Your favourite novelists?

I mentioned Norm’s latest poll in which he asks:

you to send in the list of your favourite English-language novelists. Note that I ask for your favourites and not for those whom you consider to be the greatest (should the first group not coincide with the second).

My selections, in no particular order:

PG Wodehouse
RL Stevenson
Evelyn Waugh
F Scott Fitzgerald
Raymond Chandler
John Buchan
Gore Vidal
Flann O’Brien
Ernest Hemingway
James Kennaway

Plus, as I’ve said, William McIlvanney as my absent-mindedly forgotten 11th choice. UPDATE: Ooops, I forgot Patrick O’Brian too. That makes an even dozen then. If pressed, he and McIlvanney would be included at the expense of Hemingway and Flann O’Brien.

No women you will notice, and*, RLS aside, nobody from the 19th century either. The former is, I guess, just one of those things; the latter more a testament to the fact that my favourite 19th century authors – Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dumas, Zola – are Russian or French and thus ineligible for consideration.