Carl Hiaasen was born in and lives in Florida. An award-winning investigative journalist, his other celebrated thrillers include Native Tongue (1991), Strip Tease (1993), Lucky You (1997), Basket Case (2002), Skinny Dip (2004) and Nature Girl (2005).
Age in year of publication: thirty-four.
Patricia Highsmith 1921–1995
1955 The Talented Mr Ripley
The art of Patricia Highsmith is cool and detached; this adds power to her depiction of quiet violence and of murderers who could almost be ourselves. This strange identification of reader with murderer — a kind of inverted murder mystery — gives her thrillers an hypnotic attraction.
This novel was the first she wrote about the more than talented Mr Ripley, a neglected and loveless child who grows up to ensure that he compensates for such deficiencies by letting nothing and no one stand in his way. His distinguishing characteristics are his charm, his anxiety to please, and luck, which in this instance whisks him to Italy to coerce the wealthy young Dickie Greenleaf into returning to the USA to take up his responsibilities. The relationship between Tom Ripley and Dickie is one of those troubled tugs-of-war between men in which Patricia Highsmith so eerily excels: fretful, duplicitous, overwrought.
The tension is electric, and Tom’s murder of Dickie — in which every ounce of water and blood, every slow motion of struggle is felt almost physically by the reader — is only the beginning of a chase which twists and turns as Tom veers towards his unexpected fate. This is a classic psychological thriller, sinister yet cajoling, swathed in Highsmith’s macabre wit.
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and lived mostly in Europe. Many of her novels were filmed; her first, Strangers on a Train (1950), by Alfred Hitchcock. She wrote five novels about Tom Ripley. This novel was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll.
Age in year of publication: thirty-four.
Oscar Hijuelos 1951–
1989 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
This is a novel, written in effortless prose, about Cuban musicians and their families in New York in the 1950s. It throbs with sex, with the pain of desire, with the allure of bodies, with the pure, unadulterated, exotic pleasure of coupling. It is the only novel in this list which makes mention of ‘that muscle up at the high end of a woman’s thigh, that muscle which intersected the clitoris and got all twisted, quivering ever so slightly when he’d kiss a woman there’; for this alone, the novel is mandatory reading.
It tells the story of two struggling musicians, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, authors of a song called ‘Beautiful Maria of My Soul’, and their lives in the new country and their memories of the old. It is full of pure style and gorgeous flourishes, like the dance music our two heroes play — tangos, boleros, melancholy tunes. It reads as though it was written in one single hot afternoon. Hijuelos places an aura of huge sadness around his characters’ lives, especially that of Nestor, the younger brother, who is eaten up with ennui, despite his enormous sex drive. It is one of the few great books about immigrants to the United States, grappling with the new language and the old ties of affection, the women steady and ambitious, the men hard drinking, locked in the old world and all the more attractive and interesting for their displacement.
Oscar Hijuelos was born in New York, the son of Cuban immigrants. His other novels include Our House in the Last World (1983), The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Monez O’Brien (1993), Empress of the Splendid Season (1999) and A Simple Habana Melody (2002). The Mambo Kings won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for film in 1992 and as a broadway musical in 2005.
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
Russell Hoban 1925–
1980 Riddley Walker
Written in the bastardized fragments of a ‘worn-out’ English, Riddley Walker is set in a brutal tribal world, thousands of years after a nuclear apocalypse. The twelve-year-old Riddley is led by a pack of wild dogs to help an imprisoned mutant, the Ardship of Cambry. Releasing him involves Riddley in a struggle to regain, by shamanistic and alchemical means, the secret of the bomb. On one side are the politicians, the Pry Mincer and the Wes Mincer, travelling showmen, who retell and decode the fragments of ancient stories. On the other are the mutants, whose damaged genes retain some shadows of the bomb that made them. Unknown to both is a simpler secret, the formula for gunpowder. The key is a yellow powder, ‘Salt 4’. In the battle for its possession, the Ardship is killed and the Pry Mincer deposed and blinded. Nevertheless, a bomb is made and exploded. Riddley, rejecting all power, except the power of story, becomes a travelling showman, with a new tale to tell.
This is a strenuously, fiercely imagined book. Hoban uses scraps of legend — Punch and Judy, the Green Man, St Eustace — to construct a mythology of original power. Riddley’s humanity provokes in the reader a kind of despairing sweetness. The language, which requires concentration, is both brutal and visionary: the effort to understand it becomes an effort to understand something much larger. Riddley Walker, which is often compared to A Clockwork Orange, releases a strange, raw, spiritual sense that cannot be found in smoother fictions.
Russell Hoban was born in Pennsylvania, but settled in London in 1969. He has written many children’s books including The Mouse and the Child, and his adult books include The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973), Turtle Diary (1975), Angelica’s Grotto (1999), Her Name Was Lola (2003), Linger Awhile (2006) and My Tango with Barbara Strozzi (2007).
Age in year of publication: fifty-five.
Alan Hollinghurst 1954–
1994 The Folding Star
Edward Manners, an Englishman in his thirties, goes to teach in a Flemish city — Bruges perhaps? — and like Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette falls obsessively in love. Luc Altidore, one of his pupils, is his adored object, a shadowy, unknowable, golden young man, longed for, lusted after, whilst Edward’s other worlds continue imperviously. There are the men he meets at gay bars; another pupil, Marcel, and his father Paul Echevin, curator of the museum devoted to the great Symbolist painter Orst; an entirely different, pastoral, domestic life appears when Edward returns to England for the funeral of his first lover.
Edward’s hunger for anonymous sex — for sex whatever — confronts in both a comical and affecting way the idealism of obsessive love. Edward possesses Luc but only for a moment; Luc seems to drift away, eternally elusive, a face glimpsed in a misty glass, unobtainable. Love is trailed by loss, with betrayal waiting in the wings. And shame — or worse, a Nazi past, menacing and tragic — turns romantic love to stone.
There is a mellow beauty to the form and structure of this novel, echoed in its melancholic, elegiac atmosphere. At the same time it is candid, comic, utterly contemporary, with a sly sense of the absurd. This is a luscious and continually fascinating novel; reading it is like contemplating one of the great paintings of the Flemish Old Masters.