McNab.

How annoying is that. The word "fkucking", pivotal to the rhythm, got bleeped. Fcuk, fcuk, fcukking fcuk!

Listen - if you want to translate that enthusiasm into a review of between 350 words and oooooh say 750 words I would be happy to run it on BM (I've never read any McNab and I'm happy to glimpse a world I've never peeped into before . . . I DO know that kind of excitement tho: I got the new Paul Auster novel in the post yesterday and I am like a child at Christmas! I started reading it last night and it's . . . just . . . out of this world . . .)

Finished it! Sat up all night till 6.00 a.m. McNab's the only writer who can do this to me, these days. I recommend the book heartily.

If we're going to reveal books that keep you up all night but which you wouldn't include in the cannon of great literature, I have to throw my hands up and say that 'Fatherland' by Robert Harris made me read right through the night a few weeks ago. I thought it was a blinder. Set in 1964 in a Germany that won the Second World War, it tells the story of a policeman who by accident uncovers the pattern of a series of deaths that ead to the grand secret of society. It works so wondefully because we, because of history, know what the grand unspoken secret of the Reich is but he uncovers it. Really, really good and I highly recommend it. If you haven't read it D., I'll post you my copy. I really think you'd like it. On a similar topic, 'The Man In The High Castle' by Philip K. Dick is another blinder, but his version of the world after the allies lose WWII is different, as is the focus of the book, which centres around the effects of occupation on people, where after a generation they begin to take on the culture of the occupiers. Another blinder you won't see in the top 100 books of all time. As I typed, 'Koko' by Peter Straub came to mind. There's another taught bestseller. Couldn't read it again, but it had me gripped from page one. Oh what guilty pleasures. Something can be extremely good at what it does without aspiring to the status of great art. Oh and I love HP Lovecraft too. Really love. Not great art, not even great writing often, but great horror. Blimey, I'm washing all my literary laundry in public today.

In principle I like to believe that a book is a book and whether it is literary or not is neither here nor there. In practice, though, I'm afraid to say that most popular fiction doesn't cut the mustard for me. Books as good as "Dark Winter" are actually very rare, in my experience; most thrillers are crud, and that's all there is to it. When I wrote a thriller of my own, I found out why, perhaps: it is bloody hard to do. Respect to the great thriller writers; no wonder there are so few. * I will definitely put "Fatherland" on my list of books to read. Cheers for the offer of your copy, but you must keep the books you value, mate. I should be able to borrow one near to hand. d.beswetherick.

Agree absolutely D. bes. Not that bothered if something fits in a canon or not. I love great thrillers but they are hard to find. I enjoyed Fatherland but the follow up - about Stalin but can't remember the title was awful. Have never read McNab but will give him a go. I read Prey by Michael Crichton last week. The first hundred pages are brilliant - but then it loses it with too much technical jargon and the ending is appalling. But I like the idea - lots of mini robots attacking a closed community. Crichton seems to have got away with writing the same story over and over. I'm thinking Westworld, Jurassic Park and Prey are all basically written on the same template. The most unputdownable book of the year so far for me this year is Fingersmith.

If you do read McNab, avoid his one bad thriller "Liberation Day", which is all recce. All his books, apart from "Dark Winter" have dodgy passages, but they all also have nail-bitingly wonderful long stretches of recce-and-set-piece action that are like nothing else in fiction, in my opinion. I'm nervous of reading Fingersmith because I fear being influenced by pastiche style; I feel the same about Faber's "The Crimson Petal and the White". I'm saving these titles up for one day when I'm ill and cannot write (I'm overinfluenced by the style of whatever I'm reading) and just want a mammoth wallow. That sounds like a new drink. d.beswetherick.

I read the first couple of paragraphs of The Crimson Petal and the White and it seemed pretty unreadable to me. Fingersmith on the other hand instantly draws you in. Another book I've recently read although not a thriller as such is The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. This affected me like no novel for years and I kept having to skip ahead to check that characters hadn't died. Like it says on the cover it will make you cry more than any other book. (Ending is poor though - another gay man drifting painfully into the sunset.) I was thinking about thrillers last night and why they don't work. For me it's because they are so geared towards denouement and then the denouement is ultimately disappointing. They do try to reassert some moral order of normalcy which I don't believe in. (Hitchcock is brilliant and his thrillers work in that he doesn't do this - but he is not a writer.) I tried to read Minette Waters but had to throw the book up in the air and then kick it into the sea when the killer's sheets were examined and he was found to be a 'serial mastubator'. This was apparently proof enough to suggest that he had murdered and raped several women. Likewise The Chimney Sweeper's Boy - Ruth Rendal, all the crimes had been comitted by the severe psychological damage of one brother nearly touching his brother's cock in a gay sauna. That was it. It could have been a very short book. 'Whoops. Sorry mate.' It is hard ultimately to care about these people.

I'm really disillusioned with mysteries at the moment; the respected British mystery writers: Minette Walters. Rendell, P.D.James, Rankin, leave me cold - and surprised at their good reviews when the standard of writing is so poor. For me a good thriller always beats a good mystery; but I agree, the endings are almost impossible to bring off. Even so, the ending of McNab's "Remote Control", a book that admittedly lost its way in the middle, has one of the best endings I've ever read in my life - surpring, emotionally satisfying, and genuinely witty. I think what I like above all is suspense - not whodunnit suspense (Barthes' hermaneutic code) but plot events that lead to further plot events (proairetic code): a man draws a gun; we wonder what the result of this action will be; suspense is created by the action rather than the reader's wish to have mysteries explained. Tzvetan Todorov said that the detective story contains two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. (These days there's a often third story, that of the investigator's private life.) In the thriller the narrative coincides with the real action, instead of being separated from it by mystery. Also it is not constantly retrospective like the mystery. That's why I prefer the thriller - but it's a demanding form. A matter of taste, I suppose. d.beswetherick.