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Some vintage classics… Oldies but goodies.
Desmond Bagley, Running Blind, 1970
—A first-person spy vs spy thriller set largely in Iceland. (Three-part BBC TV serial in 1979, filmed mostly in Iceland, with British and Icelandic cast.)
Bernard Cornwell, Crackdown, 1990
—Drug smuggling and drug war in the Bahamas, with a charted luxury cruiser caught in the middle.
Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, 1991 (or The Andromeda Strain, 1967)
David Dodge, To Catch a Thief, 1952
—American expat who spent much of WW2 with the French underground, now lives in Monte Carlo, where he is suspected of being a jewel thief. (Filmed, with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly)
Ken Follett, Night Over Water, 1991
—It is September 1939. The last Pan-Am Clipper flying boat is leaving Britain for the USA to escape the War. But there is trouble aboard.
Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal, 1971
—Forsyth's first novel, written in a factual, journalist style, and twice filmed.
Pat Frank, Forbidden Area (US title), Seven Days to Never (UK title) 1956
—Cold war "ticking time bomb" thriller.
Brian Garfield, Hopscotch, 1975
—CIA field agent on the run from his own agency and also the KGB
Hammond Innes, The Angry Mountain, 1950
—The author was stationed at an Allied airfield in Italy in 1944 when Vesuvius erupted just 10 km away. He used his experience in a postwar thriller novel, set in 1948, with a chase that climaxes with a shattering eruption of Vesuvius.
John D MacDonald, The Executioners, 1959
—Relentless novel of vengeance, twice filmed as "Cape Fear" (1962 with Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck; 1991 with Robert deNiro and Nick Nolte.)
A J Quinnell, Man on Fire, 1980
—Fading hit man reduced to taking small-time body guard jobs in Italy for a living; and then a hit man kills the person he is supposed to be guarding. Old instincts awakened, when he recovered from his wounds, he hunts down not just the actual killer, but everyone in the killer's chain of command, too. Twice filmed.
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