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The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction
There’s been a revolution in American popular fiction. The writers who dominated the bestseller lists a generation ago with blockbuster novels about movie stars and exotic foreign lands have been replaced by a new generation writing a new kind of bestseller, one that hooks readers with crime, suspense, and ever-increasing violence. Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post’s man on the thriller beat, calls this revolution “the triumph of the thriller,” and lists among its stars Thomas Harris, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Sue Grafton, and Elmore Leonard.
In his provocative, caustic, and often hilarious survey of today’s popular fiction, Anderson shows us who the best thriller writers are–and the worst. He shows how Michael Connelly was inspired by Raymond Chandler, how George Pelecanos toiled in obscurity while he mastered his craft, how Sue Grafton created the first great woman private eye, and how Thomas Harris transformed an insane cannibal into the charming man of the world who made FBI agent Clarice Starling his lover.
Anderson shows Scott Turow inventing the modern legal thriller and John Grisham translating it into a stunning series of bestsellers. He casts a cold eye on Tom Clancy’s militaristic techno-thrillers, and praises Alan Furst and Robert Littell as world-class spy novelists. He examines the pioneering role of Lawrence Sanders, the offbeat appeal of Dean Koontz, the unprecedented success of The Da Vinci Code, and the emergence of the literary thriller.
Most of all, Anderson demands that the best of these novelists be given their due–not as genre writers, but as some of the most talented men and women at work in American fiction. Don’t trust the literary elites to tell you what to read, he warns–make up you own minds. The Triumph of the Thriller will convince many readers that we’ve entered an important new era in popular fiction. This book can be your guide to it.
In his provocative, caustic, and often hilarious survey of today’s popular fiction, Anderson shows us who the best thriller writers are–and the worst. He shows how Michael Connelly was inspired by Raymond Chandler, how George Pelecanos toiled in obscurity while he mastered his craft, how Sue Grafton created the first great woman private eye, and how Thomas Harris transformed an insane cannibal into the charming man of the world who made FBI agent Clarice Starling his lover.
Anderson shows Scott Turow inventing the modern legal thriller and John Grisham translating it into a stunning series of bestsellers. He casts a cold eye on Tom Clancy’s militaristic techno-thrillers, and praises Alan Furst and Robert Littell as world-class spy novelists. He examines the pioneering role of Lawrence Sanders, the offbeat appeal of Dean Koontz, the unprecedented success of The Da Vinci Code, and the emergence of the literary thriller.
Most of all, Anderson demands that the best of these novelists be given their due–not as genre writers, but as some of the most talented men and women at work in American fiction. Don’t trust the literary elites to tell you what to read, he warns–make up you own minds. The Triumph of the Thriller will convince many readers that we’ve entered an important new era in popular fiction. This book can be your guide to it.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
3 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Patrick Anderson
25 books9 followersLibrarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Patrick Anderson is the weekly thriller reviewer for The Washington Post. He is also the author of nine novels and three previous works of nonfiction and was at one time a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Al Gore, and others. In addition to the Post, he has reviewed books and written articles for The New York Times Book Review, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Playboy, The Washingtonian, and other publications.
Source: Random House
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Patrick Anderson is the weekly thriller reviewer for The Washington Post. He is also the author of nine novels and three previous works of nonfiction and was at one time a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Al Gore, and others. In addition to the Post, he has reviewed books and written articles for The New York Times Book Review, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Playboy, The Washingtonian, and other publications.
Source: Random House
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 2, 2021
"I’m not a nice guy. I grow surly and vindictive when obliged to read a book that bores me or insults my intelligence. What’s more, it makes me crazy when decent people surrender $25 for some piece of crap. Of course, if people really like lousy books, that’s their problem, but I worry about unwary readers who might be misled by full-page ads or those you-scratch-my-back blurbs or might have seen the books on the best-seller lists and think they must be okay. They’re not okay. They can cause permanent brain damage."
Patrick Anderson, a novelist and now-retired critic of crime fiction for The Washington Post, wrote this compilation of odds and sods about the genre in 2006, and it hasn't aged particularly well by the standards of the genre in 2021. It's heavy on male authors — white male authors, especially — and sees series fiction as the standard-bearer of the genre when that's clearly no longer true now. But as a snapshot of where the genre stood once upon a time — as a means of tracing the path to where thrillerdom is now — and as an frequently outrageous compendium of one person's outrageous opinions, it's impossible to look away from.
