled “The Last Camel Collapsed at Noon,” and lists Follett’s line as its first example of a great grabber of an opening line, ahead of examples by the likes of Raymond Chandler and James Lee Burke. This is somewhat ironic because The Key to Rebecca is heavily indebted to Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 gothic novel, Rebecca, which begins with probably the most memorable opening line in all of 20^th century pop fiction: “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The opening line of TKTR is more memorable than the opening line to Eye of the Needle (“It was the coldest winter for forty-five years.”), but they both reference extreme weather, and Follett may have been intentionally trying to echo Needle. Still despite the many similarities, TKTR is no retread. It is an entirely original spy novel and, had it been published in 1978, may well have been every bit the breakout novel that Needle proved to be for Follett.

Whether you find yourself preferring TKTR to Needle will really depend on your own literary tastes. Being from rainy Portland, Oregon, I tend to prefer tales set in gloomy British landscapes to brightly blazing African ones. I also prefer thrillers that open with a bang rather than with a long, slow burn. The first knife murder in Needle occurs on page 9. In TKTR Follett made me wait all the way until page 17 before giving me a knife murder to enjoy. That’s almost inexcusable. Still, I can imagine plenty of readers finding TKTR the better of the two books. One of its best features, as far as I am concerned, is that it is a pop fiction that is steeped in pop fiction. It is one of those pop fictions, like Jasper Fforde’s 2001 novel The Eyre Affair, that references a classic popular novel in its title (curiously, Jane Eyre and Rebecca are the two most influential books in the development of the 20^th century gothic romance novel). And Du Maurier’s novel isn’t the only pop fiction mentioned in the novel. Several of the characters are pop fiction fans and the book is full of references to works by Raymond Chandler, Georges Simenon, Agatha Christie, and others (the Christie book referenced is, of course, Death on the Nile, published the year before Rebecca; but the most interesting use of Christie in the book is when the femme fatale invents a nonexistent Christie title – The Clue of the Bloodstained Atlas – in order to communicate a secret message to a fellow captive of the Nazi villain, although that phony title sounds more like a Nancy Drew book than a Christie story).

Another reason why I believe I found TKTR slightly less compelling than Needle is because the heroes of the latter were trying to save Great Britain from a Nazi occupation, while the heroes of the former were trying to preserve an unpopular British occupation of Egypt. The British characters in TKTR are not really saviors of Egypt. The British invaded and imperialized Egypt in 1882. They were extremely unwelcome at the time and even more so by 1942, even though they had granted Egypt partial independence in 1922 (not until after the Suez Crisis of 1956 did Egypt finally rid itself of all British control; since then, of course, Egypt has been paradise on Earth). Most Egyptians, if Follett is to be believed, were eager to see the Brits routed from Egypt by the Nazis. They seemed to believe that occupation by the Nazis would be preferable to occupation by the Brits. Thus, though I wanted the British heroes to thwart Alex Wolff, the Nazi superspy at the heart of the story, I couldn’t help being annoyed by the blindness of the British characters to how horrible their own Egyptian occupation was. Follett, fortunately, is not blind to this aspect of history and demonstrates how disliked the Brits were by the natives. And virtually every Egyptian character secretly hopes to see Erwin “the Desert Fox” Rommel’s invasion of Egypt route the British from northern Africa.

Rommel is just one of several historical characters who play a speaking role in Follett’s novel (he is also an important factor in Eye of the Needle). Another is Anwar al-Sadat, a future president of Egypt who, in 1942, was a junior officer in the Egyptian signal corps and, along with a few others, including Gamal Abdel Nasser, secretly formed an organization, Free Officers, dedicated to overthrowing British rule. (In 1942, both the Jews of Palestine and the Muslims of Egypt, hated the British; the Jews in the novel Exodus, Leon Uris’s 1958 bestseller about the formation of modern Israel, seem to loathe the Brits more than they do the Nazis.) Because of his hatred of British rule, Sadat was a Nazi sympathizer and worked to help undermine the British efforts to defeat them. But Follett doesn’t treat him like a villain. Sadat, in his few scenes, comes across as brave, level-headed, honorable and smart. Later on in his life, long after the years depicted in TKTR, Sadat, along with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (also a former terrorist, responsible for the King David Hotel bombing which killed 28 Brits, as well as another 63 innocent people) would help forge a peace between Israel and Egypt and become much honored around the globe. But he was killed by Islamic terrorists from his own country in 1981, at the age of 61. The United States posthumously awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Gold Medal. Many other countries around the globe, including Italy and France, gave him similar honors. The British, however, did not.

As you can see, the mission of protagonist Major William Vandam in TKTR is a slightly less worthy one than the mission of Percy Goldiman, the primary hero of Eye of the Needle. Both men are trying to defeat Nazis, but Vandam is trying to protect a partial British occupation that is itself a moral abomination. If that kind of thing doesn’t bother you, however, you may find TKTR every bit as rousing as Eye of the Needle. To be honest, I wasn’t overly bothered by it myself, but it made the Brits at the heart of the tale slightly less admirable than the Brits at the heart of Needle.

But one of the major heroes in TKTR is actually a heroine, a beautiful (naturally) young Egyptian Jew named Elene. She reminded me a lot of the Ingrid Bergman character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 film Notorious (made six years after his adaptation of Rebecca). In that film, Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, the beautiful (naturally) daughter of a German-America whose father has been imprisoned for being a Nazi collaborator during the war. Cary Grant plays T.R. Devlin, a government agent who recruits Alicia to seduce one of her father’s old Nazi comrades who now lives in South America and try to infiltrate his gang of fellow Nazis. In the movie, Alicia falls in love with Devlin and feels betrayed when she believes that he is essentially using her the way a pimp would use a whore. The same thing happens in TKTR between Elene and Vandam. Vandam wants Elene to become intimate with Alex Wolff so as to figure out how to thwart his efforts to aid Rommel’s planned invasion of Cairo. Elene has fallen in love with Vandam and now she feels ill used by him, not realizing that he loves her, too, but he won’t let that stand in the way of bringing down Germany’s top spy in Egypt.

