The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction

Chapter 1

A New Beat

In 2000, Marie Arana, the editor of The Washington Post Book World, put me on the thriller beat. I had for years reviewed both fiction and nonfiction for Book World, but now Marie wanted me to focus on the crime-related novels that have come to dominate the best-seller lists. Soon I began reviewing a new book each Monday in the Post’s freewheeling Style section.

Over the years, reading purely for pleasure, I’d become a fan of such writers as John D. MacDonald, Lawrence Sanders, Elmore Leonard, Ross Thomas, Ed McBain, James Lee Burke, Thomas Harris, and Michael Connelly. Now, reading thrillers on a regular basis, I learned how much more talent was out there. I discovered people like Dennis Lehane, Ian Rankin, Donna Leon, Robert Littell, George Pelecanos, John Lescroart, and Alan Furst. I reviewed best sellers by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Sue Grafton, John Sandford, James Patterson, and Patricia Cornwell; some I admired, some I deplored, but their success says something about our popular culture. I’ve had the pleasure of telling our readers about new talent like Karin Slaughter, David Corbett, Robert Reuland, and Charlie Huston.

The more I read, the more I was struck by the transformation in America’s reading habits. I grew up with the blockbuster novels of

the 1950s and 1960s, written by people like James Michener, Harold Robbins, John O’Hara, Jacqueline Susann, Herman Wouk, and Irving Stone. They explored sex, money, movie stars, war, religion, and exotic foreign lands but rarely concerned themselves with crime. In those days, crime novels were trapped in the genre ghetto, often published as paperback originals, and rarely won a mass audience.

Today, those blockbuster novelists have been replaced on the best- seller lists by the crime-related fiction we loosely call thrillers, which includes hard-core noir, in the Hammett-Chandler private-eye tradition, as well as a bigger, broader universe of books that includes spy thrillers, legal thrillers, political thrillers, military thrillers, medical thrillers, and even literary thrillers. I have a copy of the December 25, 1966, Book World—incredibly enough, I had a review in it. Starting at the top, the ten authors on the fiction best-seller list are Robert Crichton, Allen Drury, Jacqueline Susann, Rebecca West, Mary Renault, Edwin

O’Connor, James Clavell, Bernard Malamud, Harold Robbins, and Harry Mark Petrakis. Two political novelists, two or three literary writers, two grand masters of sex and schlock—but no crime fiction.

Compare that with a Book World list in February of 2006. By my count, nine of the ten books listed were thrillers, including Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Sue Grafton’s S Is for Silence, and John Lescroart’s The Hunt Club. Another Sunday that month, The New York Times Book Review had fifteen thrillers among its sixteen hardback best sellers, including those on the Post’s list plus Greg Iles’s Turning Angel, and various lesser works. The transformation between the lists in 1966 and 2006 could not be more dramatic. To oversimplify a bit, John Grisham is the new James Michener and The Da Vinci Code is our Gone with the Wind.

In this book, I’ll look back to the origins of modern crime fiction— to writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie—to examine how the modern thriller has evolved. The triumph of the thriller, I call this transformation. We will grapple with questions of definition. Just what is a thriller? How is it different from a mystery or a crime novel? The terminology is far from precise, but let me suggest a few guidelines.

Agatha Christie and her imitators wrote mysteries that stressed intellectual solutions to crimes. Her tradition continues in so- called cozies, which appeal to readers who want no violence, and in more ingenious novels by writers like the American Martha Grimes.

In this country, around 1930, Dashiell Hammett invented the American crime novel, also known as the detective or private-eye novel, and Raymond Chandler built on Hammett’s work. Their hard-boiled tradition prevailed for several decades, but by the 1970s the crime novel began to mutate into something that was bigger, darker, more imaginative, and more violent: the modern thriller. Certain novels have been milestones in expanding the boundaries of the thriller—among them Lawrence Sanders’s The First Deadly Sin, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, John Grisham’s The Firm, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River.

