FICTION: GENRE
Pulp Adventure
26 books
Pulp adventure asks only one thing of you: keep reading. Twenty-five books in the tradition of stories built for momentum — men against the wilderness, against other men, against impossible odds, against their own limitations. The genre covers treasure hunters and soldiers of fortune and sea captains and jungle explorers and frontier scouts, all of them engaged in the fundamental activity that pulp fiction has always celebrated: doing something dangerous in a place far from home. Some of these are classics of the form, some are underread masterpieces, and a few are here because they're simply the most entertaining books on any list in this collection. None of them waste your time. All of them remember that reading is supposed to be fun.
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The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
The greatest adventure novel ever written, and it isn't particularly close. Edmond Dantès — a young sailor on the verge of everything he ever wanted — is falsely imprisoned through the treachery of men he trusted, spends fourteen years in a dungeon learning from a brilliant fellow prisoner, escapes, discovers a vast hidden treasure, and methodically destroys every man responsible for his ruin. Dumas plots with a clockwork precision that makes 1,200 pages feel like 300, and the satisfaction of watching Dantès execute his revenge — patient, elegant, utterly merciless — is one of the great pleasures in all of fiction. If you've been putting this one off because of the length, stop. There is no better use of that many hours.
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Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
Already on the AoM lists and the template for every buried treasure, desert island, and pirate adventure that came after it. Long John Silver is one of the great villains in English literature — charming, capable, and entirely without principle — and young Jim Hawkins is one of the great coming-of-age protagonists. Stevenson wrote it to entertain a bored stepson on a rainy Scottish holiday and accidentally invented a genre. It remains one of the most purely enjoyable reading experiences in the English language.
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Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson's other adventure masterpiece, and the one most men haven't read. David Balfour, a young Scottish orphan, is kidnapped by his villainous uncle and sold onto a ship bound for the Carolinas. He escapes off the Scottish coast and must cross the Highlands with Alan Breck Stewart — a Jacobite rebel, a magnificent swordsman, and one of the great supporting characters in adventure fiction — while being hunted by the British army. If you loved Treasure Island as a boy, this is the book you should have read next.
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The Three Musketeers (and sequels)
Alexandre Dumas
Young d'Artagnan arrives in Paris from Gascony with nothing but a broken-down horse and an absolute conviction that he is destined for glory. Within days he has somehow ended up as the friend of all three of the King's musketeers. What follows is one of the great adventure novels of the 19th century — swordfights, palace intrigue, a villainous cardinal, and the most famous expression of male camaraderie in all of fiction. The sequels, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne (which contains the Man in the Iron Mask sequence), extend the story across decades and are well worth the investment. All for one.
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King Solomon's Mines
H. Rider Haggard
The book that invented the lost civilization adventure subgenre — the template for every Indiana Jones film, every Allan Quatermain knockoff, every tale of hunters and ancient African kingdoms that followed it. Haggard wrote it in six weeks on a bet and produced one of the most purely propulsive adventure novels of the Victorian era. Allan Quatermain — aging, self-deprecating, supremely competent in the bush — leads an expedition into unmapped Africa in search of a legendary diamond mine and finds considerably more than he bargained for. The sleeper hit entry on this list: almost everyone has heard of it and very few have actually read it.
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She: A History of Adventure
H. Rider Haggard
Haggard's other masterpiece and in many ways the more remarkable book. Two men travel to the African interior following an ancient family legend and find Ayesha — She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed — an immortal queen who has ruled a hidden kingdom for two thousand years, waiting for the reincarnation of the man she once loved and killed. It sounds like the fever dream of a Victorian pulp writer, which is exactly what it is, and it is magnificent. Carl Jung considered Ayesha one of the great archetypes in Western fiction. Haggard's imagination runs completely wild and the result is one of the strangest and most gripping adventure novels ever written.
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The Prisoner of Zenda
Anthony Hope
A vacationing Englishman named Rudolf Rassendyll discovers he is the spitting image of the King of Ruritania — a distant cousin — and when the king is drugged and kidnapped on the eve of his coronation, Rassendyll is persuaded to impersonate him to prevent a coup. Hope wrote it in four weeks in 1894 and the novel was such an immediate sensation that "Ruritanian romance" became its own genre. It is pure wish fulfillment — an ordinary man dropped into an extraordinary situation and discovering he is equal to it — executed with a wit and a pace that have kept it in print for over a century.
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Captain Blood
Rafael Sabatini
Sabatini is the great forgotten master of the swashbuckling adventure novel, and Captain Blood is his best. Peter Blood — Irish doctor, man of principle — is sold into slavery in the Caribbean after being wrongly convicted of treason, escapes, captures a Spanish warship, becomes a pirate captain, and spends the rest of the novel doing what any reasonable man would do in his position: sailing the Caribbean, outsmarting the Spanish, and settling old scores with enormous panache. Sabatini writes action sequences with a clarity and momentum that most modern thriller writers would envy. The 1935 Errol Flynn film is a classic. The novel is better.