This book is a lumpen gathering: a survey of the genre to where it is today, with plenty of bare-knuckle opinions haymakered along the way, then a collection of biographies and interviews, then an analysis of how the genre is evolving and where it's gone right and gone wrong, along with a list of the author's personal favorites (and favorite heat-reads). The first and third sections make for the most engaged reading, because the thriller community is tragically short of uncompromised opinions; in the social-media world that now represents its locus, obsequious tongue-bathing, shrieky tribalism and promotional blather tend to dominate the conversation. Being critical is being seen as being mean, and mean people get canceled and kicked out of the clubhouse.
That said, the opinions are just one man's opinions, and I disagreed with at least half of them, and had tremendous fun doing so. A discussion of John D. MacDonald that focused solely on his Travis McGee novels and not his superior standalones? Outrageous! Claiming that the long-forgotten Lawrence Sanders stands alongside Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly and Robert B. Parker as a storyteller and distinct stylist? Well, I for one don't see it.
Then again, he says things we in the crime-fiction community are generally not allowed to say for the record, and just the fact that he says them when others won't makes them delicious. For instance, Anderson's controversial opinion on the universally admired Raymond Chandler is that his ugly view of humanity spoils, to some degree, his furiously inventive prose:
— "Chandler was capable of colorful, inventive, lyrical prose, but he was also a woefully self-indulgent writer who junked up his books with cruel asides and inane similes. He was in urgent need of a good editor, but he couldn’t tolerate criticism."
— "Much of Chandler’s best writing involves nature. He likes the sky, sunsets, trees, rain, mountains, and the sea far more than he does people."
— "I don’t know how people can read Chandler today without his misogyny lessening their pleasure in his work. It isn’t enough to say that Chandler reflected the prejudices of his day. You can find scenes in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner that reflect those prejudices, but they didn’t savage blacks and gays, didn’t batter them, wipe the floor with them, and then laugh at them, as Chandler so gleefully does."
— "In Chandler’s novels, rich women are presented as murderous drugged-out whores who debase themselves for our amusement."
— "It is hard to think of another writer whose mingled gifts and weaknesses are so extreme. He was a strange hybrid of poet and pulp writer, and his novels were both brilliant and maddeningly flawed. Chandler had a right to be Chandler, but we have a right to wish he’d had discipline equal to his talent."
Read those lines out loud at a gathering of crime-fiction people and enjoy the arguments they inspire.
Anderson has plenty of other bouquets and brickbats for other semi-scared cows of the genre:
On Ross MacDonald: "Macdonald’s main device for advancing his plot is for Archer to talk to people who invariably blurt out everything they know. He can’t buy a pack of gum without the clerk giving him some vital clue. He’s an insufferable busybody. People say, “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” or “I ought to order you out of my house,” but they keep on spilling their guts. Wives and husbands have violent arguments, revealing horrid secrets, as he stands by contentedly, all ears. Most crime novels feature a cop or PI who asks a lot of questions and worms the truth out of people, but Macdonald milks this device to the point of absurdity. Archer is not only a busybody, he’s a moralist, forever telling people how they should live their lives. Everyone else is weak, crooked, and hypocritical; only Archer is wise and good."
On Elmore Leonard: "I would gladly grind several of today’s postmodernists into a fine powder if I could sprinkle that powder in Elmore Leonard’s morning coffee and guarantee us an endless supply of his magic."
On Sue Grafton: "Kinsey is a caustic, opinionated woman who holds back little, and this made her unprecedented in American crime fiction. The classic male PIs tell us little about their inner lives. We know they drink a lot and feel morally superior to the rich and smarter than cops, but we rarely know anything about their childhoods, their marriages, the pain they’ve suffered, the lovers they’ve lost. None come close to Kinsey in the sheer volume of personal data we have on them. Sherlockians still debate where Holmes went to university, but we know the name of the bully who tormented Kinsey in the fifth grade. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer reflect an American ideal of strong, silent men who never apologize and never explain. Kinsey is the opposite. She wants to share her feelings, wants to connect. In book after book, she adds new depth to her self-portrait. Women love her the way men love Travis McGee. Each is a shrewdly designed fantasy of competence and independence, one written for men, the other for women."
