Authors

Here are some of the authors who have meant a lot to me over the years.

Initially I thought of presenting them chronologically as I discovered them, starting with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alistair MacLean, then moving on to Len Deighton and John le Carré before reaching the French and German masters I first encountered at university – but progress was hardly as smooth as that, there was a lot of overlap, and in many cases I couldn’t remember who came when anyway. I’d read 1984 before I read Winnie-the-Pooh, and I’d read all of Evelyn Waugh three times before I read Treasure Island once. So alphabetical order by surname it is. (And then the page was getting overloaded anyway, so the funny ones and the heavyweights have been refiled under their own headings, Humorists and Set Texts.)

I’ve restricted the list to those authors who I would like to think influenced my own writing, though I’m aware that sounds pretentious. What exactly is that supposed to mean? Do you want people to say, ‘Ooh, there’s a plot twist worthy of Maupassant’, or ‘Oh, there’s an action scene as good as anything in Wilbur Smith’, or ‘Ah, he copied that straight out of Alan Coren’? Not really. And I don’t think ‘influence’ is even a question of consciously trying to mimic the style or rhythm or vocabulary of any particular writer. In the end I suppose this collection is merely the equivalent of browsing through someone else’s bookshelves: you get a hint of their interests, but nothing more deeply psychological than that.

There are – as it happens – hardly any classics, mainly because the few big names I’ve ploughed through are too heavy and dull and wordy for my taste. So no Dickens or Hardy, no Hemingway or Woolf, no Proust or Goethe or Cervantes or Dostoevsky or Márquez. Certainly no Melville or Trollope or Lawrence or Conrad or any of those people who are meant to be so seminal and important. I did read War and Peace once, just to say I had done it, ditto The Lord of the Rings, and more recently I had a crack at Ulysses, but I never got through it all. How can anything that elusive, effusive and difficult be deemed at all influential? I liked the final chapter, but on the whole I’d rather stick to The Odyssey.

More to the point, I notice there are very few women on the list, not even Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf or any of the Brontës, much less any Rowlings or Rooneys or Atwoods or a Waterses. There’s no deliberate misogyny here; it’s not that I avoid, much less deprecate, women authors; I just never found one I liked so much I wanted to devour their entire canon. As a lonely teenager I admit I had a brief flirtation one summer with Jilly Cooper, but her rambunctious tales of love first thwarted then rewarded found no parallel in my own life so I soon moved on, a sadder and wiser wuss.

These days I must admit I experiment very little with new writers. I have been caught out too many times by a glowing review of some modern ‘classic’ only to be left wondering at the end whether the person who wrote the blurb was actually referring to the same lumpen bunch of bollocks I’d just wasted three days of my dwindling life fighting through. I would much rather reread a William Goldman memoir or a Clive James essay, a Fitzgerald short story or a Laurie Lee reminiscence, a Mick Herron thriller or a Woody Allen skit, something which I know will still have the power to move and excite and tickle and enchant. Besides, my drawing hand is far too tired to start adding new likenesses now.

I’ve also taken the liberty of including with each name the title of a key work of theirs which was so good it inspired me to seek out the rest of their oeuvre. In case you’re not familiar, that might be as good a place as any to start.

Julian Barnes

(1946‒)

Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)

Is it a novel? Is it a philosophical rumination? Is it even a bird? Well no, not exactly, because it turns out (spoiler) there are more than one of them. But it’s wonderful. And A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) is just as good. The half chapter on the subject of love gets me every time.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

(1875‒1950)

Tarzan of the Apes (1912)

There are 24 or 25 Tarzan novels in all but for some reason the shops around us only ever sold half the titles, in the New English Library edition, 3/6d (18p) each. So I still don’t know what the energetic apeman got up to in all the others, though it was exhausting enough keeping up with him in the books I did manage to get hold of.

Raymond Chandler

(1888‒1959)

The Big Sleep (1939)

My old English master in school recommended I try Raymond Chandler. He cited a favourite simile as proof: “The elevator went up like the mercury in a thermometer.” I never found that one again, though I seem to remember Chandler frequently reuses the one about a policeman’s boots glistening in the rain like gun barrels. If I’d thought of that, I’d probably use it every other chapter.

Agatha Christie

(1890‒1976)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

It was so cheeky of her to invent the famous twist with which this ends, that for a while it spoiled the entire genre for me. I thought they were all supposed to finish like that. Her prose was always workaday at best – hence her universal appeal, I suppose – but what a craftswoman.

Len Deighton

(1929‒)

The IPCRESS File (1962)

One of the first proper ‘grown-up’ books I tackled. There might have been a James Bond or two before it, but this was far superior in both literary style and spy content. And a lot wittier.

