The best spy thrillers for readers of literary fiction

Buchan’s 1915 masterpiece is the first spy thriller I read and the start of my long-term love affair with espionage fiction.

It’s the blueprint for many of the great 20th-century spy thrillers and our first introduction to the dashing Richard Hannay. An adventure that moves at breathtaking pace, Hannay has just returned to London from Africa when he meets a shady American who warns him of a political assassination plot.

Soon, the American is dead and Hannay is racing across England and Scotland in fear of his life and searching for the mysterious thirty-nine steps that hold the key to the mystery. Spy fiction has rarely been as much fun as this.   

My personal pick not just for the best espionage thriller but for the best thriller period.

Forsyth’s spare, efficient prose is a joy to read and a masterclass in how to keep readers hanging on every word.

In this tale of a shadowy assassin sent to murder the French president, we learn everything we need to know about the Jackal not via clunky exposition or flashbacks but by the precise way he assembles his rifle.

In parallel with the assassin’s meticulous preparations, we see the French security services desperately striving to intercept him before it’s too late. This is the book that made me want to write thrillers. 

This spot very nearly went to the great John le Carre, perhaps his brilliant The Little Drummer Girl.

Grady’s debut is not as complex or as dense as le Carre, but it holds a special place in my heart, partly because of its back story.

Grady was a young congressional staffer in my adopted hometown of Washington, DC when he dreamed up a covert CIA unit whose role is to monitor foreign intelligence operations by scouring books and magazines from around the world.

When the novel was adapted into the movie Three Days of the Condor, it was seen by KGB generals who—assuming it was based on truth—set up a similar unit of their own. Amazing but true.

Perhaps the closest ancestor of my own work, and probably the most famous of Greene’s ‘entertainments’, Our Man in Havana is a dark comedy in which Greene satirizes his former employer, MI6, via the exploits of a struggling vacuum cleaner salesman called James Wormold.

Desperate for money, Wormold agrees to be an informant for British intelligence, but finds it’s easier to invent his reports rather than going to the trouble of finding actual intelligence. Among other deceits, he sends drawings of fake military installations based on vacuum cleaner parts.

He lands in hot water when real life becomes entangled with the fake intelligence. Dark, strange, and very funny, it’s essential reading for fans of espionage.  

Silva’s novels about Gabriel Allon—a reluctant Israeli secret agent posing as an Italian art restorer—are my current favorite read and a serious contender for the best spy thrillers by a contemporary writer.

Each of the novels in the series works as a separate episode; in this case, Allon is lured into action to track down a Palestinian assassin.

But Allon is brought to life by recurring themes across the series, including the fact that his traumatized wife is permanently assigned to a psychiatric hospital by the car bomb that killed their son.

Silva’s meticulous writing and ingenious mixing of historical fact and fiction will appeal to literary readers.