Entertainment
10 Forgotten Thriller Books That Have Aged Like Fine Wine
Historically, the thriller genre has been immensely important to literature, easily among the global publishing industry’s favorite kinds of books. But while classics like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes novels and modern masterpieces like Thomas Harris‘ Hannibal series have attained inimitable international acclaim, there have been other great thriller books from the past which have unfortunately been left behind.
Of course, saying that these books have been “forgotten” is a bit of an exaggeration for the sake of drama, but there’s no denying that they haven’t been read—or even heard of—by even a fraction of the number of readers that they deserve to be loved by. These are undeniable masterclasses in thriller writing; suspenseful, tense, and imbued with high stakes that make them all-around page-turners.
‘Beast in View’ (1955)
Canadian-American writer Margaret Millar was a groundbreaking pioneer in several senses, from her contributions to bridging the gap between old-school whodunnits and modern psychological thrillers to her unprecedented writing about the psychology of female characters. Beast in View is one of her most essential works, about a reclusive heiress who’s tormented by a series of phone calls from a mysterious woman claiming to be an old acquaintance.
The title may be best remembered as an episode of the beloved TV shows Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, yet the source material itself has been tragically forgotten despite having won the Edgar Award in 1956. It’s one of the best books of the 1950s, an exquisitely noir-ish thriller with shocking twists and subversive genre tropes that have allowed it to age better than many thriller books that are far more recent.
‘The Wheel Spins’ (1936)
The Lady Vanishes isn’t generally regarded as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best-known or most widely celebrated movies, yet it’s an exceptional mystery thriller nonetheless. As such, it’s surprising just how underappreciated Ethel Lina White‘s The Wheel Spins, the book that inspired the movie, is today. In it, a young English socialite traveling alone on a train meets a mysterious stranger along her journey.
Though the book was a major critical and commercial success in its time (even more so by the time The Lady Vanishes hit theaters), White slipped into relative obscurity as time passed. That needs to change, and there’s no better starting point to change that than The Wheel Spins. Thanks to its intensely claustrophobic suspense, simple yet layered premise, and relentless pacing, it has aged wonderfully from cover to cover.
‘The Hours Before Dawn’ (1959)
During her peak, Celia Fremlin was a widely recognized and highly praised voice in the world of crime and mystery literature, but her work eventually began to fade out of the mainstream. It’s incredibly strong work; however, perhaps most notably, the Edgar Award winner The Hours Before Dawn. In it, an exhausted young mother in suburban London starts growing suspicious of her new lodger while suffering from severe sleep deprivation and the chaos of an apathetic husband.
Fremlin was a master of the domestic thriller genre, and nowhere is that clearer than here, one of those thriller books that became the blueprint for an entire subgenre. It’s a brilliantly chilling piece of paranoid thriller literature that should still prove to be an impossible-to-put-down page-turner for anyone who loves domestic thrillers. Add to that a surprisingly progressive and nuanced exploration of the weight of ’50s domestic expectations of women, and it shouldn’t be surprising that Hours Before Dawn has aged as well as it has.
‘Cat of Many Tails’ (1948)
Ellery Queen is both the name of the fictional detective of the book series that carries his name, and the pseudonym under which American detective fiction writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee wrote the books. The 20th book in the series is Cat of Many Tails, where Queen must find and stop a serial strangler terrorizing a heatwave-stricken New York City while leaving behind no clues.
The Ellery Queen series is massive, but thankfully, it doesn’t need to be read in order, and considering that Cat of Many Tails is arguably the best of the bunch, one could very easily start there. A foundational and downright masterful serial killer thriller (written before the term “serial killer” was even coined), it’s an ahead-of-its-time puzzle-solving mystery that has aged wonderfully thanks to its atmospheric tone, thematic depth, and Dannay and Lee’s timeless prose.
‘Rogue Male’ (1939)
Geoffrey Household was a well-respected and prolific British author in the thriller and suspense spaces, but he never got to become a household name (pun not intended) of the stature of authors like Agatha Christie. Even still, he continues to be best-known for Rogue Male, a novel originally serialized in three issues of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. In it, a hunter plans to assassinate a European dictator, but his plan is neutralized, and he’s captured, tortured, and left for dead.
