Thu 21 Oct 2010

15 Responses to “A CHOICE OF THRILLERS, by Mike Ripley.”

1. Steve Says:
   October 21st, 2010 at 1:13 pm

   Every one of these that I’ve read I’d give an “A” or an “A plus” to.

   But why are there so many I haven’t read? There are some I don’t even own.

   Not yet, that is.

   Thanks, Mike!

2. David A. Says:
   October 21st, 2010 at 4:15 pm

   Thanks very much for doing this, Mike. I will be studying this list assiduously!

3. David L. Vineyard Says:
   October 22nd, 2010 at 12:37 am

   A good many of the same books and in many cases the ones I struggled over and didn’t choose, even a few I’m not that familiar with.

   Glad to see some of the names I forgot or left out, like Garfield, Elegant, and C. S. Forester. I can’t believe I left off BROWN ON RESOLUTION, one of the best of its kind ever penned.

   As before I’m impressed with the quality of the writers in thriller fiction. Considering it hasn’t alway had the same cachet of the detective and suspense genre’s in critical terms, the overall quality of the writers is outstanding.

   And for anyone who hasn’t read it, Dickey’s TO THE WHITE SEA is an outstanding work, unique is the only word I can think of for it.

   And I’d say anyone would be on solid ground with the writers and books that made both lists.

4. Steve Says:
   October 22nd, 2010 at 11:40 am

   Why it is, do you suppose, that Thriller writers haven’t gotten the same “respect” as crime and detective fiction have, over the years? Thrillers have always been around — obviously! — but they’ve always been lumped into an overall spy or suspense category, which is reasonable, I suppose, but neither have they gotten much notice.

   There haven’t been any fanzines devoted to thriller fiction that I can think of, for example, unless published in England and the titles aren’t coming to me. Maybe the publications of the Edgar Wallace society come the closest?

   Things are changing, though. The International Thriller Writers organization started up about five or six years ago

   http://www.thrillerwriters.org/

   and Mike’s line of Top Notch Thriller reprints

   http://www.ostarapublishing.co.uk/series.html?series=Top%20Notch%20Thrillers

   seems to be going strong.

   I don’t think anyone reading this comment can go wrong reading any of Mike’s choices, and if David can admit that some are new to him, it goes double for me!

5. David L. Vineyard Says:
   October 22nd, 2010 at 5:18 pm

   It may be the title Thriller is the problem as much as anything, because while there seems to be a sort of general definition of it as a sub-genre now there really wasn’t before. What often happened is, as you say, Steve, thriller’s got shuffled off into spy, adventure, suspense, mystery, Gothic, and even detective categories if they were any good, and dismissed if they weren’t. It probably doesn’t help, that the adjective most often used in regard to the word is ‘cheap’ thriller; or that those wonderful old yellow covered British hardcvers were just that — cheap thrillers.

   As a genre the thriller tends to get sub divided into spy stories, political, satirical, and other categories and divided by subject like gentleman adventurer, secret agent, police, serial killer, or adventure.

   And I admit I took advantage of that to work a few mainstream books into my list.

   The funny thing though is in terms of being recognised as literary figures thriller writers have generally fared better than even the detective genre — which has its own share of notables — some of which are actually thriller writers who never wrote a detective story in their lives.

   But I suspect the real culprit is simply that it is a visceral genre. The detective story appeals to the mind and the suspense genre says something about the human condition, but the thriller is about escapism, sensation, and literally thrills. If the detective novel is a trip to the library and the suspense novel a trip to the theater, the thriller is a trip to the amusement park.

   In regard to the fan publications I think the fact is that much of the broad lead the detective story has in that area is due to detective story writers and critics who set out to create a sort of literary cachet around the genre. Thriller writers — until recently — tended not to think in those terms. Either they were figures like John Buchan who had so many irons in the fire he barely had time to write his ‘shockers’ or they were Edgar Wallace and Peter Cheyney types and would never think of it. Like Graham Greene’s ‘entertainments’ they seemed self dismissive. Even when they took their craft seriosuly they seldom admitted it.

   The detective novel still has that intellectual game concept going for it, or at least Chandler’s idea of the detective story as novel of manners, but thrillers at heart are tales — shockers, crawlies (Stevenson’s term), fluff, cheap fiction, melodrama, escapism, and adventure. Not quite the same thing. But they are also likely the closet thing to the origins of literature, to the myths and tall tales, to Gilgamesh and Homer and even the blood and thunder in Shakespeare (RICHARD III and MACBETH could easily be rewritten as thrillers) — they appeal to the heart and the gut before the intellect.

