In electoral politics the conventional wisdom is that success comes from an
appeal to the centre. The same conviction now seems to hold sway in writing
and publishing. It is hard to be certain when it began, but in recent years
publishers have grown increasingly fond of describing books as “literary
thrillers”. This can mean various things: for example, books whose suspense
is located among literary materials, such as Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto
Eco, or among people with literary preoccupations, such as Donna Tartt’s The
Secret History. At a stretch, the phrase might be applied to markedly
discursive and “literary” works such as the novels of Javier Marias; but it
can also signify genre fiction which the “literary” reader would not be
ashamed of enjoying, including the books of John le Carré, Alan Furst,
Robert, and at one time Thomas, Harris. (There are of course religious
conspiracy thrillers deriving from ancient manuscripts, written in imitation
of Dan Brown, the Enid Blyton of the arcane, which now have a section to
themselves in some bookshops, presumably in happy ignorance of the prophetic
satire delivered by Umberto Eco twenty years ago.)
Clearly, as with all categories in which commerce has an interest, the terms
are unstable, subject to reinvention as required. The novels of Barbara Vine
are, or were to begin with (in the fine A Dark-Adapted Eye), more “literary”
than those written under the real name of her creator, Ruth Rendell. John
Banville has recently developed a crime-writing alter ego, Benjamin Black.
Brian Moore moved over wholly to thrillers at the end of his career. From
the other side of the house, writers of genre fiction are sometimes
resentful of the cachet attaching to the “literary” novel, and the waters
were tested recently when Tom Rob Smith’s thriller Child 44, about a serial
killer in the USSR, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was based on an
interesting idea, but Smith lost control of tone and pace at about the
halfway point. And at the same time as thriller writers want (or their
publishers want them) to be more “literary”, or for the “literary” to count
for less (whichever is quicker), the term “literary fiction” is ceasing to
be a description and becoming a category, showing signs of developing a set
of characteristics and constraints equivalent to those of the very forms of
genre fiction that “literary” fiction once unquestionably outweighed and
surmounted. All that is solid melts into air.
Is this a cause for anxiety? The thriller has a long and honourable lineage
including Stevenson, Conrad, Buchan, Greene, Ambler, Household and so on,
leading on to the superior thrillers of the present day, works of serious
intent by the likes of Martin Cruz Smith (Russia as a gangster state) and
Chris Petit (the Bush family’s trade links with the Nazis). Meanwhile, in
the next street, there are crime writers such as Elmore Leonard and Laurence
Block, whose work, though they might not thank you for saying so, has a rich
poetics of its own, emerging from economy of form. Yet a certain disquiet
persists.
Glen Duncan’s new novel A Day and a Night and a Day tells of the rendition and
torture of Augustus Rose, a black American with an Italian mother, seized in
Madrid by the CIA. Rose’s conversations with his torturer, Harper, form the
book’s core, while Rose also revisits his life to date, his activism in the
1960s and his broken marriage to the beautiful WASP, Selina. This absorbing
book is entirely serious in intent: the scenes of torture are few and
concentrate on the experience of pain rather than the details of how it is
caused. There is none of the Tarantinoid smirking which mars John Macken’s
Breaking Point, a brisk though slightly mechanical thriller about incipient
genetic fascism in a special Metropolitan Police unit, during which a
psychopath shoves a lighted cigar up his victim’s nose. (Macken, by the way,
can clearly write a book better than he either wishes or has been encouraged
to do.) Yet A Day and a Night and a Day relies on familiar tropes – revenge,
flight, redemption – which seem at odds with the teeming aphoristic
excitement of its efforts to align Harper’s culture-hungry postmodern mind
with gloves-off state terror. It recalls a very different work, Don
DeLillo’s Kennedy assassination novel, Libra, but it lacks DeLillo’s
ultimate faith in the power of obliquity. Strangely, the most interesting
element, Rose’s involvement in an organization which kills terrorists (he is
arrested after infiltrating a jihadist group), receives almost no attention,
as if pace has outbid subject – which is perhaps one of the defining
features of the echt thriller.
In the case of John Grisham’s The Associate pace has also more or less seen
off plot. A young lawyer is blackmailed into spying on his own firm by the
threatened revival of an alleged rape case from his college years. He evades
nemesis and leaves the city to join his father’s small-town law firm.
Readers may spot a moral here, but they may be more struck by the sense that
the author is, like them, waiting for it all to end. It is like reading
toothpaste, but without the unbearable excitement. The judgement that counts
in this sphere – the one delivered by readers posting reviews on Amazon – is
that this is poor stuff by Grisham’s standards, but, as with Patricia
Cornwell, who now seems to find the English language inadequate to her
requirements, that view will have little commercial effect. Film and
television can handle this material more successfully than books: much of
the thriller audience is more skilled in reading film than print, and film
can avoid lengthy passages of exposition à la Grisham, as well as the
bizarre round robins, detailing the emotional lives of characters we can
barely tell apart, which clutter Alex Kava’s Exposed (a series novel
featuring an FBI profiler, Maggie O’Dell). Kava, like Grisham, lacks any
idea of voice or atmosphere, preferring to remind us repeatedly of how
smart, tough, ruthless and compassionate the characters are. She writes
without vitality, but is by no means the worst in her field. Nor is Dean
Koontz, whose medical thriller Your Heart Belongs to Me opens in a world
which is perhaps only visible from an airport bookstall, of talented men and
beautiful women living lives of almost supernatural comfort as the result of
their labours, until (none too soon) evil intervenes. Some might object that
these books are simply fantasies, means of escape – but from what and to
where? And why does language, albeit in tatters, have to get dragged in?
