The “Big 3” of Medical Thrillers: Authors that Changed the Game

The suspense thriller is a hugely popular fiction genre…

…right up there with mysteries and romance. It started with the classic spy novels of Ian Fleming, John LeCarre, and Helen MacInnes and matured with the international political thrillers of Tom Clancy and Lee Child. Other authors in this seminal form of the genre include Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth, and Ken Follett. These stories all feature espionage or military professionals deploying an array of sophisticated weapons and gadgets and displaying feats of super-human physical skill. The story starts when they get their orders: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”

But in a medical thriller, the hero is a doctor who stumbles into danger or gets tangled in an evil scheme. It’s the story of an Everyman who must rise to his or her full potential in the face of peril. 

These three authors are the innovators and masters of the medical thriller:

Robin Cook.

The whole genre started with his first book, Coma (1977)—and you should, too. The heroine, Susan Wheeler, is a third-year medical student who notices suspicious, inexplicable complications of several routine surgeries—the patients never wake up. Other notable titles among his almost forty novels include Toxin, Chromosome 6, and Fatal Cure. 

Michael Palmer.

After reading Coma, Palmer was inspired to try his hand at writing, too. The result was his 1982 debut novel, The Sisterhood. Many other books followed, twenty-one in all. Exemplary titles include Extreme Measures, Critical Judgment, Fatal, and The Patient. Palmer died in 2013. His last novel, Resistant, was published posthumously in 2014.

Michael Crichton.

Despite my inclusion of Crichton among the Big 3 of medical thriller authors, he doesn’t always adhere to the main convention of the genre, namely that the hero of the story be a medical professional. Genre-hopping Crichton also wrote historical fiction, time travel sci-fi, and murder mystery. He is best known for his biotech thriller Jurassic Park and his creative role in the long running TV series ER (1994-2009). Notable medical & biotech thrillers: The Andromeda Strain, Sphere, Prey, Congo, and Next. 

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