Government Conspiracy Fiction Books You Won't Want To Put Down

By Ann Lee


The Thirty-Nine Steps is one of the first books to explore the genre of the paranoid thriller. It was written by John Buchan and came out in 1915, and is the first of his government conspiracy fiction books that features the character of Richard Hannay, who appears in Buchan's other works. This ambiguously titled novel follows Hannay's unlikely adventures, full of action and heroics.

While there are plenty of great novels about conspiracies that take place on a very high level, such as within or between governments, sometimes it is easier to relate to a story when it isn't on such a large scale. "Nightmare Town" is a short story that Dashiell Hammett wrote in 1924. The plot consists of a small town that plans to commit insurance fraud and results in people being murdered.

The Ministry of Fear was written in 1943, when people wanted to read stories about Nazis and World War II. Graham Greene's book is about the Nazis' method of blackmailing people into submission. It's easy to understand the title after reading this book.

Many people have heard of The Manchurian Candidate because of the film by the same title featuring Denzel Washington, but plenty of others knew about it long before that. Richard Condon wrote the novel in 1959, and the fear of communism definitely had a big influence on the writing of this book and its reception. The protagonist is subject to brainwashing to make him carry out an assassination.

One of the tragic events that happened in US history with unsolved mysteries surrounding it that have made conspirators come up with their own theories is the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Winter Kills was one of the first novels to explore this mystery. Richard Condon wrote this book in 1974, and it is very dark in nature considering the material it covers.

When Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson got together to write a book about counterculture and conspiracies, they might not have known just how big it was going to become. Their work became known as The Illuminatus! Trilogy, three novels that are usually printed as one anthology. Published from 1969 to 1971, their work combines genres like psychedelia, horror, and comedy.

Thomas Pynchon's novella called The Crying Lot 49 may be a relatively quick read, but it is a literary journey worth taking. Published in 1966, it is full of cultural references out of that colorful time that Pynchon is very prone to making. The plot in this story has to do with two postal services that were pitted against each other due to a conflict dating all the way back to the Middle Ages.

Gravity's Rainbow is one of the deepest and most complex novels a reader might come across when looking for a paranoid thriller. Although there is a large number of characters and the book deals with topics that are at a very high level, if the reader is up for the challenge, it can be very illuminating. When the book came out, many people saw it to be too obscene or not comprehensible at all.




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