On Charles McCarry: "If I didn’t admire the novel so much I would grow weary of Christopher’s virtues. But McCarry’s idealization of Christopher is the price we pay for McCarry’s silken prose and his insights into the world of spies, politics, and assassinations."
On novels he reviewed and despised: "The sin of most of the people I discuss in this chapter is not that they write clunky sentences, although some do, but that they treat their readers like idiots. They deal in clichés, stereotypes, cheap thrills, and ridiculous plots. Some of them can’t help it—that’s how their minds work—but others deliberately dumb down their work because a lot of money is made that way."
On James Patterson: "James Patterson is possibly the best-selling writer of fiction in America today. He is also, in my view, the absolute pits, the lowest common denominator of cynical, scuzzy, assembly-line writing. If, on a bullshit scale, people like Pelecanos and Leonard rate a perfect 0, Patterson is the other extreme, a bloated, odoriferous 10. So why is he popular? Well, he keeps things not just simple but simple-minded. He writes short sentences and short chapters and deals in stereotypes. He teases his readers with soft-core sex. He telegraphs who are the good guys and who are the bad guys—a man with a scar on his face is a bad man, a girl who doesn’t wear makeup is a good girl. He panders to ignorance, laziness, and prurience."
One way in which Anderson tries to have it both ways without seeming to realize it is in his discussions of the idealized perfection of series heroes and heroines. He disdains the Mary Sue qualities of Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta and Charles McCarry's Paul Christopher, but seems more tolerant of it in Robert Crais' Elvis Cole and John Sandford's Lucas Davenport, among others., and his defenses and excoriations lack a through-line one can logically follow. Basically, if he likes the character, he'll give it a break; if he doesn't, he won't. All of which is fine as long as you show you work with a little more clarity than Anderson has.
Then again, who among us does not have favorite authors and characters, and who among us doesn't not struggle to explain the subjective on a more scholarly basis? Such is the nature of fandom. I don't share more than half of Anderson's opinions, but I enjoyed reading them, and I further enjoyed Anderson's feeling of freedom to air his opinions without fear of blowback. Would that more of us had such courage.
Patrick Anderson, a novelist and now-retired critic of crime fiction for The Washington Post, wrote this compilation of odds and sods about the genre in 2006, and it hasn't aged particularly well by the standards of the genre in 2021. It's heavy on male authors — white male authors, especially — and sees series fiction as the standard-bearer of the genre when that's clearly no longer true now. But as a snapshot of where the genre stood once upon a time — as a means of tracing the path to where thrillerdom is now — and as an frequently outrageous compendium of one person's outrageous opinions, it's impossible to look away from.
This book is a lumpen gathering: a survey of the genre to where it is today, with plenty of bare-knuckle opinions haymakered along the way, then a collection of biographies and interviews, then an analysis of how the genre is evolving and where it's gone right and gone wrong, along with a list of the author's personal favorites (and favorite heat-reads). The first and third sections make for the most engaged reading, because the thriller community is tragically short of uncompromised opinions; in the social-media world that now represents its locus, obsequious tongue-bathing, shrieky tribalism and promotional blather tend to dominate the conversation. Being critical is being seen as being mean, and mean people get canceled and kicked out of the clubhouse.
That said, the opinions are just one man's opinions, and I disagreed with at least half of them, and had tremendous fun doing so. A discussion of John D. MacDonald that focused solely on his Travis McGee novels and not his superior standalones? Outrageous! Claiming that the long-forgotten Lawrence Sanders stands alongside Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly and Robert B. Parker as a storyteller and distinct stylist? Well, I for one don't see it.
Then again, he says things we in the crime-fiction community are generally not allowed to say for the record, and just the fact that he says them when others won't makes them delicious. For instance, Anderson's controversial opinion on the universally admired Raymond Chandler is that his ugly view of humanity spoils, to some degree, his furiously inventive prose:
— "Chandler was capable of colorful, inventive, lyrical prose, but he was also a woefully self-indulgent writer who junked up his books with cruel asides and inane similes. He was in urgent need of a good editor, but he couldn’t tolerate criticism."