   I suppose its like the famous NEW YORKER cartoon of a little girl confronted by a quiche at a fancy restaurant — “It’s still spinach.” she announced, and to some extent, they are still ‘thrillers,’ tales told to invoke a chill or a thrill or allow the mind to escape the real world and invoke sensation and not thought.

6. Steve Says:
   October 23rd, 2010 at 9:50 pm

   I haven’t yet tackled the problem of creating my own definition of a “Thriller,” but I can hardly disagree with yours, David, as suggested by your comments and your previous list.

   Thriller fiction is much more a British field of expertise — check out both your lists and Mike’s — and not so much an American one.

   Until recently, that is, as I pointed out in my earlier comment.

   And I think that the success of Dan Brown had a lot to do with it. Success produces imitators, and a lot of the imitators have been very good and recognized as such.

   And I certainly mean “success,” whether anyone thinks Dan Brown is a good writer or not.

   THE DA VINCI CODE was published in 2003. When did the The International Thriller Writers organization start up? 2004?

   I don’t think it was by coincidence.

7. Mike Ripley Says:
   October 24th, 2010 at 7:54 am

   I have seen flocks of readers driven to the edge of madness trying to define the “thriller”. During her tenure as what we would today call ‘crime fiction reviewer’ for The Sunday Times (1933-35), Dorothy L. Sayers had no less than three attempts to distinguish the “thriller” from the “detective story”. She finally came up with (and I paraphrase: in the detective story, what has happened before is important- in the thriller, it’s what happens next.
   She also said that “the only thing” one could say about a thriller was whether or not it was well written.
   I have always maintained that whatever sub-genre we work in, if we don’t “thrill” then we’ve failed, for we are, as Raymond Chandler said (paraphrasing again) in the melodrama business.
   In doing my list of personal favourites (and thank you for allowing the indulgence) I was conscious of the under-representation of Americans, but that is a factor my great age. I do not think we Brits hold a monopoly any more and I would date the start of the colonial rebellion (!) from the early books of Robert Ludlum and David Morrell, not Dan Brown.
   (And in 1991, both Patricia Cornwell and John Grisham changed the rules of engagement
   forensically and legally speaking.)

8. Steve Says:
   October 24th, 2010 at 12:51 pm

   Mike

   The definition of a Thriller by Dorothy Sayers that you quote is a good one, since it pinpoints exactly what it is that makes a thriller novel different from a detective story. I say “exactly” while smiling as of course there are all kinds of combinations and variations in between.

   You’re quite correct in chastising me in pointing out that there were successful thriller writers over here in the US well before Dan Brown came along. Ludlum, Morrell, Cornwell, and Grisham were all very popular and made the bestseller lists several times over before Dan Brown hit the big jackpot, especially Grisham. If I had the time, I’d like to go back sometime and study the bestseller lists in detail, not only to see what thriller writers were among the first to make it, but over the years which detective story writers as well.

   But in my own muddled way, what I was trying to express was my opinion that it was Dan Brown’s mega-success that brought about a a quantum jump in the history of the thriller novel in this country, that not only created a new subgenre of Vatican and other religious conspiracies, but also convinced a number of thriller writers, some of whom who already doing well, that they might be doing even better if they joined forces and promoted the thriller novel as a separate genre. In a sense, a movement was born.

   Here’s another line of thought I’d had, and it’s a fairly obvious one, if anyone wants to go there. But most thriller writers have been men, have they they not? Historically speaking, that is.

9. David L. Vineyard Says:
   October 24th, 2010 at 12:29 pm

   Mike

   Sayers definition is the most succinct I’ve read certainly.

   I think early on a lot of American thriller writers went into the hard boiled genre or like James Ramsey Ullman and Ernest K. Gann wrote a mainstream variation of the thriller, more the adventure story with some thriller elements. Many of the American’s who might have been writing thrillers were writing what sold — historical fiction, mainstream adventure novels, and general best seller fiction since there was no American thriller market outside the hard boiled vein, suspense, and crime novel (in my list I excluded writers like Joseph Hayes, W.R. Burnett, Cornwell, and Grisham).

