Fans pick 100 books like The Mask of Dimitrios

I was immediately drawn to the suspense of this book. The novel begins at the Berlin Wall, where British intelligence agent Alec Leamas helplessly watches as East German guards murder his colleague.

As I followed the elaborate British plan to get revenge on an East German official, I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something. When I finally got to the end, I realized that I had been duped—much like many of the characters in the novel. 

This book taught me how to write a thriller. I’ll admit I’m obsessive. I’ve not only read this book—and watched the movie—many times, but I read everything I could find about how Follet wrote this novel, his method of writing, etc. 

As I do in my novels, he breaks some of the so-called rules. His “bad guys” are real and engaging characters. He paces his novels, intertwining characters and storylines. He builds tension. And he mixes real history and real locations with his fictional characters in a way that brings them to life. 

Most of all, as do I, he loves plot, conflict, and storytelling. 

I struggled to put this book on a crime novel list, but this is one of my favorite books of all time. At its heart, it’s a spy novel. It makes the list because the main character hunts bad agents–the internal affairs of the CIA.

The book opens with a murder crime scene in New York. If you haven’t heard about this book, it’s a true phenomenon. Many times, during book signings, I’ve been asked by readers if I knew of this book and how much they absolutely loved it. More importantly, though, they wanted me to tell them when the sequel was coming out. This book came out in 2014, and the sequel came out this year, ten years later. It garners 95k reviews on Amazon, which alone tells you all you need to know.

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.

Reading a novel by Alan Furst is like seeing Casablanca for the first time, if it were written by Hemingway. There’s that same evocative atmosphere of people smoking cigarettes, having affairs, making sophisticated remarks, while looming over them is the war. Furst mines a narrow niche. All of his books are set in Europe either during World War Two or in the Thirties, with the war threatening. The protagonist here is Colonel Mercier, military attaché at the French embassy in Warsaw. Mercier must navigate the salons and alleyways of Warsaw against all manner of spies and German agents. The book is also an exploration of love in a desperate time through Mercier’s affair with the beautiful Anna, a Polish lawyer. It’s very good. Furst is always good. 

From Russia with Love is a short book and is set at the early stages of the cold war. It shakes up the norm by spending close to a quarter of the opening of the novel describing Donald ‘Red’ Grant’s evolution from Irish thug to Russia’s leading spy killer. Bond is targeted by SMERSH to be eliminated by Grant and the lure; a SPEKTOR coding machine that British Intelligence are keen to get hold of. The final showdown between Grant and Bond on a train is a masterclass in tension and violence, like Eric Ambler, Fleming captures Europe and its mindset, this time in its post-war paranoia. It is my favorite Bond book. For me, Fleming never bettered it. 

Written in 1994 after the collapse of the USSR, it is a spy story, but much more than that, a Homeric quest. A letter is smuggled out of Siberia, addressed to Jonny Porter, a Canadian of indigenous extract and who is then recruited by the CIA to go into Russia, posing as a Korean sailor to undertake a rescue mission. Porter’s journey into Russia is layered with unremitting tension as near his final destination, his identity is discovered, and he is hunted across the frozen tundra by Soviet forces.

Kolymsky Heights is my first port of call when I’m preparing to write my novels. It is a masterclass in plotting and immersing the reader into a world and country we still know so little about. Davidson is a very underrated writer and deserves a wider audience, this is the perfect introduction to his work.

This book certainly made me stop and think about how I write, and I have altered my style since. Set in modern-day London, the Slow Horses (failed MI6 operatives forced to work in Slough House) under the tutelage of Jackson Lamb eke out a futile existence. The heads of MI6 hope the demeaning work will make them walk away and leave the espionage world. Lamb is one of the great characterizations, a burnt-out spy who still has acres of tradecraft and protects his team against the outside forces at a political and international level. A string of random terrorist attacks around the UK seem to tie in with a show-boating politician riding the Brexit wave and the team goes rogue to find out the connection. A book as far away from Bond as possible but brilliantly written and plotted.

Tonguç is probably Turkey’s most famous travel guide and Yale is the former writer of the Turkey Lonely Planet guide. Together they’ve written a beautifully put-together guide to the Bosphorus, the watery strait that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn. Each entry includes the history and images of neighbourhoods along the waterway, but it’s the quirky anecdotes, nostalgia, and personal photographs, combined with exhaustive coverage of every park, palace, mansion, fountain, mosque, church, synagogue, and other examples of architectural majesty found in them that makes this guide invaluable.

Living in a world where we can look at images of places we’re planning to travel without even going there means it’s easy to forget the importance of letters sent from foreign countries. Especially ones as well written as these. Ogier De Busbecq was an ambassador for the Hapsburg Empire in the court of Suleyman the Magnificent in the 16th century, but his observations, comments, and snippets of gossip read like he was in Istanbul last month. He had a keen eye for detail and nothing escaped his notice – palace machinations, dirty politics, and even prison conditions, gleaned from the time he spent incarcerated.