— "Much of Chandler’s best writing involves nature. He likes the sky, sunsets, trees, rain, mountains, and the sea far more than he does people."
— "I don’t know how people can read Chandler today without his misogyny lessening their pleasure in his work. It isn’t enough to say that Chandler reflected the prejudices of his day. You can find scenes in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner that reflect those prejudices, but they didn’t savage blacks and gays, didn’t batter them, wipe the floor with them, and then laugh at them, as Chandler so gleefully does."
— "In Chandler’s novels, rich women are presented as murderous drugged-out whores who debase themselves for our amusement."
— "It is hard to think of another writer whose mingled gifts and weaknesses are so extreme. He was a strange hybrid of poet and pulp writer, and his novels were both brilliant and maddeningly flawed. Chandler had a right to be Chandler, but we have a right to wish he’d had discipline equal to his talent."
Read those lines out loud at a gathering of crime-fiction people and enjoy the arguments they inspire.
Anderson has plenty of other bouquets and brickbats for other semi-scared cows of the genre:
On Ross MacDonald: "Macdonald’s main device for advancing his plot is for Archer to talk to people who invariably blurt out everything they know. He can’t buy a pack of gum without the clerk giving him some vital clue. He’s an insufferable busybody. People say, “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” or “I ought to order you out of my house,” but they keep on spilling their guts. Wives and husbands have violent arguments, revealing horrid secrets, as he stands by contentedly, all ears. Most crime novels feature a cop or PI who asks a lot of questions and worms the truth out of people, but Macdonald milks this device to the point of absurdity. Archer is not only a busybody, he’s a moralist, forever telling people how they should live their lives. Everyone else is weak, crooked, and hypocritical; only Archer is wise and good."
On Elmore Leonard: "I would gladly grind several of today’s postmodernists into a fine powder if I could sprinkle that powder in Elmore Leonard’s morning coffee and guarantee us an endless supply of his magic."
On Sue Grafton: "Kinsey is a caustic, opinionated woman who holds back little, and this made her unprecedented in American crime fiction. The classic male PIs tell us little about their inner lives. We know they drink a lot and feel morally superior to the rich and smarter than cops, but we rarely know anything about their childhoods, their marriages, the pain they’ve suffered, the lovers they’ve lost. None come close to Kinsey in the sheer volume of personal data we have on them. Sherlockians still debate where Holmes went to university, but we know the name of the bully who tormented Kinsey in the fifth grade. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer reflect an American ideal of strong, silent men who never apologize and never explain. Kinsey is the opposite. She wants to share her feelings, wants to connect. In book after book, she adds new depth to her self-portrait. Women love her the way men love Travis McGee. Each is a shrewdly designed fantasy of competence and independence, one written for men, the other for women."
On Charles McCarry: "If I didn’t admire the novel so much I would grow weary of Christopher’s virtues. But McCarry’s idealization of Christopher is the price we pay for McCarry’s silken prose and his insights into the world of spies, politics, and assassinations."
On novels he reviewed and despised: "The sin of most of the people I discuss in this chapter is not that they write clunky sentences, although some do, but that they treat their readers like idiots. They deal in clichés, stereotypes, cheap thrills, and ridiculous plots. Some of them can’t help it—that’s how their minds work—but others deliberately dumb down their work because a lot of money is made that way."
On James Patterson: "James Patterson is possibly the best-selling writer of fiction in America today. He is also, in my view, the absolute pits, the lowest common denominator of cynical, scuzzy, assembly-line writing. If, on a bullshit scale, people like Pelecanos and Leonard rate a perfect 0, Patterson is the other extreme, a bloated, odoriferous 10. So why is he popular? Well, he keeps things not just simple but simple-minded. He writes short sentences and short chapters and deals in stereotypes. He teases his readers with soft-core sex. He telegraphs who are the good guys and who are the bad guys—a man with a scar on his face is a bad man, a girl who doesn’t wear makeup is a good girl. He panders to ignorance, laziness, and prurience."
One way in which Anderson tries to have it both ways without seeming to realize it is in his discussions of the idealized perfection of series heroes and heroines. He disdains the Mary Sue qualities of Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta and Charles McCarry's Paul Christopher, but seems more tolerant of it in Robert Crais' Elvis Cole and John Sandford's Lucas Davenport, among others., and his defenses and excoriations lack a through-line one can logically follow. Basically, if he likes the character, he'll give it a break; if he doesn't, he won't. All of which is fine as long as you show you work with a little more clarity than Anderson has.