F Scott Fitzgerald

(1896‒1940)

The Great Gatsby (1925)

My favourite novel. I finished reading it for the first time one night at Oxford, and the final chapter was so overwhelming that I had to go out and walk around the deserted streets for an hour before I could settle again. The Pat Hobby stories are also a regular treat: old Hollywood seen through the jaded eyes of a master wordsmith. Unbeatable.

John Fowles

(1926‒2005)

The Magus (1965)

I discovered this at exactly the right age to get the most out of it – fifteen – and it was intriguing, profound, colourful, exciting, and sexy as hell. Nubile twins on a Greek island running around in the sun. The narrator being the centre of everybody’s attention. History, mystery, misanthropy. Why can’t all books be like this?

William Goldman

(1931‒2018)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969 screenplay)

Goldman’s book of reminiscences about Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade, contains his most famous quote: “Nobody knows anything”. As for titles, his Which Lie Did I Tell? is one of my all-time favourites, right up there alongside Hello, He Lied by producer Lynda Obst.

Robert Harris

(1957‒)

Fatherland (1992)

Hugely accomplished mix of alternative history and clever invention. Extraordinarily gripping, featuring the first of his characteristically unsentimental female protagonists.

Mick Herron

(1963‒)

Slow Horses (2010)

As exciting to discover this author in this century as it was stumbling across Len Deighton in the last. Half a dozen novels in the series so far and the quality hasn’t flagged a bit. That takes rare talent.

Stieg Larsson

(1954‒2004)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (trans Reg Keeland, 2008)

The first thriller I ever read which describes in detail the protagonist shopping for office supplies and putting on a big wash. Unique. And uniquely engaging. Horrible things happen, but you’ve never rooted for anyone the way you root for Lisbeth Salander.

John le Carré

(1931‒2020)

A Small Town in Germany (1968)

One of his many spy masterpieces, of which The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the first and The Honourable Schoolboy is the longest. English-born David Cornwell died an Irishman. Read his books and you’ll understand why.

Alistair MacLean

(1922‒1987)

The Guns of Navarone (1957)

…followed immediately by HMS Ulysses (1955), and then by all the others in order until the quality fell off a cliff in the early 1970s. A shame. But the early ones were great schoolboy fare.

Peter O’Donnell

(1920‒2010)

A Taste for Death (1969)

She’s the next big screen franchise just waiting to be properly adapted, in my view – the 1965 Modesty Blaise film was loused up by Joseph Losey who didn’t treat the material with the respect it deserved. Charlize Theron would have been my pick, but she’s probably getting a bit long in the tooth by now… Probably end up being Anya Taylor-Joy or someone. Not nearly scary enough.

Willard Price

(1887‒1983)

Amazon Adventure (1949)

I usually followed my older brother Eric’s lead in music – he was right about Yes and Genesis and Nick Drake and Pete Atkin – and he was right about Willard Price’s series of adventure books from the Parson Street library. The older/younger brother dynamic of the impetuous Roger and the wiser, steadier Hal also echoed that of Rick and Charlie Wild, the precocious athletes from his Valiant comic, and I pretended we were like them too. We weren’t. But I was only ten.

Derek Robinson

(1932‒)

Goshawk Squadron (1971)

Derek was kind enough to be my mentor for a while around the end of my school days (he’d gone to the same grammar a couple of decades before me), and I publicly apologise now for the torment I must have put him through, slogging through my dodgy sixth-form prose. That’s why these days I will only do that kind of thing myself for money.

Dorothy L Sayers

(1893‒1957)

Gaudy Night (1935)

Another recommendation by a university acquaintance. Oxford figures prominently, and I liked the no-nonsense heroine, Harriet Vane. Edward Petherbridge gave the definitive portrayal in the BBC series of the ’80s, with Harriet Walter as an equally pitch-perfect Harriet.

Wilbur Smith

(1933‒2021)

The Eye of the Tiger (1975)

I plucked this off the shelf in my sister-in-law’s house one afternoon and the first action scene was so viscerally exciting that I became an immediate fan. But how does one man come up with that many words so regularly, while still managing to holiday ‘between November and February’? I suspect he’s really a bunch of blokes sitting at typewriters in a smoky room somewhere in the suburbs of Cape Town…

Robert Louis Stevenson

(1850‒1894)

Treasure Island (1883)

Took me sixty years to find out for myself that the story of the shifty sea cook really is as good as everyone always said it was. Still prefer it to Kidnapped and all the rest.

Evelyn Waugh

(1903‒1966)

Scoop (1938)

Which is the funniest? Probably this one, though I’ve always liked Decline and Fall (1928). Brideshead Revisited (1945) is glorious, The Loved One (1948) is the best constructed, but my favourite piece of writing by Waugh is probably the fragment Work Suspended (1943). Start with any of these, I would, but just remember: “I am not I; thou art not he or she; we are not they.” (I have a lot more to say about Waugh here, in the programme notes I wrote for the national tour of a stage version of Brideshead Revisited in the mid-90s.)