Jacob Thomson Official Website

Richard S. Prather:  I've enjoyed Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott novels and stories for many years, generally dipping into the collection for another look at least a couple of times a year. Scott was an odd character, a Los Angeles private eye who lived in an apartment/hotel, always drove a Cadillac convertible, and spent as much time chasing women as he ever did solving mysteries. He described himself as tall, with crew-cut hair so blond that it almost looked white. The book covers on the old Fawcett paperback originals generally made him look a lot like Lloyd Bridges during his Sea Hunt days. (His creator, for whatever it may be worth, looks more like an accountant.)

Prather's style was unique for the period when Scott first appeared. A lot of the familiar hard-boiled elements were there, but the stories were also pretty funny. Despite one critic describing Scott as "politically, slightly to the right of Hitler," he seemed like the sort of guy you'd enjoy knowing. My own feeling was that the critic's description was almost completely wrong as, except for a strong anti-communist bent, Scott came across as a fairly easy-going, likeable fellow with no obvious prejudices (especially where women were concerned).

Always Leave 'EM Dying

Darling It's Death

The Cheim Manuscript

Dan Jenkins:  Dan Jenkins is a funny guy. Now I'm generally indifferent to most sports, but I love reading Jenkin's books, which are mostly about sports-type people. Fortunately, I read Semi-Tough before I saw the movie, which would probably have turned me off to the whole series. The movie seemed to be another of those cases where Hollywood "filmed the title" instead of the story.

Jenkins characters are mostly country, mostly Texas, and mostly hillarious. Hardly any of them are what you'd call politically correct. The truth is, people are funnier when they act like normal people. No one is really 100% politically correct, and I suspect most of us don't even get close to 5% when no one is watching.

How good a writer is Jenkins? I personally think that golf is the single most boring spectator sport that ever existed, and only marginally less boring as a participant. Dead Solid Perfect, a first-person novel about a mid-level professional golfer, is one of the funniest books I ever read. That's how good Jenkins is.

Dead Solid Perfect

Bubba Talks: Of Life, Love, Sex, Whiskey, Politics, Foreigners, Teenagers, Movies, Food, and Other Matters That Occasionally Concern Human Beings

John D. McDonald  Perhaps best known for his Travis McGee novels, John D. McDonald was a prolific and multi-talented writer, and by no means confined to the mystery/suspense genre. McDonald was one of those writers whose intellectual depth was often hidden beneath a seemingly simple, and frequently amusing, story.

In Please Write for Details, a comic novel about an ill-organized summer art workshop held at a run-down Cuernavaca hotel, each of the characters arrives with a full load of quirks and, in most cases, a fair number of often ill-concealed problems. Travis McGee, McDonald's houseboat-dwelling Florida "salvage specialist," who relates his stories in the first person, is clearly a philosopher of the human condition. One of McDonald's non-McGee novels, The Executioners, was filmed twice as Cape Fear.

McDonald was a cross genre writer, producing suspense, mystery, humor, science fiction, and lots of short stories. Particularly in the McGee novels, he was also a chronicler of the Florida I first came to love many years ago, and which has now all but disappeared under the bulldozers of the condominizers.

The Deep Blue Good-By

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D. MacDonald

Thomas Harris:  Thomas Harris' bio indicates he's an ex-cop. His writing makes you wonder just what sort of cases he was involved with, and gives the suspicion that some of them must have involved some pretty scary people. His heroes are often at least somewhat screwed up, and his bad guys tend toward the out and out psychopathic.

Francis Dolarhyde, in Red Dragon, the novel that also introduced Hannibal Lector, is perhaps his best realized villain. Harris delves deeply into Dolarhyde's upbringing, and given that background it's not only easy to understand how he turned out to be a psychopathic serial killer, it's actually hard to imagine him turning out any other way. Buffalo Bill, in Silence of the Lambs, is more of an enigma, almost an incidental character in a novel that's primarily about Lector and Clarise Starling. And Hannibal Lector's own origins really don't get the full treatment until the final book in the trilogy, Hannibal. Still, while I personally think Red Dragon is the masterwork of the trilogy, the others are still far better than most novels in the same genre.

Red Dragon

Silence of the Lambs

Hannibal

J.T. McDaniel:  I'll preface this by saying that this guy is my publisher, so there may be a slight bit of prejudice in his favor. That said, he's still one of the finest writers in his genre, which is naval warfare novels about submarines. His first novel, With Honour in Battle, was good enough that it nearly had me rooting for the Germans, which is certainly not something I'd normally do (though this particular bunch didn't have a very high opinion of their political leadership, which helped). There were points where the story was a little frightening, especially after I found out that the highly-advanced U-boat featured was actually under construction at war's end.

His second novel, Bacalao, is set aboard an American fleet sub in the Pacific. I don't particularly like ships, having spent nearly all of the voyage back from England throwing up, but I enjoyed both of these books, and I think most readers—at least the male ones—will as well. McDaniel has a very clear, insightful writing style, and his novels, while set aboard submarines, are really wonderful character studies of the officers and men who make up their crews.

With Honour in Battle

Bacalao

Edgar Allan Poe  When I was a kid, I read all of these stories, despite the Yeshiva's standard policy of discouraging the bochrim from reading secular literature. I revisted Poe, and a number of other authors, while I was in the service, and came in for a more detailed, critical study in college. Poe is, rightly, credited with inventing the detective story, and was the acknowledged all-time master of the eerie suspense tale.

Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography