Harry's Game

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Thrillers exist for one purpose only — to entertain, to ‘thrill’ — and for that reason are among the most ephemeral of literary forms. Bought, read, discarded and forgotten inside a fortnight: such is the life-cycle of the average thriller.

But every so often the genre throws up a novel of such remarkable quality, the cycle is broken. Having finished it you don’t want to throw it out: on the contrary, you press it on your friends. You don’t forget it: its characters and atmosphere linger in your mind for years. John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is a superlative example. So is Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, and Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park. These are thrillers that have justly become classics of popular entertainment — novels that are likely to endure well into the next century — and this is the pantheon to which Harry’s Game belongs.

Published in 1975, it was Gerald Seymour’s first novel and has never been out of print since. Time (‘that old common arbitrator’ as Shakespeare called it) has judged it a classic — and for three good reasons.

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