Plots to kill have a powerful appeal for narrative plotters, including novelist Jonathan Lee. Here are some of his favourites, From Hilary Mantel to Ian Fleming
What is it that makes assassination attempts so fascinating to fiction writers? I asked myself this as I was researching High Dive, my novel based around the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984 – an attempt to kill Margaret Thatcher that resulted in the deaths of five people and the suffering of many more. In coming up with a list of 10 assassination plots in fiction, there were so many novels and stories to choose from that I’ve had to make some unforgivable omissions.
Where’s Graham Greene’s The Quiet American? John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps? Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted, James Ellroy’s American Tabloid? Why such a proliferation of assassination plots from well-known writers? Perhaps anyone who spends his or her days building stories, forming a web of events, deciding who within that web may live and may not, is inclined sometimes to try and imagine what it must be like to hatch a real-world plot on an awful scale – one that might change the course of history. What would it be like to be Lee Harvey Oswald, holding a whole nation’s narrative in your hands?
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