Strangers with Scalpels (and Keyboards): Who are the best bestselling medical thriller authors in the biz?
Another oldie-but-goldie (I hope) from my Rediff.com days. This one’s about medical thrillers. I haven’t read a new one in years, but note that Michael Palmer and F. Paul Wilson are still turning them out.
BOOK CHAAT
by Ashok Banker
Strangers with Scalpels
Beware the men and women in white, advises Ashok Banker
What is it about hospitals that frighten most of us?
Is it the awareness that death walks freely down these sterile white corridors? That there are corpses and soon-to-be-corpses in this building that never sleeps?
Or is it the knowledge that sooner or later we will surely visit here, perhaps for a day, perhaps for the rest of days. At worst, to suffer untold miseries of the flesh. At best, to have our bodies cut open and investigated like the engine block of an automobile on the mechanics hoist at the local garage.
And almost certainly, when the time comes, to die. Then to be packed in ice and trundled into a freezing steel compartment in that vast chamber deep in the bowels of the building.
All these fears pass through our minds everytime we visit a hospital. Even if we aren’t consciously aware of them, or willing to face them. They are part of the collective subconscious that hears the psychic screams of those who have suffered in these halls, the primordial sense that sniffs out the stench of death and decay that no amount of antiseptic can disguise.
Hospitals are houses of horror. There’s no denying that. If you scoff at the idea, then it’s probably because you’ve been blessed not to have endured the terrors of medical emergencies or to have watched a loved one struggle through those final moments.
But it’s not the hospitals themselves we should really fear.
It’s the doctors who work there.
Those men and women in white with the power to save our lives. To extend the fragile years we spend in our biomechanical cages of flesh and bone, through the use of drugs, instruments, machines, and their own skills.
They also have the power to reduce these same lifespans, either through human error or miscalculation or mechanical failure. A power outage. A mistake during surgery. A bad blood transfusion.
There’s no limit to the myriad ways in which the human body can be damaged or harmed by the wrong doctor or even by the right doctor at the wrong time.
And yet, we can’t live without them. At no time in human history have so many people depended so completely on the skills and appliances of these men and women in white.
Their power is as close to being absolute as can be.
While a spy-fi thriller can seem exaggerated and unlikely, and a techno-thriller can seem imaginatively unrealistic, virtually all medical thrillers are based on real possibilities, real threats, real fears.
Even a serial killer novel requires you to suspend your disbelief in the events being described, and to accept the remote likelihood that you might someday become the one-in-a-billion victim of one of those rare human predators.
But medical terror can strike anyone at anytime. It could happen to you today, right after you finish reading this column — God forbid!
That’s why medical thrillers as they’re commonly called, are such favourite fear-fests for readers. But it’s also curiously true that unlike detective stories or spy-fi pulps there just aren’t very many good medical thriller writers around.
Michael Crichton used to be one of the best. A practising MD by day in his youth, he was a prolific author of medical thrillers. so prolific in fact, that he wrote under more than one pseudonym. Now, of course, he’s moved on to dinosaur disasters, time travel epics and other techno-suspense thrillers. But even today, the doctor in him is still visible at moments. And his earliest bestsellers such as Sphere, The Terminal Man and Congo were imaginative thrillers based largely on breakthroughs in medical science.
Then there are the dozens of dime-a-dozen fictional doctor-authors who produce reams of surgical terror. Well, not dozens of authors perhaps. But dozens of titles certainly. We’ve even seen one Indian author make a contribution to the genre, although the novel doesn’t seem to have chilled many spines — maybe it scared readers away, heh, heh, heh!
Among the best of the best, there are only two names I’d recommend. Michael Palmer and F. Paul Wilson.
F. Paul Wilson rose to fame with a trilogy of novels — The Keep, The Touch, and The Tomb. All three were suspense-horror thrillers with nothing else in common. The Keep was a vampire mystery set in WWII times. The Tomb was also a chilling horror novel. While The Touch was a medical horror thriller about a man who develops the power to heal — or kill — through physical contact alone.
All three of those books are regarded as classics of horror/suspense and their original editions are collector’s items. If you get your hands on them now, consider yourself lucky and don’t let them out of your sight, even after you finish reading them.
