Nowadays, we have a whole host of mysteries and thrillers at our fingertips—and authors keep upping the ante! Still, sometimes, the classics are classics for a reason: they just hit so hard that nothing seems to measure up, no matter how far we advance. If you’re looking for a classic thriller, consider one of these ten that just get better with age.
Mickey Haller operates as a criminal defense attorney from the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car as he goes between Los Angeles courthouses for cases of every kind. When a client hires him to defend him against attacking a woman he picked up at a bar, Mickey thinks he’s landed a high-paying “franchise case,” one that will keep him in business for years. Evidence stacks up in his client’s favor, and Mickey’s sure he has this one in the bag, until someone close to him gets murdered… and it sends him fighting for his own life.
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You might know her work from The Little Friend or The Secret History, but this one’s the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Here, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives the accident that kills his mother. Though he’s taken in by the family of a wealthy friend on Park Avenue, he becomes obsessed with his mother’s death and clings to a small painting that reminds him of her. The painting draws him into the insular art community… which is much more dangerous than it sounds.
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It’s impossible to choose just one novel of Chester Himes’ forty-year career writing, so let’s go with a collection of his short stories. Himes started writing when he was imprisoned in the 1940s, and his canon illustrates struggles of the Black experience spanning decades, all in thriller form, and all in bite-sized stories.
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Similarly, it’s impossible to choose just one of Daphne du Maurier’s thrillers—she wrote both Rebecca and “The Birds,” for reference—so let’s go with this one. She wrote it between her two best-loved novels, Jamaica Inn and Rebecca, and her goal was to tell the story of her family so that it “reads like a novel.” It does just that: over decades, the du Mauriers travel between England and Paris and span every line of work from military men to courtesans and creatives.
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When Tom Ripley realizes he’s being tailed through New York City, he thinks it’s because of a low-level insurance fraud he’s been committing… but when it turns out his acquaintance’s blue-blooded father wants him to wrangle his son back to the States from Italy because his mother is on the verge of death, things take an up-swing for hard-up Tom. It’s the ‘50s, and he’s always been an underdog despite his stunning intelligence and willingness to grab any opportunity that comes his way. Let’s just say there’s a reason this was adapted into an impeccable film starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwenyth Paltrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in 1999… and then also adapted into a full series on Netflix in 2024.
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Llewellyn is a Vietnam vet and a good ole boy on a hunting trip in Texas when he happens upon what looks like a shoot-out. There’s only one man left, shot and dying in the cab of a pickup truck, but next to another body, someone has also left behind a suitcase full of money. Llewellyn takes it home to his trailer, but the more he thinks about the dying man, the more it bothers him. He fills a plastic jug with tap water and goes back to the scene of the crime—“dumber’n hell,” he knows. He also knows he’s being followed. Not only by the dealers at the drug deal gone wrong, but by a hit man with an air compressor, so constant that he seems like death himself. He’s in trouble. There’s no way out. As he tells his wife when he puts her on a bus and she asks how long she’ll be gone, “At what point would you stop looking for your two million dollars?
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Referenced to death for a reason: when the married couple Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move to New York, they move into an apartment too good to be true. The building has a weird reputation, but it’s a Gothic Revival-style with high ceilings and affordable rent, and kind (if nosy) elderly neighbors. Rosemary is a little wary of the weird sounds in the apartemnt, but soon everything starts going right for them: Guy gets a leading Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant, and her neighbors, the Castavets, start taking a special interest in her health. She meanwhile gets sicker and sicker… and her suspicions that something is amiss become more and more realized.
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Again, there’s a reason why this thriller is still the gold standard over 35 years after its publication. Thomas Harris apparently consulted with Robert Ressler, one of the FBI guys who invented criminal profiling, when he wrote the novel, and that’s probably why it’s so believable. We follow Clarice Starling, an up-and-coming agent at Quantico, who’s intent on helping locate the serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill. She consults with known cannibal, serial killer, and brilliant psychiatrist Doctor Hannibal Lecter to better understand the M.O. and drive, and hopefully the killer from murdering the girl they think he currently has kidnapped.
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The original Easy Rawlins mystery novel by Walter Mosley, who is often regarded as the most iconic Black name in hard-boiled detective fiction. Here, it’s 1948, and after veteran Easy Rawlins gets fired from his defense factory job, a white man asks him to find Miss Daphne Money. She’s a blonde woman known for loving Black jazz clubs, and she’s about to change Easy’s life forever.
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Speaking of hard-boiled detective fiction, Raymond Chandler is a household name of the genre, as is Philip Marlowe. LA PI Marlowe makes his debut in this novel when disabled General Sternwood hires him to figure out who’s responsible for this petty blackmail. Sternwood just wants the problem to go away, but Marlowe has his hands full trying to keep Sternwood’s daughters out of trouble….
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