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Fleming
Of all the authors I've run across, there's only one where I feel like every single word, on every single page has not just value to the story, but real importance. It's as though I've been presented with detailed information of exact instructions to achieve perfect bliss.
Of course I'm speaking of Ian Fleming, of James Bond fame. To be fair, I've only read his Bond novels, but with very few misses, I've been unable to stop reading for little more than sleep from beginning to end.
I chalk this up to Fleming's real life experience in reporting. It's terse, and his novels are short, but if you were to encounter real life scenarios with significance and enough "mass" to encompass a novel/novella, it would be similar because you would've written only what mattered. It seems to be the same with the Bond books. It reads like a brief, like you're about to go on a follow-up mission, which you have only moments to prepare for, and you're given the novel to catch you up. It can't be any longer than necessary.
So the result is a highly concentrated effort to convey the details of a really interesting series of encounters in as little space as possibly, causing you to be very interested and giving you a strong sense of urgency to find out what happened next.
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