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Scaramouche
Rafael Sabatini
Some readers prefer this one to Captain Blood. André-Louis Moreau is a lawyer's son in pre-Revolutionary France who witnesses the murder of his best friend by an aristocrat and decides to take matters into his own hands. He becomes an actor, then a swordsman, then a revolutionary politician, pursuing his enemy across the chaos of the French Revolution with a theatrical flair that gives the novel its irresistible energy. The opening line — "He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad" — is one of the great first lines in English adventure fiction.
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The Call of the Wild & White Fang
Jack London
Already on the AoM lists and paired here as the two sides of the same coin. The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a pampered California dog sold into service as a Yukon sled dog during the Gold Rush, and his gradual return to the wild instincts that civilization had buried. White Fang reverses the journey: a wolf-dog born in the wilderness is gradually domesticated by human love. London wrote both at white heat and the elemental energy shows on every page. Read them back to back.
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The Sea Wolf
Jack London
Less famous than The Call of the Wild but arguably the more impressive achievement. A literary critic is rescued from a shipwreck by a sealing schooner captained by Wolf Larsen — one of the great villains in American fiction, a man of enormous physical strength and genuine intellectual power who operates by a philosophy of pure Social Darwinism. The philosophical debates between the narrator and Larsen are as good as anything in the novel-of-ideas tradition, and the adventure plot that surrounds them is first-rate. A genuine sleeper hit.
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The Man Who Would Be King
Rudyard Kipling
A novella short enough to read in an afternoon that Graham Greene called the best short story in the English language. Two British adventurers in colonial India decide that India isn't big enough for their ambitions and set off to conquer Kafiristan, a remote mountain kingdom where no white man has gone. They succeed beyond all reasonable expectation, and then one of them makes a fatal mistake. Kipling based it loosely on a real figure, and the story's exploration of ambition, hubris, and the seductive madness of empire has never been surpassed in short fiction.
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The Jules Verne Library (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / Journey to the Center of the Earth / Around the World in Eighty Days / The Mysterious Island)
Jules Verne
Verne invented the science fiction adventure novel and four of his books deserve a place on any serious adventure reading list. Twenty Thousand Leagues gives you Captain Nemo and the Nautilus — the most iconic submarine in literature. Journey to the Center of the Earth sends a professor, his nephew, and an Icelandic guide down a volcanic shaft into a world that shouldn't exist. Around the World in Eighty Days is the great wager novel, Phileas Fogg betting his fortune and his freedom on a feat of precision travel. The Mysterious Island is the survival epic, five castaways building a civilization from scratch on an uncharted island with nothing but their knowledge and their ingenuity. Start wherever you like. They all reward.
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The Lost World
Arthur Conan Doyle
Doyle's other great creation, Professor George Edward Challenger — enormous, bellicose, intellectually arrogant, and almost certainly right about everything — leads an expedition to a South American plateau where prehistoric creatures have survived into the 20th century. Doyle wrote it as a deliberate romp and the result is one of the most purely fun adventure novels of the Edwardian era. Challenger is the anti-Holmes: where Holmes is cool and precise, Challenger is explosive and physical, and the novel has an energy that the Sherlock stories, for all their brilliance, rarely match.
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Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
The first English novel and the first survival adventure, published in 1719. A merchant sailor is shipwrecked on a deserted island off the coast of Venezuela and spends twenty-eight years building a life from nothing — shelter, food, tools, agriculture, and eventually a social order — before he is rescued. Defoe writes it as a practical manual as much as a narrative, and the pleasure is in the specificity: exactly how Crusoe solves each problem, what he salvages from the wreck, how he constructs his fortifications. Every survival story, desert island scenario, and castaway narrative written in the three centuries since owes its existence to this book.
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Beau Geste
P.C. Wren
Three English brothers — Beau, Digby, and John Geste — enlist in the French Foreign Legion under mysterious circumstances, and the novel opens with a desert fort full of dead legionnaires propped at their firing positions with no explanation. What follows, told in flashback, is one of the great adventure stories of the early 20th century: the Legion, the Sahara, a sadistic sergeant, a stolen sapphire called the Blue Water, and three brothers who would each die for the others without a second thought. The code of honor at the novel's center — and the specific question of why Beau Geste stole the jewel — makes it considerably more than a straightforward adventure.
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The Riddle of the Sands
Erskine Childers
The most important thriller you've never heard of. Two British yachtsmen on a sailing holiday in the German Frisian Islands stumble onto evidence of a secret German plan to invade England — years before World War I. Childers wrote it in 1903 as a genuine warning to the British government about their undefended coastline and the novel is so specific in its sailing detail that it reads like a manual as much as a thriller. Churchill read it. The German High Command reportedly read it. It is also one of the most atmospheric adventure novels ever written: the grey North Sea, the shifting sandbars, the fog, and two ordinary men discovering they are the only people who know something that matters enormously.