In absolute contrast, Josh Bazell’s ferocious Beat the Reaper finds a cruelly
funny and inventive voice in Dr Peter Brown, aka Pietro Brnwa, a Manhattan
hospital doctor and retired hit man who unluckily finds himself treating
figures from his Mafia past. The book is fuelled by flights of nihilistic
wit and by an exuberant contempt for criminals, the law, rednecks, the US
healthcare system, the British, anti-Semites and anyone else who happens to
be in the way. Despite its burning-rubber pace it is full of instructive
footnotes about medicine, the law and various popular misconceptions that
the author knows we would all be ashamed of entertaining if we weren’t so
irredeemably stupid. At the close Bazell plunges into gleeful absurdity,
almost as if ashamed of his blood-boltered extremity and lewd indulgence,
but he is clearly a writer, as very few in any field are. It is a pity he
hasn’t yet got anything to say.
It may be a law of the thriller that the journey is better than the arrival.
Michael Marshall has in recent years moved from writing science fiction to
vivid paranoid thrillers, beginning with the Straw Men trilogy, in which a
caste of hunter-gatherer plutocrats prey on mere mortals. Much of his work
is set among the fogbound, frozen forests of a darkly imagined Pacific
Northwest, and the sense of menace and imminent revelation is
authoritatively created. Bad Things begins very powerfully, with the
mysterious death of a child, apparently caused by a sudden intense despair.
Thus far Marshall’s books have carefully distinguished themselves from the
X-Files terrain with which they have much in common, but Bad Men ends by
requiring more credulity than perhaps it deserves to claim.
Terrain – Buchan’s Scotland, Household’s West Country, Greene’s London during
the Blitz – has long been important to the thriller. For some American
writers it seems to get in the way of the action, though their locations are
often pretty homogeneous anyway. Tom Bale sets his first novel, Skin and
Bone, among the Sussex Downs, following a massacre of villagers near the
planned site of a huge housing development. This is promising material, but
tone and pace are uncertain, the villain gloats cartoonishly and the travels
of the hero and heroine raise a significant question: can a character in a
thriller simply visit the lavatory, or must he or she go there to kill, be
killed, retrieve a concealed weapon, escape through the window? The odds
seem stacked against Bale’s initial “realist” use of the trope.
A writer with a commanding sense of place is Dennis Lehane, whose native
Boston has become a zone of the imagination as rich as James Lee Burke’s
southern Louisiana. Works such as Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone depend
on their mostly Irish working- class milieu to give weight to their plots.
Being a novelist rather than a typist, Lehane has now gone literary and
produced a historical novel, just as Burke did with his Civil War book White
Doves at Morning, and like Burke he seems hampered by the very seriousness
he brings to the project, the effect of which is to make the writer oddly
external to his own creation. The Given Day is set at the end of the First
World War among the families of Irish policemen as the Boston police strike
approaches. The problem, again, is one of exposition, Rather than throw the
reader into the action to pick up clues on the way, Lehane has a mission to
explain, and this bleeds life from the plot and most of the characters. In
addition, the political dimension of the book – Boston is teeming with
socialist, Marxists, syndicalists, Wobblies and anarchist bombers – causes
Lehane some anxiety. He repeatedly takes an oath of loyalty to capital by
denouncing and deriding the ideas and the characters of the Left. That fear
may be part of America’s tragedy; it certainly contributes to the novel’s
problems.
In recent years, crime and thrillers from Scandinavia have proved very popular
with anglophone readers. Henning Mankell’s Wallander books have led the way,
closely followed by Karin Fossum, Arnaldur Indridason, Stieg Larsson and
others. Eurocrime, as the phenomenon is called, often attempts a wintry
gravity which manifests itself in leisured pacing and lots of exposition.
Glacial pace seems to be used to ward off accusations of banality, but a
little of this goes a long way, one might think. Jo Nesbø’s The Redeemer
chooses an interesting context, the Salvation Army, adds a Croatian assassin
marooned in Oslo at Christmas, and offers the case to Inspector Harry Hole,
off the drink but at war with his superiors. It is better than you might
expect, but that is no basis for enthusiasm. When popular novelists, stung
by critical disregard while contemptuous of it, reject literariness and
describe themselves as storytellers, they may often be wrong in all but the
barest mechanical sense, but they raise some useful general points: rather
wholehearted pulp than earnestness; rather economy than “weight”; and rather
winter in a canning factory in Narvik than John Grisham.
Glen Duncan
A DAY AND A NIGHT AND A DAY
244pp. Simon and Schuster. £14.99.
978 1 8473 7404 2
John Macken
BREAKING POINT
384pp. Bantam. £17.99.
978 0 5930 6189 3
John Grisham
THE ASSOCIATE
384pp. Century. £18.99.
978 1 8460 5092 3
Alex Kava
EXPOSED
332pp. Mira. £12.99.
978 0 7783 0259 9
Dean Koontz
YOUR HEART BELONGS TO ME
337pp. HarperCollins. £17.99.
978 0 00 726756 9
Josh Bazell
BEAT THE REAPER
292pp. Heinemann. Paperback, £12.99.
978 0 434 01923 6
Michael Marshall
BAD THINGS
370pp. HarperCollins. £17.99.
978 0 00 720998 9
Tom Bale
SKIN AND BONE
425pp. Preface. Paperback, £12.99.
978 1 84809 071 2
Dennis Lehane
THE GIVEN DAY
720pp. Doubleday. £16.99.
978 0 385 61534 1
Jo Nesbø
THE REDEEMER
Translated by Don Bartlett
457pp. HarvillSecker. Paperback, £11.99.
978 1 846 55040 9
Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book (2007) won the Forward and T.S.Eliot
poetry prizes. His collection of short stories, The Silence Room, appeared
in 2008. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
