‘The attitude among the intellectuals was that Dumas wasn’t good enough. It’s taken the French 200 years to realise that telling a good story is actually worthwhile and they’re putting statues up now.” Jeffery Archer on his favourite bestsellers (not by him).

The bestselling author of legal thriller Presumed Innocent tells us about his own favourite legal novels.

A good thriller isn’t about the violence or bloodshed, it’s about making the reader feel off-balance and as if something isn’t quite right, says bestselling author Tess Gerritsen. She tells us about her own favourite thrillers.

The celebrated Swedish crime-writing duo take turns to recommend gripping and grisly Scandinavian thrillers, as well as to tell us about visiting prison – and being in it

The bestselling author of The Righteous Men tells us how his other job as a political journalist helps with thriller writing, and what makes le Carré, Forsyth and Buchan such masters of their trade

The best crime novels grip you right from the first sentence and don’t let go, says best-selling crime author, Peter James. He picks his own favourite crime novels.

From the psychological terror of a haunted house to the spectral dread of an indescribable colour, the British horror writer recommends five disturbing tales to get you in the mood for Halloween

Plot is king, says bestselling thriller writer Simon Kernick of his chosen genre. He lists five of his all-time favourites

Veteran crime writer, Simon Brett, tells us what makes a great whodunnit and selects his five favourites of all time.

We learn much more from failure than we do from success, says Irvine Welsh. The author of Trainspotting recommends his own favourite crime novels.

The right-wing journalist says the Left has been liberated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and that speech is probably freer in modern Russia than it is in Britain. Peter Hitchens recommends some great anti-Communist thrillers.

Author Jeremy Duns says Maksim Isaev was a kind of Soviet James Bond and when they rerun the old black and white TV shows the Russian crime rate drops because everyone is indoors watching them

Five classic chase stories, nominated by the internationally bestselling author. A world of jailbreaks, secret documents, beautiful heroines, honour, revenge, death and glory

Novelist Simon Mawer picks his favourite books on forgiveness.

Author Matt Lynn says that good thrillers need a sense of foreboding and tension – and a brilliant central character. “The thriller has always been a very political genre, a kind of snapshot in time”

The British public-school system, with its hidden homosexuality and feelings of loneliness, encouraged subterfuge and led to a generation of great spy writers and spies, suggests author and journalist Ben Macintyre. He picks the best books on spies.

Leading British spy writer Charles Cumming found his vocation at 25 after he was approached by MI6. He says that experience, brief but interesting, was crying out to be dramatised

Best-selling author says the elements you need to write a perfect thriller are a brilliant central character, some link to reality, and an inanimate object around which the human story revolves.

Dracula, I am Legend, Edgar Allen Poe and Louis Stevenson all make the novelist and horror expert’s list. But the most terrifying horror moment for him is when a book is burnt in the Stephen King novel Misery