A charismatic Democratic senator who speaks in "noble but slippery abstractions" is elected president, in a groundswell of cultish adoration, by a nation on the brink of economic disaster. Promising to restore America's greatness, he promptly announces a government seizure of the big banks and insurance companies. He strong-arms the Congress into amending the Constitution to give him unlimited emergency powers. He throws his enemies into concentration camps. With scarcely any resistance, the country has become a fascist dictatorship. No black helicopters here, though. Sinclair Lewis's dystopian political satire, now largely forgotten except for its ironic title, was a mammoth best seller in 1935, during the depths of the Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. His president, Berzelius ("Buzz") Windrip, is a ruthless phony with the "earthy sense of humor of a Mark Twain"; one of the few who dare oppose him openly is a rural newspaper editor who is forced to go on the run. Lewis's prose could be ungainly, but he captured with caustic humor the bumptious narrow- mindedness of small-town life.
2. The Ministry of Fear. Graham Greene. Viking, 1943
Set in London during the Blitz, "The Ministry of Fear"—the only novel Graham Greene wrote during the war years—opens with a now-familiar Hitchcockian gambit: An innocent man stumbles upon a secret and is marked for death. Arthur Rowe, a loner who has just been released from an insane asylum, wins a cake at a carnival by guessing its precise weight. Concealed in the cake is a spool of film intended for a Nazi spy. Rowe becomes the target of a
shadowy international espionage ring bent on stealing vital British war plans. On this slim armature Greene constructs a richly atmospheric thriller, one of the classics of the genre. His prose is spare and elegant, his pacing masterly. The protagonist, haunted by a terrible crime in his past, loses his memory and comes to feel "directed, controlled, molded, by some agency with a surrealist imagination," pursued through a city where entire buildings can disappear overnight in a bombing raid.Also made into a film starring Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds.
3. Libra. Don DeLillo. Viking, 1988
Don DeLillo, our poet of paranoia, here reimagines the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It's a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories, about the powerful mythology of the greatest crime of the American century. DeLillo's language is dazzling as he presents an ingenious fusing of fact and fiction, theory and reality. A CIA operative devises an "electrifying event" that will force the invasion of Cuba. He enlists a pawn, Lee Harvey Oswald, to unwittingly carry out a "spectacular miss." But of course a perfect plan conceived by "men in small rooms" must self-destruct in the cold light of reality. This is a hallucinatory meditation on the seductiveness of conspiracy: strangely lyrical and fraught with steadily encroaching terror. Oswald, the puppet, is no more paranoid than his masters; the difference is that they realize that there is always "a world inside the world."
4. Advise and Consent. Allen Drury. Doubleday, 1959
A generation of political junkies got hooked on the ways of Washington because of this book, published 50 years ago. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, "Advise and Consent" revealed the inner workings of the Senate—and offered compelling drama along the way. An ailing, manipulative, FDR-like president nominates as secretary of state an arrogant liberal intellectual
and would-be Soviet appeaser, meant to evoke Alger Hiss. In the midst of his vicious confirmation battle, evidence emerges that he was once a member of a secret Communist cell. Allen Drury, who was a reporter in the New York Times's Washington bureau, is not exactly subtle about his politics: All of his bad guys are soft on Communism. The capital he depicts is a period piece: Senators all orate like William Jennings Bryan; socialite hostesses have boozy salons where senators get sloppy; a hint in a newspaper column can destroy a politician's career. But it's addictive reading and arguably still the best novel about Washington politics.Made into a film with Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Don Murray, Walter Pidgeon, Peter Lawford, Gene Tierney, Franchot Tone, Lew Ayres, Burgess Meredith, Eddie Hodges.
5. The Matarese Circle. Robert Ludlum. Bantam, 1979
No one will ever call Robert Ludlum a great novelist or even a good writer of prose. But "The Matarese Circle," his best thriller, perfectly captured the paranoid suspicions of post-Watergate America. In Ludlum's cosmology, it's always a few brave individuals up against immense and yet somehow still unseen conspiracies. An ancient secret society of assassins-for-hire has been revived by a powerful organization that turns out to be controlling entire governments. Only two men can save the world: one a rogue agent in the CIA, the other in the KGB—sworn enemies forced to work together. Eventually they uncover a sinister plot involving a Kennedy-like family and an impostor who is on the verge of being elected to the White House. There is a classic scene in which our hero discovers who is in on the conspiracy and it turns out to be . . . everyone.
—Mr. Finder, a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, is the author of nine novels, including "Paranoia" and "High Crimes." His suspense thriller "Vanished" has just been published by St. Martin's Press.
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