   About the only Americans consistently writing thrillers in the British tradition in the thirties and forties would be David Garth, John P. Marquand, and Van Wyck Mason. A few writers in the pulps were doing something akin to thrillers, but most of them did not carry on into the mainstream (or wrote a different kind of book when they did), although Louis Joseph Vance and the Lone Wolf probably had more impact on British writers than American ones since the gentleman crook field remained chiefly British.

   Starting in the 1960’s — largely with the success of Robert Ludlum — things changed a bit. Richard Condon, Marvin Albert, Stepehn Marlowe, Frank Gruber, William McGovern (all who predate Ludlum), Fletcher Knebel, Douglas Terman, David Morrell, Thomas Gifford, Ross Thomas, and quite a few others were all writing consistently good thrillers rivaling anything the British produced — certainly in sales — then Clive Cussler came along somewhere between Fleming and MacLean in appeal if not style, followed much later by Tom Clancy who established a whole school of American thriller.

   And as Steve points out the flood came with Dan Brown. Now if anything the American school is predominent. Still, I would have to say Ludlum was the greatest influence on American thriller writers in terms of opening up the market for them, followed by Cussler and then Clancy. If you read Dan Brown’s early fiction it is very much in the Clancy school of techno thrillers — his real innovation with DA VINCI was to mix the Clancy and Ludlum school with Umberto Eco and the literary thriller (a sub genre indulged in by the likes of Thornton Wilder, C.P. Snow, Iris Murdoch, Hugh Walpole, and Kingsley Amis among others).

   Still, if you named the big four in American thrillers in terms of their influence on the market and other writers it’s Ludlum, Cussler, Clancy, and Brown — and, if you extend it to the legal and forensics field Harris, Grisham, and Cornwell. Those are the ones everyone is copying anyway — the ones publishers encourage you to write like.

   But there is still that period beginning with Buchan (who invented the field for all practical purposes) and extending into the middle seventies at least, when the British thriller was the gold standard for the form. Particularily the field that followed the steps of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler and brought a more adult and realistic milieu to the genre: Household, Canning, Hammond Innes, Elleston Trevor, Gavin Lyall, Simon Harvester, Desmond Bagley, Allan MacKinnon, Alistair MacLean consistently wrote some of the best and most literate thrillers ever produced. I don’t think anyone writing today approaches them on the level of literacy on either side of the pond.

   And Mike brings out a good point, namely that the thriller was looked down on in general by the Golden Age writers. Many of them felt thriller elements cheapened the detective story. Read some contemporary reviews and histories of the period and note how hard they came down on Philip MacDonald, Michael Innes, and sometimes even Carr for the thriller elements that crept into their work.

   Christie is even attacked because AND THEN THERE WERE NONE isn’t ‘really a detective story.’

   But the problem for the thriller is simply in definition. Most of us know one when we read one, but could not label it before, where it is fairly simple to label a detective story or a suspense or crime novel. Thrillers on the other hand veer off into science ficion, horror, politics, law, medicine, and even satire and social comment and run the gammut from Nick Carter and Sexton Blake to Graham Greene and John Le Carre.

10. David A. Says:
    October 24th, 2010 at 11:30 pm

    What I find particularly interesting about Mike’s list are the number of fairly recent titles — by that I mean published within the last twenty years or so. We tend to think the thriller slumped in quality sometime in the Eighties but Mike has obviously found plenty of good ones since then.

11. David L. Vineyard Says:
    October 25th, 2010 at 2:18 pm

    Steve

    Quite a few women have written in the thriller genre, but nothing like the ones writing in the detective genre. Most of the women I tend to put in the mystery or suspense category (or some mixture of the two), but Helen MacInnes, Martha Albrand, Mary Stewart, Sarah Gainham, Evelyn Anthony, some of Phyllis Whitney, Daphne Du Maurier, Dorothy Cannell, Linda Davies, Marjorie Bowen (as Joseph Shearing), Katherine Neville, and Dorothy Dunnett come to mind as primarily thriller writers, and a few mainstream women writers have written at least one thriller including Frances Parkinson Keyes (STATIONWAGON IN SPAIN), Rebecca West (THE BIRDS FALL DOWN), Phyllis Bottome (DANGER SIGNAL), Margaret Atwood (BODILY HARM), Elizabeth Bowen (HEAT OF THE DAY) …

    Still compared to mystery and suspense it is a male dominated field, though many of the books today written for and read mostly by women are thrillers more than anything else(almost everything marketed as romantic suspense today is a thriller by any other name more than traditional suspense or Gothic). And ironically they are the last really dirty books being published as mainstream fiction. The only market for heterosexual erotica (or porn if you prefer) today is written for and by women (or men writing under women’s names).

