Seven top conspiracy thrillers from the 1970s

Daniel Palmer is a critically acclaimed suspense novelist.

One of his seven favorite conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, as shared at CrimeReads:

Thomas Harris, Black Sunday

The 1975 novel by Thomas Harris (yes, the same Thomas Harris who gave us Hannibal Lecter) deals with a pact between Michael Lander, a pilot who flies the Aldrich Blimp over NFL football games, and Black September, the terrorist organization responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Lander, a former POW from the Vietnam War, is deranged and angry at all the happy football fans he helps film from high above, which is why he’s willing to kill himself and take as many people as possible with him in the process. Like The Day of the Jackal, the book is a hunt as American and Israeli intelligence forces track the path of explosives into the country that will eventually lead them to a blimp bomb made of plastique and a quarter million steel darts. Harris makes the case that conspiracies don’t have to involve shadowy governments to be terrifying. He also portrays how war can do an equally good job of creating killers as any covert government operation. Black Sunday was the novel my father returned to on many occasions when he needed reminders of how to build suspense to a knuckle-whitening degree.

Learn about another book on the list.

Black Sunday is among Howard Gordon's five best thrillers with terror themes and Gerald Seymour's five riveting novels about terrorism.

--Marshal Zeringue