After a considerable gap, during which he continued his own medical practise (yes, he’s a qualified and successful MD too), Wilson began writing straightforward thrillers set against the backdrop of medical science. He continues to publish these even today, at the rate of about one a year, often in collaboration with other authors.
Of these, the best by far is a novel entitled The Foundation. A tale of a medical college where a young student discovers grisly goings-on, this excellent thriller is reminiscent of the best parts of Crichton’s Coma, which you might remember by the equally effective film of the same name starring Michael Douglas and Genevieve Bujold.
Wilson’s other medical thrillers are always readable and enjoyable, but they tend to be almost too neatly put-together at times. Having read so many thrillers, I tend to see the whole plot laid out before me after reading just a chapter or two, which sort of spoils it for me. But if you haven’t read a lot of medical thrillers and don’t want too much gore and gristle, then Wilson delivers a fast-paced, fun read with believable characters, authentic science research, and interesting political plots.
But my personal Master of The Golden Scalpel award goes to Michael Palmer. He’s the finest medical thriller writer ever to work in the genre, in my opinion. And that’s no idle hype.
Palmer is also a practising physician, and his medical knowledge is as accurate and authentic as anyone else’s. Certainly far superior to my own family doctor’s knowledge! Whether he’s telling about a new drug to treat angina or a new procedure for surgically removing brain tumors, you know you’re in safe hands.
But that’s not what makes Palmer the master of medical mayhem.
It’s his characters. This is the one medical thriller author who has the ability to create believable, likeable, identifiable characters with real lives, real problems, real predicaments. Unlike say, Crichton, who gets overawed by his scientific ideas, or Wilson who focusses more on plot and pace, Palmer makes you care about his people.
And caring, as Stephen King once wrote, is the key to creating effective fiction. If you don’t care enough about the characters, you won’t care what happens to them.
With Palmer’s books, you care enough to get involved in the characters’ problems and situations. So when the plot unfolds in twists and turns, embroiling the protagonist in an imbroglio of murder and paranoia, you’re caught up with him or her and swept along for the ride.
Even in the only film made to date from his novels (although several have been optioned and might make it to the screen someday), Extreme Measures, it’s protagonist Hugh Grant’s personal problems that scare us more than the larger medical conspiracy going on. We don’t want this guy to lose his job, to have his reputation besmirched, and most of all, to die.
As another great story-teller, Alfred Hitchcock once put it. Great terror is the art of showing us a woman who goes down a dark staircase at the bottom of which is a beastial ax-murderer. If, by the time that woman goes down those stairs, we don’t care enough about her, the killer might as well chop her head off and we wouldn’t waste time yawning.
You’ll never yawn in a Michael Palmer novel. That’s a promise I can make based on my own sleepless nights.
The other thing about him is that virtually all his novels are equally good. I’ve read all of them so far except the first one, titled The Sisterhood, which I’m told is the best. I absolutely loved Side Effects, Flashback, Extreme Measures (even better than the movie), Natural Causes, Silent Treatment, Critical Judgement, Miracle Cure and his latest, The Patient.
Once you’ve got through Palmer, Wilson, Crichton and all the usual suspects, there isn’t much more to discover in this genre. There’s the occasional novel like The M.D. by Thomas Disch, which has a great two hundred pages then falls apart like a badly bound exercise book at school.
Or the Alex Delaware series by Jonathon Kellerman which deal more with psychological medical science than physiological and therefore isn’t really in the same category.
Or even the forensic pathological thrillers of Patricia Cornwell and Kathe Reichs, which are now fast becoming a genre unto themselves.
Or even the more medically oriented thrillers that Jeffrey Deaver sometimes writes, like his excellent The Bone Collector (also made into a superb film).
Or those timeless medical soap-suspense novels of Henry Denker or Jonathan Fast.
But for consistent, book-after-book, year-after-year, medical suspense, there’s only one name to really beat on the antiseptic block. That’s Michael Palmer. His scalpel slices deepest. Beware.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 9th, 2005 at 12:42 pm. It is filed under Ashok.
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