I am not the first person to note that Follett has been creating strong female characters for practically his entire career. In TKTR Elene proves to be at least as brave and crafty as Vandam. Lucy Rose in Eye of the Needle may be the most bad-ass character in the novel. Jackdaws is a feast of strong female characters. The Man From St. Petersburg is at least partially a feminist take on the early 20^th century suffragist movement in Britain, and Emmeline Pankhurst even appears in a speaking role. Night Over Water, A Place Called Freedom, The Hammer of Eden – plenty of other Follett novels feature women as their most admirable characters.

Follett is also a master of creating villains who are not without sympathetic characteristics. As bad as Wolff is, he has some admirable qualities. As a native of Egypt, he comes by his hatred of the British naturally. He is smart, resourceful, and able to survive under the most inhospitable of conditions (including in an Egyptian desert after the death of his last camel leaves him stranded in an ocean of sand). He is a cultured individual who loves good caviar and champagne and music. Though he is a spy who got his espionage training in Germany, he isn’t really a Nazi. He is an ardent Egyptian nationalist. The Nazis are basically just his best bet of ousting the Brits from his homeland. He is far from a good guy and, towards the end of the novel, Follett goes overboard in trying to portray him as a mad man. But for most of the book he is a cool and intelligent operative, if also a mass murderer and sexual deviant (the book includes an intriguing threesome).

The Key to Rebecca is about as much fun as a popular spy novel can get. The book includes a thrilling chase scene in which a motorcyclist goes up and down (outdoor) staircases in an effort to run down a villain who has escaped a police trap on foot. Like most Follett novels, it is beautifully paced, becoming more exciting with each new chapter until the reader almost unwittingly finds himself completely absorbed by it. If you love pop fiction, you can’t afford to miss this one. It is a pop fiction that, among other things, celebrates the centrality of pop fiction to life in the English-speaking world.

I don’t write about it much here (this Substack is mostly devoted to popular fiction) but among my favorite things to read are other people’s handwritten diaries, journals, letters, recipe books, school notebooks, artist sketchbooks, and so forth. I own dozens of these and most of them I have acquired at the monthly flea market held in Sacramento at the former site of Arco Arena (aka Sleep Train Arena, aka a lot of other things). The flea market is held on the second Sunday of every month. Yesterday, I was perusing one vendor’s offerings when I discovered what looked like a crazy person’s journal/sketchbook. I mean no disrespect to the mentally ill (among whom I occasionally count myself). This book looked like Hollywood’s idea of the crazy writings and jottings of a mentally disturbed teenage boy who is contemplating killing his classmates, or someone who wants to assassinate the president, or just some garden variety TV detective show loony with a grudge against the world. I didn’t investigate it very carefully. I never do when buying diaries and such. If it looks promising I will by it largely blind, so long as the price is good. This one was selling for a whopping five dollars. So I took out five bucks and handed it to the vendor. After I bought it he told me that he acquired it at the estate sale of an outsider artist who has a cult following. “I bought a lot of his paintings and other artworks,” he told me, “and I sold them all.” “This book is all that’s left.” Then he told me something strange. He said that the artist’s name was Franklin Mint, and that he was well known online for some bizarre videos he had posted on YouTube. He told me that I should especially check out a video called Baby Spider. Although the vendor seemed totally sincere, I was dubious about this. I told him, “Franklin Mint is the name of a company that sells collectible cars and dolls and dishes.” The vendor wasn’t fazed by this information. He said, “I know. I own some of their cars. But this artist has nothing to do with them. Check him out on YouTube.” I promised I would.

I know of The Franklin Mint because it was affiliated with the now-defunct Franklin Library, a publisher of handsome collectible editions of books, of which I own about three hundred. At any rate, I put the book into my backpack and my wife and I moved on to the next vendor. When I got home, I went online and searched for an artist named Franklin Mint. Multiple search engines and AI chatbots told me I was mistaken, that the Franklin Mint was a producer of collectibles and not an artist. Searching “baby spider” on YouTube brought up a lot of hits but nothing related to an artist named Franklin Mint. I don’t think the vendor lied to me. He had no reason to. But he was clearly wrong about something. If I see him again next month I’ll ask him for more information. In the meantime, if you know what he might have been talking about, let me know in the comments below.

After giving up my online search for more information, I began reading the book of Franklin Mint (it’s the only name I have for him), which, no offense, really did look and feel like the work of someone suffering from mental illness, albeit a fairly smart and interesting sufferer. The writings all seem to have been produced in 1991 and 1992. He (I suspect he was a black male, for reasons I’ll elucidate later) was probably an autodidact. His writing was rather clever and articulate, but his spelling was…idiosyncratic. The book included handwritten diary entries, poems/song lyrics, philosophical observations, and so forth. It also included a lot of highly evocative, though primitive, pen-and-ink drawings, and some colored drawings that might be in chalk (I know little about graphic art). Pasted into it were a few photographs of teenage girls (none of them even slightly obscene), newspaper articles, a horrific image of an aborted fetus’s head, and sundry other things. His writings often employ a lot of alliteration and rhyming without regard to meter (although it includes a lot of attempts at metered rhyming, as well). Much of it reads like the random ramblings of a disturbed but fascinating mind. Here’s a sample (I left the misspellings in place but didn’t bother with “sic”):

A book of empty pages a pen with no emotion

this silent bus at night drives along the ocean

bathroom bathing beauties

sit around smelling like flesh crutches

browning frowning crowning

themselves King & Queen

***

Thousands of monsters walk

around in tuxedos. Some

four hundred carry torpedoes.

others have knives and wives.

comb back hair and a swivel chair.

Desks. Big Oak plane tells lies.

