“The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value.” ― Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October
I have long been a fan of Cold War fiction. I devoured Tom Clancy from the first day The Hunt for Red October was available in the local Waldenbooks. Harold Coyle soon followed, and I even managed to get through a few Dale Brown books along the way. I love a good war story. Throw in a bit of techno-thriller action, and I’m sold.
If you asked me to list the ten best Cold War books, I couldn’t. Clancy was a master of the genre, and I could name ten of his books that would all deserve a place on a list. The same for the works of Sir Ian Fleming, who made James Bond a household name. How do you pick between From Russia with Love and The Spy Who Loved Me? Even narrowing the list down to just the 10 best authors of Cold War fiction is problematic. Sir William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Lord of the Flies, but most people don’t realize that it’s an allegory about the stakes of the Cold War itself. Flight of the Old Dog remains one of my favorite novels, and who knew that the B-52 would still be flying regular missions 35 years after the book was published?
THE COLD WAR GENRE
It’s said that if you want to understand the facts surrounding the Cold War, you read memoirs and history books. If you want to know how it felt, you read novels. As author Jessamyn West said, “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” And the fiction of the Cold War revealed a reality that kept people up all night.
The novels of the Cold War hold a special place in the historical fiction genre. Layered in intrigue, conflict, and the paranoia of the era, the writers who mastered the craft weaved marvelous stories. As the genre began to evolve and techno-thrillers became more common, readers were taken on marvelous, harrowing adventures with emerging or even fictionalized technology, from Abrams main battle tanks on the plains of Europe to the Red October’s silent caterpillar drive. The more fascinating – and believable – the technology, the deeper the story could pull in the reader.
The Ten Best Cold War Writers
So, rather than focus on just the books – which would be an impossible list to summarize, I focused instead on the writers themselves. Narrowing that list is still a Herculean task, but more manageable for an old dog with deep Cold War roots.
1. Tom Clancy
Without a doubt, the quintessential Cold War writer. Clancy defined the techno-thriller genre and was so prolific with his Cold War stories that he continued writing them after he died. That’s no small feat. And the books are just as relevant as ever, pulling a thread through current events to spin one remarkable tale after another.
2. Harold Coyle
A tanker himself, no one told a better war story of tank battle than Harold Coyle. When his novel, Team Yankee, exploded into the genre, it was an irresistible read. The book took readers to the Fulda Gap, the armor superhighway through which a Soviet invasion was expected to come. Coyle followed with The Ten Thousand, another novel of armored warfare, before settling into more traditional Cold War fare. Team Yankee remains the gold standard of tactical fiction.
3. Ian Fleming
James Bond. Full stop. Even the books that weren’t focused on the Cold War were set against a Cold War backdrop.
4. Craig Thomas
The godfather of the techno-thriller. A fair number of people alive when Reagan was president remember the Clint Eastwood film Firefox. Fewer remember the brilliant Craig Thomas novel, or it’s equally phenomenal sequel, Firefox Down. This pre-Clancy techno-thriller foreshadowed the evolution of the Cold War genre, a genre that Thomas continued to produce well into the 1980s.
5. Stephen Coonts
To call Coonts a prolific writer of Cold War fiction is an understatement. From Flight of the Intruder on, Coonts followed the exploits of Navy pilot Jake Grafton from the skies of North Vietnam into the Cold War and beyond. In the same vein, Coonts followed CIA operative Tommy Carmellini through a series of Cold War intrigue novels, beginning with Liars & Thieves. Coonts covered all the Cold War bases, from spy novels to techno-thrillers.
6. Sir John Hackett
In early 1979, Hackett published The Third World War, a speculative piece of Cold War fiction that hypothesized a 1985 war between the West and the Soviet Union. The book was wildly popular at time, but also prescient: Hackett predicted the fall of the USSR and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact at a time when most people feared they would both endure for decades to come.
7. Bob Forrest-Webb
On the heels of Hackett’s The Third World War, Forrest-Webb captured the human dimension of such a war with Chieftans, a novel that chronicled the wartime experiences of two tank crews: Bravo Two, the crew of a Chieftain main battle tank of the British 4th Armoured Division, and Utah, the crew of an American Abrams tank. An instant classic so detailed and authentic that Hackett himself couldn’t contain his praise. The book was on every military reading list for at least the next decade.
8. Frederick Forsyth
My first foray into Forsyth was with The Day of the Jackal, the tale of a Cold War assassin tasked to kill the world’s most heavily guarded man. From there, I never stopped. It was one book after another, all of which seemed to revolve around the secrecy and intrigue of the old Soviet Union. They didn’t, but to young me, it felt that way. I buried myself in his novels, wiling away more than a few summers in the air conditioning of the county library.
9. Graham Greene
Greene was already an established writer when he published The Quiet American (1956) and Our Man in Havana (1958), two of the most important novels of the Cold War era. More followed, and he soon became a master of the genre. Although his subjects range from Nazi spies to Soviet agents, the latter defined his influence more so than his earlier work. He remains one of the most renowned writers of Cold War fiction more than 30 years after his death.
10. John le Carré
Where do you start? Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? The Spy Who Came in from the Cold? A Perfect Spy? From one spy novel after another, le Carré spun intrigue like no one else. You can’t have a serious conversation about the Cold War genre without talking John le Carré.
Not Everyone Makes the Cut
Yes, I left Dale Brown off this list. For years, he was a guilty pleasure, like watching Rocky movies until Sylvester Stallone started looking like Abe Simpson. They were fun. Right up to the time when I lost the ability to suspend belief any longer. It got to the point where I was waiting for a B-52 to dock with International Space Station. At the rate we’re going, that might happen one day. But until then, Brown’s books – however much fun to read – don’t make the cut.