Then again, who among us does not have favorite authors and characters, and who among us doesn't not struggle to explain the subjective on a more scholarly basis? Such is the nature of fandom. I don't share more than half of Anderson's opinions, but I enjoyed reading them, and I further enjoyed Anderson's feeling of freedom to air his opinions without fear of blowback. Would that more of us had such courage.
April 14, 2017
Even those few times when I disagreed with the author, I realized he was probably correct in his assessment. An excellent book about the morphing of the detective novel into today’s thriller and how the thriller rules the best-seller lists. Along the way, the author gives us lists of his favorites, books to read, books not to read, and a few that are downright awful. Spoiler alert: there are many spoilers in this book, not every book mentioned, but quite a few.
There are a few typos someone should have caught: Steve Carella, from the 87th Precinct, is called Frank Carella a couple of times, and Miles Archer’s widow is called both Ivy and Iva. In my opinion these do not lessen Anderson’s credibility. He is, however, a little too fond of George Pelecanos and his books for my taste.
Even if you are well read in the genre, you will find many suggestions for further reading here.
This book is tremendous fun!
There are a few typos someone should have caught: Steve Carella, from the 87th Precinct, is called Frank Carella a couple of times, and Miles Archer’s widow is called both Ivy and Iva. In my opinion these do not lessen Anderson’s credibility. He is, however, a little too fond of George Pelecanos and his books for my taste.
Even if you are well read in the genre, you will find many suggestions for further reading here.
This book is tremendous fun!
August 15, 2008
Patrick Anderson, book reviewer for the Washington Post, provides a chatty overview of the current state of crime fiction with lots of recommendations and plot summaries and discussions of a few past masters.
If you are looking for serious literary criticism or a consideration of the thriller phenomenon, this isn't it. He has a tendency to summarize plots and end saying empty things that don't convey much information like "Her books have won numerous prizes, and this one shows why" or "Her plot is nasty as it is delicious".
Anderson also places a great deal of emphasis on the size of the author's advance and sales, although he does criticize James Patterson for basing one novel in San Francisco in order to improve West Coast sales. Once in a while, you wonder if Anderson is more interested in literary merit or marketing skill.
On the positive side, he is willing to go after some of the best selling authors for pawning off sub-par work and serving as CEO's managing a crew of co-writers. And he is willing to challenge the quality of some of the classics of the past creating a great opportunity for endless, if imaginary, discussion.
Overall, this is a great conversation but not the definitive word on the "Serial Killer Motif" or "New Developments in Narrative Structure".
If you are looking for serious literary criticism or a consideration of the thriller phenomenon, this isn't it. He has a tendency to summarize plots and end saying empty things that don't convey much information like "Her books have won numerous prizes, and this one shows why" or "Her plot is nasty as it is delicious".
Anderson also places a great deal of emphasis on the size of the author's advance and sales, although he does criticize James Patterson for basing one novel in San Francisco in order to improve West Coast sales. Once in a while, you wonder if Anderson is more interested in literary merit or marketing skill.
On the positive side, he is willing to go after some of the best selling authors for pawning off sub-par work and serving as CEO's managing a crew of co-writers. And he is willing to challenge the quality of some of the classics of the past creating a great opportunity for endless, if imaginary, discussion.
Overall, this is a great conversation but not the definitive word on the "Serial Killer Motif" or "New Developments in Narrative Structure".
August 27, 2009
I don't particularly like thrillers & seldom read them but was interested in what makes them so popular. This was an interesting look at the history and development of the genre. I took 5pp of notes in my journal. He says some pretty nasty stuff about some of the most popular and prolific recent thriller authors but also compliments other authors for bringing something new to the genre. Interesting and enlightening for an "outsider".
(p266) "Too many people . . . fear that if they don't understand a book the fault must be theirs. It ain't necessarily so. There are writers who are unreadable simply because they don't think clearly, and others who equate obscurity with profundity." That observation does not only apply to thrillers.
(p266) "Too many people . . . fear that if they don't understand a book the fault must be theirs. It ain't necessarily so. There are writers who are unreadable simply because they don't think clearly, and others who equate obscurity with profundity." That observation does not only apply to thrillers.