John Updike said this while reviewing Robert Littell’s surreal spy novel Legends in The New Yorker in 2005: “The slippery difference between a thriller and a non-thriller would hardly be worth groping for did not the thriller-writers themselves seem to be restive— chafing to escape, yearning for a less restrictive contract with the reader. They write longer than they used to, with more flourishes.” Updike notes that Agatha Christie’s ambitions never extended past the lean, efficient mysteries she wrote, but “Littell and le Carré and the estimable P. D. James give signs of wanting to be ‘real’ novelists, free to follow character where it takes them and to display their knowledge of the world without the obligation to provide a thrill in every chapter.”

The estimable Updike might have gone further and added a number of other thriller writers to his list of restive souls, many of whom have gone beyond wanting to be real writers to doing it. Novels like Bangkok 8, Hard Revolution, Tropic of Night, Done for a Dime, Red Dragon, Lost Light, and The Way the Crow Flies are simply some of the best fiction being written today.

I had misgivings when Marie put me on the thriller beat. I was an English major in the uptight 1950s, when the high modernists—T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Faulkner—were force-fed to undergraduates, and for years I felt a tremor of guilt when I stooped to popular fiction and certainly to thrillers. A lot of people of my generation felt that way. When my political thriller The President’s Mistress was published in 1976, The Washington Post’s reviewer declared that she locked herself in her office until she finished it. It was, she said, “a Mt. Everest among cliff-hangers.” I was feeling pretty good until she sandbagged me at the end: “Of course, I always did like Chinese food.”

In other words, I’d given her a few hours of guilty pleasure, but I wasn’t a serious writer providing solid sustenance. I was guilty as charged, of course, but consoled by a $250,000 paperback sale and a movie deal. A few years later I saw another review in which that same writer confessed that, after much soul-searching, she had decided it was all right to enjoy popular fiction. I was happy for her.

A lot of people have a hard time making the leap from officially approved “literary” fiction to novels that are fun, and they aren’t all refugees from the fifties. I received an e-mail recently from a college student in Houston, an English major, asking what thrillers he should read—or whether he should read them at all. “I am racked with guilt if I read any of this stuff. Life is short. I haven’t finished all of Dickens or Shakespeare. Do I have time for detective novels?” I could only advise him that life is a lot longer than he at present understands and there is time for, say, Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane along with Dickens and Shakespeare.

The more I read, the more I saw that Marie, in putting me on the thriller beat, had given me the new mainstream of American popular fiction to splash about in. I want to examine this new mainstream and how it came about. I want to show who the good writers are and why— and, to a lesser degree, who some bad ones are and why. It seems to me beyond dispute that the level of talent at work today in thrillers and crime fiction is superior to anything that has previously existed in America or Great Britain. I say this having recently reread a number of acclaimed crime novels that I first read several decades ago. Alas, the books we loved in our youth, like the sweet young things we dallied with, have not always aged well. Our memories play tricks on us and often we have been misled by movies that vastly improved the original material. Nostalgia is the sweetest of drugs, but it will cloud our minds, distort our memories, and lead us into error if we let it.

We must ask why thrillers have become increasingly popular. Of course, stories of danger and suspense have always had visceral appeal. Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series, once summed this up nicely:

In human evolution we developed language, we developed storytelling, and that must have been for a serious purpose. I think right from the caveman days, we had stories that involved danger and peril, and eventually safety and resolution. To me that is the story. And that’s what we’re still telling today, 100,000 years later. That’s what a page-turner is.

But there are contemporary reasons for the triumph of the thriller as well. One is the transformation of the book business. Once hailed as a “gentleman’s profession,” publishing today is more like a barroom brawl as corporate takeovers have intensified bottom-line pressures on editors. And the bottom line is that thrillers sell, which means there is a continuing scramble to find the writers who can produce books that translate into corporate profits. There are other social and cultural factors, of course. Decades of war, recession, and political and corporate corruption have made Americans more cynical— or realistic—and thus more open to novels that examine the dark side of our society. And yet most thri...