Antenna mouthpiece spews lies.

***

And what is this about leaving?

cause fallen in love with

a tree that breeds is like trying

to steal a bees polen

leaving tracks that have been stolen

by you and no others.

Those are all separate and untitled entries. Some of the entries cover an entire page or more and are full of interesting passages and ideas but they are rather long and I am too lazy to recreate them here. Some of the poems/lyrics have titles, such as this one:

LEFT AND LOVED ALONE

You’re taking this ride lying down

baby-buggy roller derby, must’a

been dropped when you’re quite young

your mother musta loved you

you’ve been spun you’ve been thrown

you’ve been loved, been left alone,

in the market buying fruit

sleeping in a one piece suit.

1. “How long you been buried in snow”?

2. “Who knows how old you’ll grow?”

The above poem is illustrated by a drawing of two women pushing their babies towards each other in strollers. One baby is saying, “I was spun” and the other is saying “and I thrown.”

It’s often difficult to tell where one Franklin Mint poem/lyric ends and another begins. Most are untitled. Some appear to be continuations of a poem that began on a previous page, but it’s impossible to say for sure. What’s more, a lot of the periods in his writings could be commas, and vice versa. Here’s another untitled piece:

2 victims, by the beach

they embarrassly embrace

Resent the flow of green land

cash is filtered through their hands

try to run try to destroy

a very wise Chinese nurse

gives the beach some advice

“Please stay rigid, spill no

milk, go to the 3 judges

dressed in silk robes.”

There is joy when you say hello

There is joy when you say good-bye

you don’t know if the night will

take the whips from the slaves.

2 homosexuals, by the corner

their boss is sick in bed

he has an IV stuck inside

the right arm pumping red

he remembers being naked

nursing on his mothers breast

he had a very good posture

As he put his key in the door

He feels affection for the whore.

One of the best writings in the book is a lyric called “I Have Known Love,” but it didn’t sound like any of the other writings in the book so I Googled it and it turns out to have been the lyric to a song of that name that was released by a New York electronic rock group called Silver Apples, which put out two albums in the late 1960s and then, sort of, disbanded (in part because of a lawsuit by Pan American Airlines, according to Wikipedia). The rock group had four members, but none of them was named Franklin Mint.

Here’s another Franklin Mint original (at least, Google can’t find any record of it), which is part eight of an eight-part cycle of…musings, messages to a friend, poetry?

Sweat is sticking to my hair

under there, and my new pink

underwear looks funny with a white

band. No music. Just rain. My big

toe is in a plastic baggie cause

it may just fall off, and if it does

I’ll catch it and send it off to you.

But instead it’s gonna heal, so get this:

another gift I’ll give you, something

to make you smile. I can’t quite

picture your mouth as it curves up

so beautifully on your small face.

I’ve been reading today, and listening to my

humble songs, so long to music, cause

all I hear now is rain. It’s funny

how events are timed so right, so

perfect, dot, dot, dot, and then other

times when it’s slow and wrong and so

off. I would like to transport myself

in the dream of my healing the toe

and of the gourgous wild Amazon

cat mother humping, and also a

third wish that felt so fine, I had

wished I would not wake up, but

I did.

I get the feeling that Franklin Mint might have been an injured veteran of the Vietnam War. Some of his writings seem like coded rants against the U.S. and against war. Several times he mentions that he has a fake hand, as in this…poem?

Sorry slave,

Congratulations

I shaved

My hand is fake

Golden medals

drop from your neck

grown-ups say

your fucked till death

so until sex do we part:

So onto sex

we embark and it ain’t no shit ship

sorry sailor

I’d like to sail that sea

but my anchors way

is drowning deep

dark dense days

and the nights are good too!

On another page, we find a drawing of a noose and these words:

My hand is a noose

to strangle myself

with. To take my life

into my own hands.

My heart is the size

of my fist.

My hand is fake.

Another page simply reads: “Your mom in the kitchen with Kafka.” It sits alongside a creepy drawing of a woman whose right eye has two irises. Next to her are drawn a can opener, half of a lime, a serrated knife, and, perhaps, some spilled blood. Another poem, dated 2/11/92, reads:

Magenta Rabbits and golden

elephants float on a river

of clear blue air. And already

I am full of love for you.

There is another place

where we can stay all

day and enjoy these sights,

where we can be happy…

Let’s kiss again, and again,

I can hear the smiling

taking place, distant

heart beats and strange

music of the ages…

Another odd poem, which I believe is an anti-abortion piece, reads:

The favorite food of Jackie O

is fetal lamb, before it has a chance to live

it’s taken out, out of the womb

and put into an oven.

The last words of her husband John

was, “My God, I’m hit.”

(Almost like a fetal lamb, taken out,

of it’s mother’s womb.)

And here’s one called “Head of Cement”:

It’s grey and heavy

and has some holes

your head made of cement

it gets hot, it gets wet

but its not permanant

Usually it stands silent

in a field of weeds

people smash glass bottles on it

but it never bleeds

It’s your head, it’s cement

nothing can hurt it.

if someone threw it in a lake

it would splash and sink

Another untitled poem, this one makes an attempt at regular meter and rhyme:

I was getting ready for bed, I started undressing

when from behind me I felt some caressing

turned around and nearly dropped dead

For there was an angel in my bed.

I couldn’t believe it, you should have seen her wings

white, silky, incredible things.

I got into bed, I didn’t want to be rude

When I got next to her, the angel was nude

She gave me a kiss, as to say it’s alright

But then she kissed me with all of her might

and it was intense, like peace from a dove

I guess she was high with heavan above.

The angel was wild, and she was the boss

She rode me around like a hobbity-horse

She cuffed my wrists to the bed post

Then she did what she called The Holy Ghost.

The poem continues on a second page, but I didn’t like that part and neither, apparently, did Franklin Mint. He crossed much of it out and wrote “terrible” “trash” across the bottom of the page.