October 19, 2017
Excellent history of the thriller. Enjoyed his analysis with some more thriller novels on to read list. I hope he will published an update eventually. Not many women authors discussed but that's a genre issue, and some women authors still hide behind their initials. I'd subscribe to the Washington Post just to read his book reviews.
February 10, 2012
As Washington Post book reviewer Patrick Anderson notes at the start of his book, thrillers have largely replaced genres like the historical epic, the family saga and stories of the rich and famous (books like James Michener and Harold Robbins and James Clavell used to write) on our bestseller lists – and this book promises to tell how that happened.
Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed by what it delivered, for two principal reasons. The first is that the title implied a portrait of the transformation of American culture (or at least of publishing) during the past half-century. The broad cultural history, the sociology required for that just aren't there.
The second is that Anderson's discussion of the thriller struck me as overly narrow. While the title seems to me something of a misnomer, the book lives up only too fully to the implication in the subtitle, specifically in its focus on crime fiction, the only branch of the thriller that gets anything like comprehensive treatment. By contrast, spy novels, legal thrillers and military "techno-thrillers" (a term Anderson himself coined in a 1988 article on Tom Clancy) each get a bit of patchy attention, and many other subgenres - such as the Michael Crichton-style scientific thriller, the Robin Cook-style medical thriller, and with few exceptions, the action-adventure thriller (let alone anything more likely to be labeled speculative fiction, though it very regularly operates in the thriller mode) - are all but ignored. Additionally, particularly after the introductory discussion of the genre's history from Poe to noir in the first four chapters, Anderson's personal likes and dislikes (he prefers stylishly written, character-oriented thrillers with a tone of gritty realism or dark zaniness) increasingly dominate the bulk of the narrative.
Nonetheless, Triumph did give me an introduction to a fair bit of pop culture history I knew only dimly, and a good many authors I knew nothing about. There is a lot of summary of key works here, but Anderson's writing is always lucid, brisk and highly readable. Additionally, when doing more than retelling stories, Anderson is an astute critic, quite conscious of the silliness of so much thriller convention (the detectives whose brilliant deductions are just a combination of the obvious with wild guess disguised as intuitive leaps; the routine involvement of P.I.s in murder investigations), and also of genre politics (Anderson commenting on the challenges confronting a would-be liberal thriller writer). By and large, his criticism is also persuasive, at least where I've been in a position to judge the works in question for myself (as in his writing about Tom Clancy). Anderson also has a good eye for relevant trivia (seeing in the success of James Patterson, a highly successful adman, the embodiment of "the belief that you can sell books the way you sell dog food"). The result is that rather than the epic history promised, the reader gets a number of sketches of major authors out of thriller history inside a hodgepodge of observations and comments, which offered just enough of interest to have been worth my while in the end.
June 8, 2015
Sometime novelist and Washington Post book reviewer traces the history and state of "Thrillers"--the crime, spy, and legal novels that dominate the fiction bestseller lists these days (by Anderson's count, 40% of the 130 novels that sold more than 100,000 copies in 2005).
Anderson is a reviewer, not a historian, so the focus is on current writers, their backgrounds, their inspirations, and their stories ("stand-alones" or series). It is interesting how late in life many of even the most successful writers started their writing careers, or progressed within them far enough to quit their day jobs.
Also prominent in Anderson's account, as in the books he reviews and describes, is a rising level of violence, described and defined as "realism" to a point where Anderson wonder's how much is realistic and how much readers can stand. As he points out about several authors, their "realism" limits their readership--although after reading the sickening descriptions of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lector novels (and the popular movies based on them) it is hard to think of their extreme popularity as being in any way self-limiting. Anderson never questions the psyche of a readership that can tolerate and apparently relish such extreme sadism.
Still, I was intrigued by some authors and books Anderson described (among them William Lashner, Daniel Silva, and Michael Connelly), so I have noted and will sample their works, with reviews pending, of course.
Anderson is a reviewer, not a historian, so the focus is on current writers, their backgrounds, their inspirations, and their stories ("stand-alones" or series). It is interesting how late in life many of even the most successful writers started their writing careers, or progressed within them far enough to quit their day jobs.