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The Tarzan Series
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Burroughs created Tarzan in 1912 and the character has never gone out of print, which tells you everything you need to know about the power of the premise. An English aristocrat orphaned as an infant in the African jungle and raised by apes grows up to be simultaneously the most civilized and the most savage man alive — fluent in the law of the jungle and, eventually, in the drawing rooms of Europe. The first novel, Tarzan of the Apes, is the one to start with, and the sequels — particularly The Return of Tarzan and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar — are well worth continuing. Burroughs also created John Carter of Mars, whose first volume A Princess of Mars is equally worth your time and takes the pulp adventure into planetary romance territory.
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The Courtney Series
Wilbur Smith
Smith is the direct heir to Haggard — African adventure on an enormous canvas, spanning centuries and continents, written with a narrative drive that makes 500-page novels disappear in a weekend. The Courtney series, which follows the Courtney family from 17th century South Africa through the modern era, is the place to start, with When the Lion Feeds as the entry point. Smith writes action, landscape, and the specific texture of southern African history better than anyone who has ever put words to paper on the subject. A genuine discovery for readers who didn't know this territory existed.
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The Dirk Pitt Series
Clive Cussler
Dirk Pitt is what you'd get if you crossed James Bond with Jacques Cousteau and gave the result a collection of classic cars and an unlimited budget for underwater adventure. NUMA director, former Air Force major, deep-sea expert, and accidental hero of roughly two dozen novels in which the fate of the world regularly hinges on his ability to improvise under water. Raise the Titanic is the classic entry point, Sahara is arguably the most fun. Cussler is unapologetically pulp — the plots are preposterous, the action is relentless, and the reading experience is pure pleasure. Exactly what airplane books were invented for.
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Sharpe's Rifles (and the Sharpe series)
Bernard Cornwell
Cornwell is the best living writer of historical action-adventure, and Richard Sharpe — a common soldier who rises through the ranks of Wellington's army through sheer competence and ferocity — is his greatest creation. The Napoleonic Wars provide an almost inexhaustible backdrop, and Cornwell's research is as meticulous as his action sequences are visceral. Start with Sharpe's Rifles, which introduces Sharpe in the Peninsula Campaign of 1809, and continue as far as the series takes you — there are twenty-four novels and they are remarkably consistent in quality. The Sean Bean television adaptations are excellent. The books are better.
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The Jack Reacher Series
Lee Child
Jack Reacher — former U.S. Army Military Police major, six foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds, no fixed address, no phone, no car, traveling the country with nothing but a folding toothbrush and a habit of walking into situations that need straightening out — is the great American pulp hero of the last thirty years. Child writes action with a technical precision that makes every confrontation feel like a physics problem being solved in real time, and Reacher himself is one of those rare fictional creations who feels genuinely inevitable: the only possible person for these particular situations. Start with Killing Floor, the first novel, or with One Shot, which became the first Tom Cruise film. Either works.
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The Mitch Rapp Series
Vince Flynn
Flynn created CIA counterterrorism operative Mitch Rapp in 1999 and spent the next decade writing the best American espionage-action series of the post-Cold War era. Where le Carré gives you the moral complexity of the intelligence world and Fleming gives you the fantasy, Flynn gives you the operational reality of the War on Terror as it might be conducted by a man without institutional constraints and with a very specific set of skills. American Assassin, the origin story, is the place to start. The series seeds naturally into the GWOT history list elsewhere in this collection.
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The Martian
Andy Weir
An astronaut is accidentally left behind on Mars when his crew evacuates during an emergency. He has enough food for thirty days. The next scheduled Mars mission arrives in four years. What follows is one of the most purely enjoyable survival adventure novels of the 21st century — a meticulous, funny, relentlessly optimistic account of a man solving an almost infinite series of engineering problems with whatever he has on hand. Weir spent years doing the actual math to make every solution work, and the novel reads like the best possible version of a very hard problem being solved by a very competent person who refuses to stop. The Matt Damon film is excellent. The book has more math and more jokes.
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Ice Station
Matthew Reilly
Reilly is an Australian writer who decided early in his career that the way to write action-adventure fiction was to end every single chapter on a cliffhanger and never let the reader breathe for five hundred pages. Ice Station — U.S. Marines, a remote Antarctic research station, a discovered spacecraft under the ice, and approximately every special forces unit on the planet converging to claim it — is his debut novel and still his best. It is completely, gloriously shameless: the plot is preposterous, the action is relentless, and the reading experience is like watching a very expensive action film that never slows down. You will miss your connecting plane.
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Tarzan of the Apes
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Burroughs created Tarzan in 1912 and the character has never gone out of print, which tells you everything you need to know about the power of the premise. An English aristocrat orphaned as an infant in the African jungle and raised by apes grows up to be simultaneously the most civilized and the most savage man alive — fluent in the law of the jungle and, eventually, in the drawing rooms of Europe. The first novel, Tarzan of the Apes, is the one to start with, and the sequels — particularly The Return of Tarzan and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar — are well worth continuing. Burroughs also created John Carter of Mars, whose first volume A Princess of Mars is equally worth your time and takes the pulp adventure into planetary romance territory.