Franklin Mint mentions slaves and slavery several times. And at one point he writes, “Shirt: REAL MEN ARE BLACK.” Apparently this refers to a tee-shirt he must have been amused by. Occasionally he mentions other men as “brothers.” Based on this slim evidence, I am assuming that he himself is/was an African-American. But on the inside of the back cover of the book a professionally printed sticker is affixed that reads “WHITE MAN BEWARE! WE WANT YOUR JOBS. WE WANT YOUR HOMES. WE WANT YOUR COUNTRY. WAKE UP! The sticker features offensive caricatures of a Jew, a black man, and a Hispanic. The bottom of the sticker identifies it as a product of “White Aryan Resistance, P.O. Box 65, Fallbrook, CA, 92028.” Fallbrook is located in San Diego County. Whether Franklin Mint is/was black or white, he doesn’t come across in his writings as a racist. I suspect that he found the sticker amusing and put it in his book as an ironic coda to it. Although he was probably not a racist, he appears to have been steeped in Christianity and to have been a hardcore opponent of abortion. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I’m often suspicious of the stories flea market vendors tell me when trying to sell an item. But, occasionally, after the transaction has been completed, the seller will offer some extra info about the item I have purchased. This info I tend to trust. Why would the seller bother lying after the sale has been made? In April my wife and I attended an antiques street faire in Petaluma, CA. At one vendor’s space, we both were dazzled by an old wooden chair that had at some point been repainted with a bunch of psychedelic colors. It looked like something from a hippy commune. We bought the chair from the seller and afterwards he told me, “The paint job was done by a girl who lived in a redwood tree for two years to prevent it from being chopped down. I can’t remember her name but she was famous for awhile.” I happened to have been a fan of that “girl” so I said, “You mean Julia Butterfly Hill? The young woman who sat in a tree called Luna?” The vendor seemed shocked that I had heard of her. I suspect he was wishing he’d asked more money for the chair. “Yeah, that’s her,” he said. “She gave it to a friend of hers, who was an antiques dealer, and I bought it years later from the friend.” I believe that story because it wasn’t used to sell me the chair. And now the chair sits in my living room. Whether the story is true or not, my wife and I now refer to it as the Julia Butterfly Hill chair.

I believe that the vendor who sold me the book of Franklin Mint thought he was telling me the truth about it. But I can’t find any evidence that he was. I’ll try to track him down on the second Sunday of next month and see what else he can tell me. The best feature of the book is the artwork, but I am a technoboob and thus cannot reproduce it for you here. All of the photos used to illustrate A Boomer and His Books are imported from the internet. I don’t know how to import photos that I take with my own phone. If I should figure it out, I’ll revisit this essay and supply you with a look at the primitive but lively folk drawings of the man who, for now, I know only as Franklin Mint.

If you are tired of reading about Ken Follett in this space, you should skip this essay. As mentioned previously, my wife was reading Follett’s 1978 novel, Eye of the Needle, when we first met (in 1979). She talked enthusiastically about it and passed it along to me when she was done. It became the first book we ever bonded over. After that, for a few years (we married in 1980), we each read every Follett novel that came along. We read 1979’s Triple, 1980’s The Key to Rebecca, 1982’s The Man From St. Petersburg, and 1985’s Lie Down With Lions. After that we and Ken drifted apart for reasons not quite clear to me, because I remember that we enjoyed all of those books. In the 1990s, on the recommendation of her daughter Mary Ann, my wife read and enjoyed Follett’s monster bestseller and, I gather, his masterwork, The Pillars of the Earth. She enjoyed it but I never got around to it. After that, neither of us read any more Follett until, a few years ago, when I decided to renew my acquaintance with him. Since then I have read A Dangerous Fortune, A Place Called Freedom, The Third Twin, The Hammer of Eden, Night Over Water, and Jackdaws. After that I planned on reading the eight massive historical tomes that comprise his Knightsbridge series and his (20^th) Century Trilogy. Alas, for some reason, I put that off so that I could go back and re-read the five books that we began our Follett journey with.

First up was Eye of the Needle, which I reviewed here a week or two ago. I remember it being my favorite of all the Folletts, so I was a bit worried it wouldn’t live up to my memory of it. But it was actually just as good (if not better) the second time around. Chronologically, I should have read Triple next, but while looking for it amongst the several thousand old mass-market paperbacks in my library, I came across The Man From St. Petersburg first, so I decided to make it my next Follett re-read. It has been forty-plus years since I read any of these five books. I was in my twenties then and am nearing seventy now. As I began this re-reading project, I had almost no memory whatsoever of the details of these books. I could have told you that Eye of the Needle was a thriller about Nazis, but that would have been the extent of it. I had even less memory of The Man From St. Petersburg. This is not a knock on Follett. I have little memory of the many bona fide classics of English literature that I read in my younger days. I seemed to recall that The Man From St. Petersburg was a Cold War spy thriller, but I was wrong about that (the fact that it wasn’t called The Man From Leningrad should probably have tipped me off about that). TMFSP is actually set in the summer of 1914 and takes place mainly in England during the run up to World War I. Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and his First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, are desperate to sign a mutual defense pact with Czar Nicholas II of Russia before Germany begins its effort to take over all of Europe. The Brits, probably correctly, fear that they don’t have the military power to defeat the Germans by themselves. The Czar sends a diplomat, Prince Aleks Orlov, to London to see what kind of terms the Brits are offering. Churchill, though a member of Asquith’s Liberal cabinet, enlists the aid of Tory statesman Lord Steven Walden to negotiate the deal with Orlov, because Walden’s Russian wife, Lydia, is a relative of Orlov’s. Walden and Orlov are quite fond of each other, but their missions are quite different. The Russians don’t care much if England is invaded by Germany, but they are worried about protecting their access to various waterways to the open ocean that might be cut off to them if Germany should take over much of Europe. England, on the other hand, doesn’t like the idea of stretching its Navy all across Europe just to make sure that Russia retains easy access to various seaports. But the Brits need the help of the Russians and the Russians need the help of the Brits, so the two men spend weeks trying to hammer out an agreement.