Rogue Male did one-man-army thrillers well before James Bond or Jason Bourne made them cool, establishing a blueprint for the genre that has continued to age like fine wine. One of the best mystery books of all time, it’s a gripping survival thriller that reads as shockingly fresh and modern for an 87-year-old novel. The BBC TV adaptation starring Peter O’Toole is fantastic, but this is one of those cases where there’s no beating the source material.
‘The Scapegoat’ (1957)
Daphne du Maurier was a hugely important British author of groundbreaking psychological thrillers, best known for masterpieces like Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. Even the greats have criminally underappreciated works, however, and in du Maurier’s case, that’s The Scapegoat. In it, a lonely English academic on holiday in France meets his doppelgänger, a French aristocrat who steals his identity and then quickly vanishes.
A dark, thrilling twist on The Prince and the Pauper.
There’s no actual evidence that du Maurier was actually inspired by Mark Twain, but The Scapegoat feels like some sort of dark, thrilling twist on The Prince and the Pauper. The book has aged beautifully, remaining a potently atmospheric and suspenseful study of dual identity whose ambiguous conclusion is still widely debated all these many decades later. Only the greatest of thrillers still elicit such ardent discussions so long after their publication.
‘The Face of a Stranger’ (1990)
Nowadays, British author Anne Perry is perhaps best-known as the subject of Heavenly Creatures, a Peter Jackson film chronicling the case in which she, then 15 years old, and her 16-year-old friend Pauline Parker, murdered Parker’s mother in New Zealand. After a five-year prison sentence, Perry changed her name from Juliet Hulme and went back to the UK. Written before that became public information, The Face of a Stranger is the first installment in the William Monk series, where the Victorian London police detective Monk wakes up with amnesia and must solve a brutal murder while trying to regain his memories.
The Face of a Stranger is one of the best thriller books of the 1990s. Some readers may understandably opt to steer clear of Anne Perry’s whole bibliography, but this undeniable masterpiece does stir up some interesting conversations on separating the art from the artist. The author’s reputation has certainly not aged well, but the book itself has retained every bit of its atmospheric, gritty, slow-burning edge.
‘Pressure’ (2005)
Though most of the thriller books that have had enough time to age like fine wine are classics from the 20th century, there are also a few awfully underrated gems from the early 21st century that keep getting better with age as well. Case in point: Jeff Strand‘s Pressure, an incredible horror thriller about a family man whose childhood friend turns out to be a dangerous killer determined to force him into becoming his partner in (literal) crime.
Strand is an exceptional horror writer who excels at both pitch-black humor and absolutely gnarly horror, and Pressure offers plenty of both elements to satisfy even the most demanding thriller book fans. The humor still holds up after several revisits; the pacing and cat-and-mouse character dynamics don’t lose any of their punch, and the remarkable tightness of Strand’s plotting further ensures that Pressure will remain timeless for as long as a copy of it exists out there.
‘Dissolution’ (2003)
C.J. Sansom was a British historical fiction master best known for his Matthew Shardlake novels, books that still serve as further evidence that there’s some incredible yet awfully underrated thriller literature from the 21st century to discover. The first installment in the series is Dissolution, about a lawyer and reformer from 16th-century England sent by Thomas Cromwell to investigate a brutal murder.
It’s one of the best thriller books of the 2000s, even if it isn’t often recognized as such. It was the subject of Disney+’s Shardlake, but in this case, the book is infinitely better than the adaptation, despite being even lesser-known. This Tudor-era mystery is a downright masterclass in crafting a historically accurate atmosphere, bringing a period of history to life vividly and in full service of a compelling story, and grounding a nail-biting thriller plot in such richly researched elements.
‘The Last Good Kiss’ (1978)
There’s a solid argument to be made that James Crumley‘s The Last Good Kiss is the forgotten thriller novel that has not only aged the best, but that most deserves a considerably bigger cult following. It’s one of the best hard-boiled detective books of all time, about a private investigator tracking down a missing author. Crumley, though vastly revered as a master of 20th-century thriller literature, never quite reached the mainstream like other hard-boiled fiction writers. If there’s one of his books that deserves infinitely more love, however, it’s this one.
It’s the first detective noir book featuring the character of C.W. Sughrue, one of the most underappreciated hard-boiled protagonists in the history of thriller literature. But aside from having excellent character writing, The Last Good Kiss benefits from Crumley’s timeless, beautiful prose and the gritty 1970s tone and atmosphere. It’s one of the greatest noir novels of all time, and it deserves to be rescued from the oblivion that it has fallen into as the years have passed.
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