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 Worldincredibly 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 schlockbut 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 Christieto 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 toAnderson, Patrick is the author of 'Triumph of the Thriller How Cops, Crooks, And Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345481238 and ISBN 0345481232.