Unbeknownst to either Orlov or Walden, an anarchist/assassin named Feliks Kschessinsky, has snuck into England with the intention of killing Orlov and thus ruining any chance of an agreement. Feliks spent several years being tortured by the Czar’s secret police in Siberia and now is determined to bring down the government of Russia. He believes that if Nicholas II’s reign should fall, the peasants of Russia will rise up and install a socialist government that will turn the country into a workers paradise. He fears that if Nicholas aligns himself with England, Russia’s government just might muster the military strength to ward off an invasion by Germany. Feliks isn’t greatly worried about Germany. He believes that Germany has more important targets for invasion than Russia. But anything that strengthens Nicholas is anathema to Feliks. He believes that if Orlov is killed on British soil, the Russian government will be outraged and will break off its negotiations with the Asquith government. With no foreign government committed to rallying to his defense, Nicholas will be highly vulnerable to a peasant uprising should the coming war unleash the kind of chaos across Europe that Feliks believes it will. And so Feliks, an experienced assassin, has come to London eager to kill Orlov. He has been through so many terrible ordeals in his fortysomething years that he is no longer afraid of anything. Which, of course, makes him even more lethal. Unfortunately, he will discover that, in London, there reside not one but two people who are capable of restoring a bit of his humanity – a terrible fate for an assassin who relies on his fearlessness and lack of emotion to successfully carry out his assignments.

In 1978, Kirkus Reviews called Eye of the Needle, “easily the best first novel in the espionage genre since The Day of the Jackal.” That was probably true. But The Man From St. Petersburg bears a much stronger resemblance to The Day of the Jackal than does Eye of the Needle. The Nazi spy at the heart of Eye of the Needle is an accomplished killer, but he wasn’t sent to England to assassinate anyone. He was sent there to acquire information. But Feliks in TMFSP is a flat-out assassin, like the protagonist of Jackal, and so the novel has a main character and a primary mission much like Jackal’s. But the resemblance mainly ends there. Jackal is written in an almost documentary style, creating a sense of verisimilitude so impressive that the reader sometimes feels as though he is reading a nonfiction work of history. The first few chapters of TMFSP seem like a fairly realistic depiction of Britain’s political situation in the summer of 1914. But, after Follett establishes the book’s historical background, he lets his pulp freak-flag fly, and the book becomes anything but a documentary. Soon we have suffragette meetings that turn into bloody riots, bombs being tossed in hotel corridors, long lost lovers reuniting under bizarre circumstances, startling revelations about the parentage of a certain character, a terrorist attack at Windsor Palace, secret trysts, laudanum-induced nightmares, a swordsman fighting off an attack on his horse-drawn carriage, hair’s-breadth escapes by a villain from the detectives of Scotland Yard, an exploding apartment complex, an escape from a speeding train, and much, much more. If melodrama isn’t your meat, stay away from The Man From St. Petersburg, but I loved it. Follett ratchets up the pulpy aspects of the novel so slowly that you don’t really notice it happening until about the last quarter of the novel when it becomes practically an Indiana-Jones-style adventure novel.

The book reminded me of many excellent pieces of popular fiction. Perhaps the most prominent of these is Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Just prior to TMFSP, Follett published The Key to Rebecca, a novel in which Du Maurier’s bestselling classic plays a major role. He was clearly immersed in the Du Maurier novel while writing The Key to Rebecca, and much of Du Maurier’s influence remains in TMFSP. We have a young bride who is largely a stranger to English country homes marrying a fabulously wealthy Englishman who installs her in a grand house located on an estate of thousands of acres. Walden Manor is so large and sprawling that the roof covers four acres (one particularly entertaining scene involves a scamper across said roof) and there are rooms that some of the occupants have never even had the time to visit. A massive fire in the climactic scene of the book also mirrors some of the events in Rebecca. A forbidden love affair by a woman who appears to the outside world to be the epitome of probity is featured in both novels. A family member who betrays the master of the house is featured in both novels.

As noted, The Day of the Jackal is also a major influence on TMFSP. In fact, you can see the Jackal’s influence on Eye of the Needle as well. In that novel, Follett’s Nazi protagonist uses the famous “Day of the Jackal Fraud” to falsely obtain British I.D. papers (hundreds of authors have ripped off Forsyth’s ingenious device). Follett is such a huge Jackal fan that, in 2014, when the Folio Society released a handsome collectors edition of The Day of the Jackal, Follett was enlisted to write the introduction. In that introduction he specifically mentioned the Day of the Jackal Fraud, though he didn’t mention that he had borrowed it for Eye of the Needle.

I could list a lot of other classics of pop fiction that were probably an influence on TMFSP, but I’ll restrain myself. One book that it reminded me of is Trevanian’s The Summer of Katya, which was published one year later, in 1983, so it couldn’t have possibly influenced TMFSP. Both novels are set in the summer months prior to the outbreak of World War I. Many books, both fiction and nonfiction, have commented on what an idyllic period the summer of ’14 was in Europe before the war came along and ruined it. Of course, it was only idyllic and peaceful if you were wealthy enough to be able to enjoy it. For the poor and working classes, it was probably as unpleasant as any other European summer. Follett shows us the misery of the British poor and working classes, but he also shows us just what a golden summer it was for the upper middle class and the leisure class. This would be the last pleasant summer in Britain, and Europe, for many a year. The dust jacket description of The Summer of Katya notes, “The time is that golden summer of 1914, a summer remembered for its glorious sunny days that seemed to roll endlessly forward until the guns of August changed the world forever.” Like TMFSP, The Summer of Katya begins fairly tranquilly. But, also like TMFSP, the final act of Katya is so crazily over the top that it stands, in my mind, as an all-time classic of popular fiction excess. And I mean that as a compliment. The conclusions to both books left me nearly breathless.

