10 books like Six Days of the Condor

Before the U.S. entered the war in Vietnam, Graham Greene forecast its disastrous consequences. His love triangle, set amid the escalating conflict, perfectly captures the naiveté of American interventionism overseas. I love the subtext of the tale, which is narrated by an embittered British journalist. Although it’s never spoken, we intuit that he is addicted to opium and living the life of a dissolute expatriate. Fowler watches in horror as a U.S. diplomat tries to steal both the woman and the country he has adopted. He claims impartiality and indifference until he cannot any longer.

As dark and depressing as this Cold War cautionary tale is, the author’s use of creeping ecological doom in the aftermath of a world-shattering war was profound to me. The story is told from several points of view by characters who have different motivations. I found their choices to be just as understandable as they were heartbreaking. This isn’t a “happily ever after” story. Even so, I found myself appreciating the whole story, from start to end.

I chose this for authenticity. Newsday's review said it was "chillingly real" and "the reader himself seems to be traveling with 'the Jackal.'"

That’s because Forsyth, as a foreign correspondent working in Europe and Africa, knew assassins, mercenaries, and arms dealers, which allowed him to craft fantastic but believable characters, settings, and situations. Forsyth opens the novel with the depiction of a real assassination attempt, employs historical figures, locations, and details, then seamlessly weaves his fictional plot into this authentic world.

Forsyth reveals lives most of us can only imagine, and he shows that wall-to-wall suspense does not require wall-to-wall action, but is built on plausible intrigue, sustained tension, and excellent writing.

As a Washington journalist time and again I watched sources rely too much on assurances that situations were under control, surprises would probably never happen and technology was utterly reliable. Airplane cockpits were safe. Climate change would never disrupt the world. Disease was under control. Fail-Safe terrified the world and helped ignite a global movement by asking the question, what if – in the nuclear age – the assurances we are fed are wrong. 

Like most readers, I’m scared these days about the future of our democracy. As a reporter I’ve covered trouble spots; like Somalia – where no law existed - and Sudan, where I was in a crowd fleeing at the mere sight of an airplane, fearing bombs. One of my friends lost his wife in a Washington car bombing. Others escaped danger during a Chilean coup. Seven Days in May imagined an attempted coup in the US, and although the setting was decades ago, some forces at play are the same, since human motivation never changes. This book sobered up the nation back then by reminding readers what happens when some of us....any of us...think they know better than everyone else and believe force is the way to go. We could use that reminder now.

Because I bought it on a whim, having not heard much about it, and honestly, I was in the mood for something set during the cold, and this cool book cover sold me. And sometimes the best serial killer novels burrow into the reader’s soul—mine, in this case—when you go into it not knowing it’s a serial killer novel! But this one was dark and perfectly cold and chilling and made me feel like I was right in the middle of Cold War Soviet Union. It’s a brutal world Rob Tom Smith creates here, but the MGB officer Leo Demidov was a character so well written he made me want to stick around and lose myself in it.

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.  

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.   

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. 

Published in 2001, The Constant Gardener is my favorite le Carre Novel. A British diplomat in Nairobi, Justin Quayle, is informed his activist wife, Tess has been killed in a remote part of Kenya along with a doctor friend. As Quayle investigates her life (in a similar way to Eric Ambler unfolds Dimitrios’s life), he uncovers her work exposing large pharmaceutical companies’ unethical experiments in the poorest regions of Africa. This leads to her brutal death and cover-up at a diplomatic and political level. It is an exceptional book that makes you rethink how medicine and the industry behind it operates. After the collapse of the USSR, le Carre seemed to struggle with his work, The Constant Gardener though, kick-started another two decades of great writing from him.