Excerpted and adapted from the introduction to Anderson's The Triumph of the Thriller (Reviews, Nov. 13), in which the author, who reviews thrillers forthe Washington Post, argues that the modern crime thriller is the new mainstream of American popular fiction. He states that its finest practitioners are among the best novelists in America today, regardless of genre.
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 thrillers manage some sort of happy ending. They have it both ways, reminding us how ugly and dangerous our society can be and yet offering hope in the end. Thrillers provide the illusion of order and justice in a world that often seems to have none.
Of course, we read for fun too. We love the excitement of suspense. We want to know whodunit. Indeed, these days, we love suspense more than sex, at least in books. In the '50s and '60s, sex was a huge element in popular fiction, from I, the Juryto Peyton Placeto Portnoy's Complaintand countless others. Today, we're up to our ears in sex. Who wants to readabout it? The books I'm discussing contain relatively little sex and dirty talk, nothing like what we endure on HBO. In the modern thriller, suspense has replaced sex as the engine that drives popular fiction.
As thrillers have become more popular and their potential rewards greater, more of the most talented young writers, those who a generation ago would have produced anguished novels about their unhappy childhoods, are instead trying to become the next Grisham or Grafton. The level of their work has risen until the best of today's thrillers are the white-hot center of American fiction. We hear talk about this or that "golden age" of yesteryear. Forget it. Right here, right now, is the golden age of thrillers, some of which transcend genre. The Silence of the Lambs and Mystic Riverare excellent examples. Both novels—and the Oscar-winning movies made from them—are vastly more sophisticated and powerful than their counterparts from earlier eras. Since 1992, Michael Connelly has been turning out the best crime series anyone has ever written, the Harry Bosch novels. And I applaud PW for including novels by Peter Abrahams, Adrian McKinty and George Pelecanos on its list of the best books of the year, alongside those of Richard Ford and Cormac McCarthy. That's where they belong.
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