I've written dismissively about NPR's list of Top 100 Thrillers. I have nothing against popularity contests, but I felt the NPR list slighted too many of the all-time masterpieces of suspense.
For that reason I was delighted to stumble across Thrillers: 100 Must Reads in (where else?) my local library. Editors David Morrell and Hank Wagner asked contemporary thriller authors — everyone from Lee Child to my friend Tess Gerritsen — to recommend their favorite stories and novels. The result is a great list that includes both many of my personal influences as well as a number of titles I haven't read yet but definitely plan on buying.
The books aren't ranked from one to one hundred but instead are organized by publication date:
- Theseus and the Minotaur (1500 B.C.)
- Homer's The Iliad and The Odyessey (7th Century B.C.)
- Beowulf (between 700 and 1000 A.D.)
- William Shakespeare's Macbeth (1605-1606)
- Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719-1722)
- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)
- James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
- Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
- Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1845)
- Wilkie Collins The Woman in White (1860)
- Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (1874)
- H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885)
- Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886)
- Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)
- Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)
- H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898)
- Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901)
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)
- Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902)
- Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903)
- Jack London's The Sea Wolf (1904)
- Baroness Emma Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
- Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1912)
- Marie Belloc Lowndes's The Lodger (1913)
- John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
- E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation (1920)
- Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" (1924)
- W. Somserset Maugham's Ashenden or The British Agent (1928)
- P.G. Wodehouse's Summer Lightning (1929)
- Edgar Wallace's King Kong (1933)
- Lester Dent's Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1933)
- James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)
- Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938)
- Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939)
- Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939)
- Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male (1939)
- Helen Macinnes's Above Suspicion (1941)
- Cornell Woolrich's "Rear Window" (1942)
- Vera Caspery's Laura (1943)
- Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock (1946)
- Graham Greene's The Third Man (1950)
- Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train (1950)
- Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night (1951)
- Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952)
- Ernest K. Gann's The High and the Mighty (1953)
- Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)
- Hammond Innes's The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1956)
- Ian Fleming's From Russia, with Love (1957)
- Alistair MacLean's The Guns of Navarone (1957)
- Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (1959)
- Len Deighton's The IPCRESS File (1962)
- Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey's Seven Days in May (1962)
- Lionel Davidson's The Rose of Tibet (1962)
- Richard Stark's The Hunter aka Point Blank (1962)
- John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
- Wilbur Smith's When the Lion Feeds (1964)
- Evelyn Anthony's The Rendezvous (1967)
- Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969)
- James Dickey's Deliverance (1970)
- Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal (1971)
- Brian Garfield's Death Wish (1972)
- David Morrell's First Blood (1972)
- Trevanian's The Eiger Sanction (1972)
- Charles McCarry's The Tears of Autumn (1974)
- Peter Benchley's Jaws (1974)
- William Goldman's Marathon Man (1974)
- James Grady's Six Days of the Condor (1974)
- Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed (1975)
- Joseph Wambaugh's The Choirboys (1975)
- Clive Cussler's Raise the Titanic! (1976)
- Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (1976)
- Robin Cook's Coma (1977)
- Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle (1978)
- Ross Thomas's Chinaman's Chance (1978)
- John D. MacDonald's The Green Ripper (1979)
- Justin Scott's The Shipkiller (1979)
- Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity (1980)
- Eric Van Lustbader's The Ninja (1980)
- Thomas Harris's Red Dragon (1981)
- Jack Ketchum's Off Season (1981)
- Thomas Perry's The Butcher Boy (1982)
- Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October (1984)
- F. Paul Wilson's The Tomb (1984)
- Andrew Vachss's Flood (1985)
- Stephen King's Misery (1987)
- Nelson DeMille's The Charm School (1988)
- Dean Koontz's Watchers (1988)
- Katherine Neville's The Eight (1988)
- Peter Straub's Koko (1988)
- John Grisham's The Firm (1991)
- R.L. Stine's Silent Night (1991)
- James Patterson's Along Came a Spider (1992)
- Stephen Hunter's Point of Impact (1993)
- John Lescroat's The 13th Juror (1994)
- Sandra Brown's The Witness (1995)
- David Baldacci's Absolute Power (1996)
- Gayle Lynds's Masquerade (1996)
- Lee Child's Killing Floor (1997)
- Jeffrey Deaver's The Bone Collector (1997)
- Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003)
Which famous contemporary author recommended which of the above books and why? You'll have to read Thrillers: 100 Must Reads to find out.