Also prominent in Anderson's account, as in the books he reviews and describes, is a rising level of violence, described and defined as "realism" to a point where Anderson wonder's how much is realistic and how much readers can stand. As he points out about several authors, their "realism" limits their readership--although after reading the sickening descriptions of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lector novels (and the popular movies based on them) it is hard to think of their extreme popularity as being in any way self-limiting. Anderson never questions the psyche of a readership that can tolerate and apparently relish such extreme sadism.
Still, I was intrigued by some authors and books Anderson described (among them William Lashner, Daniel Silva, and Michael Connelly), so I have noted and will sample their works, with reviews pending, of course.
January 20, 2012
A Washington Post book reviewer gives his take on thrillers since its inception--sometime in the late 19th centurty with a Poe detective story. He focuses on the certain authors of the genre and their key books. Prominent bestsellers are ignored because the reviewer doesn't like their writing (e.g., Ludlum, J. Archer, Patterson, Grisham and more).
His concept of thriller is much broader than my idea of it. A thriller is another word for suspense and the story is about what's going to happen and often with surprising action and twists. A mystery or a who-done-it has a murder at the the start and a sleuth goes about figuring out who the killer was and why. It's a puzzle and the readers get to solve it as they read. To me, a thriller is not a mystery a la Agatha Christie, but this guy would include them. Most of the book covers mysteries.
Worth a read if you write in either genre, but you'd be better off reading the novels themselves.
His concept of thriller is much broader than my idea of it. A thriller is another word for suspense and the story is about what's going to happen and often with surprising action and twists. A mystery or a who-done-it has a murder at the the start and a sleuth goes about figuring out who the killer was and why. It's a puzzle and the readers get to solve it as they read. To me, a thriller is not a mystery a la Agatha Christie, but this guy would include them. Most of the book covers mysteries.
Worth a read if you write in either genre, but you'd be better off reading the novels themselves.
April 27, 2013
Very enjoyable read covering the development of the modern thriller. It starts with Poe and the Sherlock Holmes stories but focuses more on the last 60 years and American thrillers post-Chandler/Hammett. Not really a scholarly study, it's more conversational in tone but I still found it very informative and a useful survey of the "thriller" terrain. And that's not to be dismissive because the author is a professional critic with a literary background; so in sharing his opinions he's very able to lay out his reasoning and to point out why he thinks some books qualify as first-rate works of literature and others are just enjoyable (or sometimes not so enjoyable) fluff. As someone how enjoys hard-boiled stories, it was particularly to be introduced to newer writers like George Pelecanos or Michael Connelly whom I've never read but am eager to check out.
August 2, 2009
Anderson's book is less an examination of the thriller as a popular genre than it is a collection of books he has liked, and some he has not. Though he makes a stab at the genre's history, he doesn't actually define a thriller, nor does he provide much analysis of the genre's tropes, focusing instead on writers who have achieved some success in America and in England writing works with the nebulous form of "thriller." Still, it's an entertaining, if slight, read.
October 9, 2009
Thriller write Partick Anderson also reviews thrilers. Here he traces the contemporary thriller from detective writers like Hammet and Chandler through McBain and McDonald, Pelecanos and Connelly, to newcomer Peter Craig. Great for developing a reading list, but weak on true exploration of the genre. Does not answer questions like "What is a thriller?", and neglects to identify and define thriller sub-genres. However, great appreciatin of thrillers and the best of popular fiction writers.
April 11, 2010
Mystery writer and crime fiction reviewer for the Washington Post, Anderson has written a witty history of late 19th and 20th century crime fiction. His interviews with and assessments of present writers such as Clancy, Grafton, Turow, Pelecanos, Connelly and Lehane as well as many others are on the mark. For those who are venturing into crime fiction, this is a useful tool. For those who want to add to their book list, there's much to be gleaned.
April 23, 2007
This a fun read on the history of the thriller, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and covering Doyle, Chandler, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, Thomas Harris, etc. The author (a literary critic and author himself) does a great job of breaking the genre down and reviewing some of the top names in the field (some he admires and some he abhors).
April 19, 2008
Hey, the guy says nice things about me. How can I NOT love it?
March 20, 2011
This is an opinionated, but fair, survey of thriller fiction. I found it quite useful.
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