15 Authors I can remember offhand

Okay... here goes, perhaps not as literary as some, but my measure of a
book is a darn good yarn. One that has me daydreaming about it for days
afterwards. In no particular order.
1) Jack London - I can spontaneously shiver even now. White Fang and
Call Of The Wild had a profound effect on me as a child.
2) A A Milne - nuff said!
3) M M Bennetts - If you don't know why by now... wait for her next
book!
4) Alexander Kent - Perhaps not as good as CS Forrester or Patrick
O'Brian, but I loved his Bolitho novels, and they really opened up the
period for me.
5) Len Deighton - for all sorts of reasons, Harry Palmer, Game, Set and
Match, Hook, Line and Sinker... and a brilliant non-fiction work
"Bomber".
6) Michael Crichton - because the despite the lame kiddie movies that
Spielberg turned Jurassic Park and The Lost World into, the books
themselves are actually thoughtful criticisms of how science sometimes
goes places it really shouldn't, just because it can. And he writes a
stonkingly good thriller.
7) Anne Rice - for The Mummy... and for bringing the Vampire genre into
disrepute.
8) Douglas Adams - for the Hitchhiker, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul
and Last Chance to See - proving that he wasn't just a great comedy
writer but a concerned and interesting environmentalist too.
9) Lincoln Preston - These two guys, Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston,
wrote the book which became the film The Relic. In fact there are a
whole series of books featuring their FBI Agent, Special Agent Aloysius
Pendergast. Thoughtful and very creepy thrillers. Still Life With Crows
is one of the most genuinely frightening novels I have ever read.
10) Agatha Christie - She may have put murder in the parlour and bodies
in the library, but she wrote a great thriller, created two characters
which in their own way have entered into the legend of literature and
has kept us entertained through books, plays, radio and the medium of
television for over eighty years.
11) Dan Brown - for basically writing the same book over and over and
over again, but nevertheless getting published and being made into
movies - how the devil does he do it?
12) Janet Evanovich - for Stephanie Plum.
13) John Galsworthy - I read my way through the Forsyte Saga when I was
fifteen, something of a forgotten gem.
14) William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair, I loved this book I've
read it cover to cover many times.
15) Bram Stoker - for being the original master of gothic suspense.
Jewel Of Seven Stars beats Dracula any day of the week.
I can hear it now... why would I include an author that I really don't
like. To be frank, Dan Brown has a lot to do with why I am where I am
today. Had it not been for Dan Brown, Authonomy, Year Zero and the
realisation that there had to be something better than the mainstream
and the status quo, I would be in a very different place.

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