Eye of the Needle is probably an all-around better novel than TMFSP, but the latter provides for a much wilder rollercoaster ride. Many of the book’s later plot developments don’t even make much sense, but Follett shoots you through the hairpin turns and loop-de-loops and stomach-churning drops so quickly that you barely have time to register that some it is outright nonsense. A more self-important novelist might have used this book to make important arguments about class warfare or the futility of war or the flaws of democratically elected (sort of) governments. Fortunately, Follett eschews all that. He is occasionally very funny in his ability to skewer the ignorance and pretention and hypocrisy of Britain’s upper class, but he has no real interest in schooling the reader. He’d rather thrill him. And he does. At least he did this man from Sacramento.

My wife and I have been watching and, to some degree, enjoying Apple-TV’s new miniseries Cape Fear, which has got me thinking about the fact that a lot of popular intellectual properties are no longer widely known by the titles that their creators gave them. Cape Fear began life in 1957, as a John D. MacDonald novel called The Executioners. In 1962, the book was adapted as a Hollywood film that starred Gregory Peck and, most memorably, Robert Mitchum, as villain Max Cady. The film was a hit and, since then, the book, whenever it has been reissued, has usually carried the title Cape Fear. This is odd, because nowhere in the novel is a place called Cape Fear ever mentioned. There is a headland in North Carolina called Cape Fear. In the 1962 film, Peck’s character sends his family to hide out at a family cabin in Cape Fear, NC, while he stays home in southeast Georgia to deal with the murderous Max Cady. But in the novel, Sam Bowden (Peck’s character) sends his wife and kids to a fictional town called Suffern. Thus, the words Cape Fear have nothing to do with the contents of the novel that now bears that title, just as the words The Postman Always Rings Twice have nothing to do with the novel that bears that title (but that’s a story for another time).

Something similar happened to James Grady’s 1974 thriller Six Days of the Condor. When Sidney Pollack turned it into a 1975 film, he shortened the timeline of the tale and called the film Three Days of the Condor. After that, for many years, paperback editions of the novel bore the title Three Days of the Condor, even though the book still covered six days. More recent releases of Grady’s novel have restored the book’s original title. In 2018, a streaming TV series based on the novel made its debut. That series didn’t compress its storyline into a specific number of days, as far as I could tell, and, thus, the series was called simply Condor.

Ken Follett’s first big blockbuster thriller was published in England in May of 1978. It was called Storm Island and was, at first, only a modest success. Two and a half months later it was published in the U.S. under the title Eye of the Needle and became a runaway bestseller, finishing in tenth place on Publishers Weekly’s year-end list of the bestselling novels in America for 1978, despite have been published when the year was more than half over. When the British publishers saw how enamored of Eye of the Needle American readers were, they rebranded the British novel with the same name and it began climbing the bestseller charts of the UK as well. Since then, every foreign edition of the novel has been a translation (some looser than others) of the American title (in Germany, for instance, it is simply titled Der Nadel). In 1981, when a British film production company was adapting the book for the screen, they used the American title.

It isn’t just famous novels that can have their names dramatically changed at some point during the publishing process. One of my all-time favorite books is Famous All Over Town, a 1983 coming-of-age novel by Danny Santiago (a pseudonym for Daniel Lewis James). The book began winning plaudits and awards almost immediately upon publication, which makes sense because it is funny, moving, and a much better coming-of-age novel than The Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird or many another more famous title. Alas, on August 16, 1984 (my 26^th birthday), Daniel Lewis James’s “friend” John Gregory Dunne (Mr. Joan Didion) published an essay in the New York Review of Books exposing the fact that the novel was written not by a young Latino but by a 73-year-old white guy. After that, enthusiasm for the novel waned and James was accused of cultural appropriation (although, at that time, they used the phrase “literary fraud”). After that, James lived another four years but never published another word. Which is a shame, because the book is a masterpiece. A few years ago, I purchased a rare advanced readers copy (an uncorrected proof for book reviewers to read in advance of publication) of the novel, but at the time the ARC was printed, the novel was titled My Name Will Follow You Home, a haunting title that sounds somewhat like a curse. And, for all I know, it may well have served as a curse upon John Gregory Dunne. His career as a novelist began auspiciously with the publication of two excellent and well-received crime novels, 1977’s True Confessions and 1982’s Dutch Shea, Jr. After ratting out Daniel Lewis James in 1984, Dunne published three more novels (The Red White and Blue in 1987, Playland in 1994, and Nothing Lost in 2004), none of them any good and none of them commercially or critically successful.

It’s not unusual for the same novel to have different titles in the U.S. and the U.K. Martin Cruz Smith’s 2002 novel was published in the U.S. as December 6, and in the U.K. as Tokyo Station. There is an excellent pop-fiction bookstore, called The Book Worm, in Fair Oaks, California (twenty miles from my home in Sacramento) that occasionally shelves British editions of novels. When I first saw a book on its shelves called Tokyo Station by Martin Cruz Smith, I got very excited, thinking that there was an MCS novel that I had somehow been unaware of. But when I read the description of the book on the dust jacket, I realized that it was simply a British rebrand of December 6. Likewise, at the same store, I got very excited many years ago when I saw a Ken Follett novel titled Storm Island. But a quick perusal of the plot description made it clear that this was just Eye of the Needle by a different name.

