The best books with movie-ready thrills and widely appealing plots

This is the novel that birthed television icon Steve Austin of The Six Million Dollar Man. It represents everything that makes the merger of man and technology worth reading about. As a young boy, I loved The Six Million Dollar Man—to the point that I wanted to write something like it. But as a young writer, I was enthralled by the technological expertise and human psychology that author Martin Caidin brought to the novel. This is the standard by which the melding of man and machine should be measured in literary fiction.

Steve Austin is practically the best that mankind has to offer: athlete, intellectual, astronaut, and test pilot. And while flight testing a sub-orbital lifting body, Austin is horribly injured. With skull and skeletal damage, the loss of both legs, an arm, an eye, and numerous other injuries, his life is essentially over. And it is only through the six million dollar infusion of cutting-edge technology that Austin is restored physically to “better than before.”

But being “whole” is more than the sum of our parts, and this novel doesn’t get there as simply as that. The story here is about what makes us human. And while we certainly can appreciate that science can “re-enable” us, where do we draw the line? How does this affect our interpersonal relationships? Do we understand our gains and losses?

This book explores this motif in a fascinating and educational way while offering a rip-roaring adventure that resonates on a deeply personal level.

I first read this book not because of interest—in fact, I hadn’t read anything else by its author, Robert Ludlum. Instead, I read this novel because I had been told that my writing was like that of Ludlum’s.

And that is startlingly true. It was as if reading something I had forgotten having written but which was richer with a depth of ever-increasing emotional nuances than works of a comparable kind. It’s a compelling read.

Through a combination of unusual story elements and narrative style, this novel engages a reader in the main character’s journey to discover his forgotten identity. Although this isn’t an all-that-unusual aspect of story-telling, the espionage element makes it a singular literary experience. Over the course of the novel, I progressively felt as if I were spending time with a really awesome friend. And this is owed to, I think, the “slow burn” of empathy compelled by a novel seemingly at odds with the fact that it is about a man entrenched in the cloak-and-dagger world of spy craft.

While the action aspect of this novel translated well into cinematic adaptation, I think the novel’s psychological element made it more all-consuming than the action-packed film could have ever been. After all, an emotionally “damaged” character is always a good read—and that happens only when a novelist blends his or her plot with solid character development. 

This book by Tom Clancy has the distinction of being the author’s only book focusing on the origin story of a “secondary” (or recurring) character throughout his Jack Ryan series of novels. That secondary character, who becomes John Clark, is former Navy Seal John Kelly.

While this novel isn’t as integrally plotted as the Jack Ryan “techno-thrillers,” it is more character-driven than Clancy’s previous works. In light of the character’s stoic history (or, with this being a “prequel” of sorts, the character’s future), I think it was probably a bit difficult to write in terms of balancing the character’s emotions. 

I found this to be a fascinating study. The emotive aspects of a character who is typical of a “John Wayne,” black or white, good or bad temperament, are not easily understood or conveyed to readers unfamiliar with historically traditional roles of masculinity. Or, to put it another way, the man who can kill without remorse is not usually an overly expressive person. This book shows us how that can come to be. 

Few novels epitomize excellence in as many areas as Ayn Rand’s book. I don't know if it was because it never came up during the years of my formal education, but I put off reading it for years after I became vaguely aware of it. And then I read it twice.

One might think of it in terms of being part one of Orwell’s 1984. The two books are nowhere near similar, but whereas 1984 is a dystopian future without regard for how society would get to such a point, Atlas Shrugged is the embryonic steps that could lead to an Orwellian future.

The most remarkable aspect of it, is its portrayal of an economic downtrend imposed upon free-market capitalism and its resulting impact on the country. The crux of Rand’s novel is that if the giants of industry shrugged—or rather just walked away from the imposition of tyranny—everything would crumble.  

Perhaps the only difficult part of the novel is a solid 55-page block of narrative text comprising a radio monologue by one of the main characters. It is pure gold, but it is without a break, diversion, or indication of infliction whatsoever.

But the characters driven by the plot of this novel are priceless. Just about anyone you've ever known is represented here. It is a masterpiece in terms of a political, cultural, and economic study, delivered via a Machiavellian plot worthy of any espionage thriller.

An ill-timed robbery and a mysterious ghost train—both from 1914—and the present day CIA and MI6: All are perfectly normal, abnormal elements to this Clive Cussler novel.

I especially like this book for its ties to recent American history. It flirts with elements of espionage and the crackerjack job of merging a confounding prologue with a mystery that needs solving. There is a combination of Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels that have influenced my own story-telling, and this one is among them.

Cussler penned an entire series around his National Underwater and Marine Agency Projects Director, Dirk Pitt. Nearly every one of the novels begins with an event of the distant past that culminates in the present. This novel follows that pattern but involves political concerns regarding the North American Continent. While Cussler’s characters only occasionally rise to the challenge of emotionally involving me, his plots—the twists, turns, and historical antecedents—always richly compensate for this perceived absence.

While Pitt and his friend, Al Giordino—both of whom fit like my well-worn fedora—are critical to the plot of this book, the orbital characters here are essential to the “spy craft” and historical research essential to the denouement. This division of labor (for lack of a better term) makes this particular novel seem even more realistic than it might otherwise be.