The Triumph of the Thriller
Mar 10th, 2007 by Debra Murphy
The New York Times online has published the first chapter of Patrick Anderson’s book, The Triumph of the Thriller, which charts the change in American reading habits (as judged by bestseller lists) over the last forty years.
Here’s an excerpt:
“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.”
Anderson offers several possible reasons for this shift, but here’s the one I personally find most compelling:
“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…. 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.”
My family and I have often noticed, for instance, that our autistic son, Luke, who has reasons to feel more vulnerable in this already scary world than the rest of us, often translates the fear we all feel, but which must seem overwhelming for him at times, into what we’ve come to call his “catastrophic imagination.” He’ll purposely make up stories of planet-killing natural catastrophes or mass-murderers being bested by tall majestic heroines, I think because that helps him deal with some of the scary things he hears about every day, from the TV news to movies to discussions in the classroom.
For my own part, I know full well that one of the reasons my first novel took on the thriller aspect it did was because I’m few things in life scare me more than the thought of being in the power (or someone I love being in the power) of a conscienceless sociopath—almost the definition of the diabolic, in personality terms. Writing a story in which grace builds on nature to combat such a threat was I think a means of “working it out”, psychologically and spiritually speaking.