Speaking of Follett, when I read his 1996 novel The Third Twin two years ago, I was excited when I got to the end of the book and saw an advert for a 1998 Follett novel (still in the future back when my used paperback copy of The Third Twin was published) to be titled Out of the Mouth of the Dragon. I went online looking for the book but I couldn’t find it. I thought it might be a British edition of a book known as something else in America, but a search of Amazon.uk turned up no such title. Eventually I discovered that, prior to publication, Out of the Mouth of the Dragon was retitled The Hammer of Eden (a book I reviewed here a few weeks back). The Hammer of Eden makes more sense, since the book is about a huge mechanical device that pounds the earth in order to trigger seismic activity. But I can see where Follett was going with the ungainly Out of the Mouth of the Dragon. In the novel, a group of survivalist hippies steal a “seismic vibrator” and then put it on the back of a truck that was made to carry a circus ride called The Dragon’s Mouth. When the survivalists/terrorists are traveling from point to point with their seismic vibrator on the back of a huge flatbed truck, they cover it with the housing of The Dragon’s Mouth, so it looks as if they are merely transporting a massive piece of circus equipment. If you go online and search Out of the Mouth of the Dragon by Ken Follett, you’ll find a fascinating document housed at, of all places, the online archives of Saginaw Valley State University of Michigan, which consists of a letter written to Follett by his British editor, Suzanne Baboneau. A lot of people tend to complain that brand-name fiction writers like Follett and King and Steele and Grisham are too big to be required to submit to the ordinary process of book editing. But Ms. Baboneau’s very polite and kindly letter is eleven pages long and filled with editorial suggestions. She clearly gave the book a very close read (and this was the second draft of the novel that she had edited). It is to Follett’s credit that at this stage of his career, when he was already one of the most successful living writers of popular fiction, he was still inviting this type of editorial input. One of the first, and most adamant, of Ms. Baboneau’s recommendations was a new title. She writes: “The only hesitation from our end has been towards the title. Many of us feel that it is too long, not catchy, not – dare I say it – thrillerish enough, and some feel they’ve heard it before. And that it denotes a Chinese setting. Are you wedded to it? What do the Americans think?” Apparently Follett wasn’t wedded to the title and his American publishers didn’t like it at all because, in the English-speaking world, the book was published as The Hammer of Eden. In the Spanish-speaking world, however, the book was published as En la boca del dragon.

The book known in America as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published in the U.K. as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (apparently American’s don’t find philosophers exciting; go figure). More understandable is the fact that the Agatha Christie novel Ten Little Niggers was published in the U.S. as And Then There Were None (both titles come from the same playground rhyme). Likewise, Agatha Christie’s novel The Calais Coach was published in America as Murder on the Orient Express (a much better title, in my opinion, and in the opinion of most subsequent publishers and filmmakers). Similarly, the Graham Greene novel published in the U.K. as Stamboul Train was published as Orient Express in the U.S. The Philip Pullman novel known in the U.S. as The Golden Compass was published as Northern Lights in the U.K. (both titles strike me as boring). The Steig Larsson novel known in the U.S. as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was originally published in Sweden as Men Who Hate Women. The British edition used the Swedish title. Likewise, the Peter Hoeg novel known in the U.S. as Smilla’s Sense of Snow was published in Danish as Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. The British used the original Danish title, translated into English of course. The English-language editions of the films made from Larsson’s and Hoeg’s books carry the American titles.

This has been going on a long time. The novel Pride and Prejudice was sometimes published in America in the 19^th century as Elizabeth Bennett. Moby Dick was first published in England as simply The Whale.

I have made my own infinitesimal contribution to this literary phenomenon. Back in the year 2000, when the internet was still relatively new to most of us, I was excited to read that British author Jim Crace was going to be holding an online conversation with his fans in real time. When the day and hour arrived, I excitedly logged onto the conversation and watched while Crace graciously answered questions from his readers. For most of this time I couldn’t think of anything to ask him. Then, finally, he mentioned that he had a novel coming out soon called The Devil’s Larder. As an aside, he mentioned that his American publisher was planning to call the book The Devil’s Pantry, because few Americans were familiar with the term “larder.” At that point I finally found my voice and urged Crace to strenuously object to the name change. I told him that “pantry” sounded too much like a lot of words that don’t pair well with something as dark and dangerous as “devil”: “panty,” “pansy,” “pasty,” “patsy” etc. Crace seemed impressed by my argument and assured me he would fight for the British title to be used by the American publisher. Eventually he won that fight and the book was published in America as The Devil’s Larder. Alas, the book made not even the tiniest of stirs in American book sales. Currently it is being outsold at Amazon.com by 1,466,641 other titles. I have always worried that my suggestion might have depressed U.S. sales of the book unnecessarily. Of course, it’s not as if the book was a big blockbuster in the U.K. either, but at least that failure had nothing to do with me.

(Side note: A few years later, in 2007, I got word that Jim Crace was releasing a book called Useless America and that only about a dozen copies would be printed and that they would be distributed for free to fans via some internet site. I can no longer recall how this worked, whether the books were distributed via a lottery or on a first-come-first-served basis or if I had to write a 100-word essay explaining why I should be sent a copy of the book. I believe the contest was run through Powell’s Book Store in Portland, Oregon, but even that I am no longer sure of. All I know is that I was one of the winners and was sent a copy of Useless America, a book that apparently only eleven other people in the world possess.)

It wasn’t my intention to read two D-Day-themed novels right around the 82^nd anniversary of the event. It just happened that way. First I read Ken Follett’s 1978 thriller, Eye of the Needle, which takes place mostly during the run up to the Normandy invasion. And yesterday I finished reading Follett’s Jackdaws (2001), which also concerns itself with the invasion. The novels share a lot of the same DNA. Both feature an incredibly brave British woman who finds herself in a life-or-death competition against a man who is a hyper-efficient Nazi killing machine. Both novels concern an attempt to prevent news of the Normandy invasion from reaching the Nazi braintrust (who were expecting the invasion of Western Europe by the Allied forces to come at Calais, 400 miles away) while they might still have time to respond to it with full force. In Eye of the Needle, young wife and mother Lucy Rose must contend with a Nazi spy, nicknamed The Needle because of his skill with a stiletto, who has learned that the invasion will take place at Normandy, not Calais, and will stop at nothing to relay that information back home to Germany. In Jackdaws, a young British spy named Felicity Clairet (“Flick” to her friends) leads an intrepid team of female spies into France, where she is hoping to blow up a major Nazi communications center located in a heavily guarded old chateau in the small French town of Sainte-Cecile. The Nazis can’t use radios to broadcast important news back to Berlin because they suspect (correctly, as it happened) that the Brits and Americans have cracked most of their radio codes. The only secure way to communicate from France to Germany is via landlines. If Flick and her six recruits (a motley crew of British women from various classes and occupations) can infiltrate the chateau posing as cleaning ladies, they are hoping to wire the place with plastic explosives and blow it to hell shortly before the D-Day invasion, making it incredibly difficult for Berlin and the Nazis occupying France to communicate with each other.

