This week I am delighted to introduce Neil Lancaster who has kindly agreed to take on my Decades challenge.  In what could almost be considered a bit of careful planning, Neil is the first of two back-to-back guests who are making their decades selections in publication week of their new novel.  This gives you six days to get your pre-order placed for Neil’s terrific thriller Dead Man’s Grave and a full week to work out who next week’s guest could possibly be!

If you haven’t come across my Decades challenge yet then let me explain what I asked Neil to help with.  I am trying to build a new library of the very best books but started with nothing on the shelves.  Each week since January I have been joined by a guest (authors, bloggers, journalists and publishers) and I ask them to help me fill the Library shelves by nominating their favourite reads.  But each guest must follow two rules:

1 – Select ANY five books
2 – My guests may only choose one book per decade over five consecutive decades.

I shall leave you in Neil’s capable hands…

Neil Lancaster is the No.1 Audible bestselling author of the Tom Novak series. He has served in the RAF as a Military Policeman, in the UK, Germany, Cyprus and the Falkland Islands. He has worked for the Metropolitan Police as a Detective, investigating serious crimes in the capital and beyond. As a covert policing specialist, he has used a variety of tactics to obtain evidence against murderers, human traffickers, drug dealers and fraudsters.

He now lives in the Scottish Highlands, writes crime and thriller novels and works as a broadcaster and commentator on true crime documentaries. He is a key expert on two Sky Crime TV series, Meet, Marry, Murder and Made for Murder.

Twitter: www.twitter.com/@neillancaster66
Facebook: www.facebook.com/@NeilLancasterCrime
Website: www.neillancastercrime.co.uk

You can visit Neil’s Amazon page here:

Neil’s new novel Dead Man’s Grave has been included on the 2021 Bloody Scotland MacIlvanney Prize Longlist.  It releases in digital format on Thursday 16th July and my review (with a pre-order link) is here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5620

DECADES

1950’s My family and Other Animals- Gerald Durrell- 1956

This book means so much to me that I find it hard to explain myself, which for a writer is a bit daft. I first came across this book aged about ten years old when my older sister was doing English Lit for O’ Level. As anyone of a certain age will tell you, this book was a feature on the syllabus for many years, and as a result it is widely loved and loathed in equal measures. I fall very much into the first category. It’s a magical, sunlit tale of the Durrell family’s five-year sojourn to Corfu in the 1930’s during that period between the world wars. My Mum, a real bookworm basically ordered me to read it. Up until this point, my reading had been limited to The Beano, The Dandy and occasionally Sparky, but as soon as I began reading, I was completely transfixed by the tale of the eccentric Durrell family and their life in Corfu. All at once the book was warm, sunlit, funny, intriguing and sometimes heart-rending. I learned from the book just what words on a page could conjure in my young mind. I was instantly transported to pre-war Corfu with the beautifully written descriptions of the landscape, flora and faunae. A magical book that will live with me forever.

1960’s- The Spoilers-Desmond Bagley- 1969

Desmond Bagley. Well, what can I say about him?

It’s pretty clear to me that without this author, I’d never had opened a laptop with the idea of writing a novel. Perhaps not as well known as Alistair Maclean or Len Deighton, Bagley was still a multi-million seller of fast paced thrillers, typical of that era.

This one, The Spoilers is a real knockabout rollercoaster of a thriller. A millionaire businessman’s daughter dies from a heroin overdose. He’s not satisfied, so puts together a team of individuals to take the fight to the heroin importers. A proper boys own tale of daring, risk, adventure and loss. The baddies are REALLY bad, the heroes as disparate as could be imagined. It just grabs you by the lapels and drags you in. Bagley was the master story teller of the thriller that featured an ordinary guy thrust into an extra-ordinary situation. Just a phenomenal book.

1970’s Running blind – Desmond Bagley-1970

My whole #Decades list was constructed around this book, that I maintain is Baglley’s best. I just HAD to have Running Blind in. I have read it more than any other book.

This presented me with an enormous problem, as I could have had a whole list of books just from the 1970’s, but as there are rules, even if there’s only two of them, I had to build my list around Running Blind. Just think of the other 1970’s books I could have included. The Moon’s a Balloon, Legionnaire, most of the Alistair MacLean’s, Deighton, Francis and loads of other Bagley’s, but rules is rules, so here we is.

I first read this book after watching the 1979 dramatisation of the book, which starred Stuart Wilson and George Sewell. I was only 13 at the time, but it had a profound effect on me. The story of a lapsed British intelligence agent forced into one last mission by a corrupt spy boss. He travels to Iceland to complete a simple task, but all is clearly not as it seems and he finds himself at the heart of a conspiracy involving KGB, CIA, double agents, and triple agents. It was just tremendous (look it up on YouTube. My Mum found the book in a charity shop and I devoured it. From that moment on, I was hooked on thrillers, and simply never looked back Bagley was a master craftsman at twists, revelation and pace and no one has influenced my journey as a writer more.

To my mind the opener of Running Blind has never been bettered, so I hope you’ll indulge me.

“To be encumbered with a corpse is to be in a difficult position. True, any doctor, even one just out of medical school, would have been able to diagnose the cause of death. The man had died of heart failure or what the doctors call cardiac arrest. The cause of his heart having stopped pumping blood was that someone had slid a sharp sliver of steel between his ribs just far enough to penetrate the great muscle of the heart and to cause a serious and irreversible leakage of blood so that it stopped beating. Cardiac arrest, as I said.

 I wasn’t too anxious to find a doctor because the knife was mine and the hilt had been in my hand when he died. I stood on the open road with the body at my feet and I was scared, so scared that the nausea rose in my throat to choke me. This particular body had been a stranger — I had never seen him before in my life.”

BEAT THAT ! ! !

1980’s Policeman’s Lot- Harry Cole -1981

Harry Cole was a Bermondsey boy born before the war. After brief service in the army, and a time as a stone mason, he joined the Metropolitan Police in the 1950s. After training he was posted to Carter Street Police Station in Bermondsey, South London where he remained for thirty years.

His account of policing London in those decades has never been bettered in my opinion. All at once uproariously funny, touching, and often sad. He knitted together his decades of experiences into a beautifully written collection of disparate stories. I was dead set on joining the Met, and I read this book until it fell to pieces. It should still be required reading for anyone seeking to become a cop. There is more wisdom in those yellowed pages than in any official “how to” manual.

1990’s Killing Floor-Lee Child-1997

What can I say? I simply have loved everything that Lee Child has written. The hook of Reacher is just irresistible. The lone gunman coming into town is always an attractive prospect because of what it represents. Freedom. Reacher has nothing beyond his folding toothbrush, and a desire to travel America, where he just runs into situations that are there for him to solve. He’s what we all would secretly like to be (or so we tell ourselves) as in, free. No ties, no money worries, no washing clothes, no job, just the open road and an innate sense of discovery.

Child is a brilliant storyteller. His prose is lean and spare with no words wasted and Killing Floor is as good, if not better than any of his books. The tale of corrupt cops, murder money and deception. I could prattle on forever here, but we’ve all read it, right?

As long as you can continue to suspend belief that the same shit keeps happening to the same guy, the Reacher series is there forever, and for everyone.

Huge thanks to Neil for taking time to select five new books for my Library. I think this is the first time someone has managed to get two books by one author into their selections (still waiting for someone to do a clean sweep of Stephen King).  I am also hugely excited to see Killing Floor appear – if I were to ever make my selections then this could well have been a contender for my own list.

If you want to visit my Library, see all the previous selections and meet the guests who selected each of the books then you can click this handy link: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

DECADES WILL RETURN