Eye of the Needle is a taut 335-page thriller. Jackdaws is a 500-page historical epic. Curiously, though, Needle covers a much longer stretch of time: the summer of 1940 to June of 1944 (with a brief coda set in 1970). Jackdaws begins on Sunday, May 28, 1944 and ends on Tuesday, June 6, 1944 (with a very brief coda set on Wednesday, June 6, 1945). Eye of the Needle has plenty of history in it, while Jackdaws contains plenty of thrills, but still the former felt more like a thriller to me, while the latter felt like a fat historical tale. Both have plenty of action and a very high body count.

Many of the professional reviews of Jackdaws compared it to the 1967 film The Dirty Dozen (based on E.M. Nathanson’s 1965 novel), and there is a lot of similarity between the two. The film features twelve convicts who are recruited to infiltrate a French chateau and kill a bunch of high-ranking Nazis just prior to the Normandy invasion. In Jackdaws, Flick recruits a ragtag group of “girls” – a prisoner awaiting a murder trial, a safe cracker, a flighty noblewoman who happens to be a crack shot with a rifle, a gay male cross-dresser who is an expert on telephonic systems, etc. – and must train them in a couple of days for a mission that will require them to parachute into occupied France and pass as French cleaning women, which will allow them to enter the chateau and plant the explosives they hope will bring it all down. Standing in their way is Major Dieter Franck, a Nazi intelligence officer with an almost supernatural understanding of how to thwart rival intelligence operations and how to torture people for information. He puts both of those skills to terrifying use in Jackdaws. My tolerance for torture scenes in books and films and TV is fairly low. I was tempted to skim my way past the many torture scenes in Jackdaws but I resisted the urge. The book was not written as torture porn. And it would have been dishonest of Follett to portray the Nazis as anything less than the beasts they often were. Flick and company commit a lot of atrocities that would have been clear violations of the Geneva Conventions had they existed during World War II. So it was necessary for Follett to show how much worse the Nazi treatment of enemy operatives was. After an interrogation, Flick will shoot dead a captured Nazi collaborator who has been bound and disarmed, a clear violation of the rules of war. But she does so to protect the secrecy of her operation. And she never actually tortures anyone gratuitously, although one of her subordinate Jackdaws (the codename for the female spy group) does gleefully torture a Nazi officer who had previously tortured her. Curiously, I didn’t see many online reader reviews that complained about all the torture scenes in Jackdaws, but plenty of readers complained about what they thought was an excess of graphic sex scenes. This is a common complaint among prudish readers about the books of Ken Follett. It reminds me a bit of the joke about a restaurant-goer who complains of a dining establishment, “The food was lousy and the portions were too small.” If you don’t like sex scenes, don’t read Ken Follett novels. But, to be honest, I didn’t think that the book had an overabundance of sex in it; and what it had didn’t strike me as terribly graphic or gratuitous. Your mileage may vary. But it seems weird to me that anyone could read Jackdaws and be upset more by a few sex scenes between consenting adults than by the much more numerous scenes of extreme Nazi torture (including vaginal penetration with a device meant to deliver electric shocks!). Some readers apparently are not upset by a device similar to a curling iron being inserted into a vagina, but are horrified when a friendly penis enters one. Go figure.

Eye of the Needle was a monster success. It was the tenth bestselling novel in America for 1978 and was made into a hit film. Jackdaws, like all Follett novels, was a bestseller but not a phenomenal one. It probably should have been a much bigger success with the public. That it wasn’t might have something to do with the fact that it was published in December of 2001, just about ten weeks after another famous invasion: the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. At that time, many Americans and Brits were still reading everything they could find on the 9/11 attacks and probably weren’t all that interested in a novel about an invasion that had occurred more than a half century earlier. Had Jackdaws been a follow-up to Eye of the Needle, and published, say, in 1980, I suspect it would have been one of the bestselling novels of the decade. There were still plenty of people alive in 1980 with vivid memories of the WWII years. Had it been published in 1980 it would probably nowadays enjoy a status similar to such monster bestsellers of the era as The Day of the Jackal, The Eagle Has Landed, The Odessa Files, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Dogs of War, and Eye of the Needle. Instead it languishes in a twilight zone somewhere between classic work of pop fiction and unjustly neglected masterpiece. The book is still in print, widely available, and has been reviewed more than 2,000 times on Goodreads.com, which didn’t even exist when the novel was published. At Amazon.com, the book has received a massive 17,320 reader reviews (Eye of the Needle has over 31,000 reviews at Amazon, even though it was published decades before Amazon.com existed).

The Normandy D-Day invasion was the largest single naval/amphibious operation in the history of warfare. It involved roughly 7,000 ships, 12,000 airplanes and more than 200,000 Allied soldiers and sailors and marines. It marked the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. It has inspired countless books (both fiction and non-), films, TV series, and other intellectual properties. Jackdaws may not be the best of these, but as pop-culture products go, you’d be hard-pressed to find a smarter or more engrossing one. If you’re looking for a D-Day thriller, Eye of the Needle may be the better bet. But if you’re looking to be immersed in an epic tale about the French resistance and its British allies as D-Day draws near, Jackdaws will more than fill the bill.