    Things have certainly changed from when the raciest thing in women’s fiction was Fannie Hurst and Elinor Glyn, though it is tamer than the Erica Jong, Rona Jaffe, etc school of just a couple of decades back.

    No arguement about the impact of Brown — he has created a whole sub genre (though the Vatican thriller has been around since at least Morris West’s day — though not as popular as now). Still, even some of those now imitating Brown started out in the footsteps of Ludlum, Clancy, and Cussler. James Rollins may throw in some elements of Brown’s work, but his books owe far more to Cussler and Ludlum (and Alistair MacLean who still has wide influence), and Vince Flynn and Brad Thor are primarily Ludlum influenced with Clancy’s right wing politics thrown in.

    The publishers may be marketing new thrillers as the new DA VINCI CODE, but once you get into them they owe more to Cussler, MacLean, and Ludlum in terms of plot and style.

    Re Dan Brown, I understand many hate him, and grant his subject could be offensive to some people, but as far as his writing goes he is a perfectly average thriller prose stylist. He’s better than some I find unreadable, and does what he does perfectly adequately.

    Considering the modern style consists of large chunks of barely digested research and science (often of the pseudo variety) mixed with equally large chunks of historical research (often equally selective) piled on top of fairly standard chase scenes and cartoon level violence Brown could almost be considered a classist.

    I enjoy his books for what they are, admire the research even when it is selective in its results, and appreciate the minor intellectual play the books offer — not really all that far removed from the pleasures of the fair play detective story — and in the tradition of Sue, Dumas, and Hugo (Sue in particular was a powerful critic of the Catholic Church)there is a bit of social commetary thrown in to leaven the action.

    What Brown has done is to marry the techno appeal of Clancy, the treasure hunt appeal of Cussler, Ludlum’s brand of international skullduggery, a patina of the intellectual thriller ala Umberto Eco, the appeal of the Vatican insider school, thrown in a New Age elements, and pseudo religous concepts, added the ever popular conspiracy novel, and — as usual when you mix that many formulas — come up with something new — or mud depending on how you feel about it.

    For the life of me I can’t see the harm. If Dan Brown challenges your religious beliefs they can’t have been that strong to begin with, and his writing is no worse than anyone else on the best seller list. Granted you aren’t going to read him the same way you do Eric Ambler, but then he writes no worse than Ludlum did. If he offends you don’t read him, but don’t imagine banning him will do anything but sell more books.

    My only complaint about any of this is that it has killed off the classic school (for now) in favor of bloated cinematic cartoons. But that’s what the publishers are printing and the public is buying and some of them are at least entertaining cartoons.

    And I have to say I’ve enjoyed many of them on exactly the level they are intended for. I like Brown and even admire Rollins and Preston and Child. I miss the Cannings and Amblers and Innes, but there are some entertaining thrillers out there — and there are still fine writers like Perez-Reverte and Alan Furst in the field. Mark Gattiss Lucifer Box books are much in the same vein as Flashman, and Elizabeth Peter’s Amelia Peabody remains inventive and entertaining. Barry Eisler has two well written series that could rival Quiller in quality eventually.

    As for all the imitation, that’s just how popular fiction is born. The Golden Age grew out of the success of TRENT’S LAST CASE and then Agatha Christie. The spy novel Buchan and Sapper then Ambler and Greene then Cheyney and Fleming and finally Le Carre and Ludlum. The suspense novel is still in the shadow of Cornell Woolrich.

    Someone probably complained because John Buchan killed off the whole drawing room intrigue school of William LeQueux and E. Phillps Oppenheim too, and then when Eric Ambler put paid to Buchan and Sapper and the public school heroics.

    Who knew the model for the modern thriller would turn out to be Dennis Wheatley (the closest thing to Dan Brown) instead of Eric Ambler? And who knows what will be next? People who once loathed Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane are nostalgic for them now.

    As for me, Dan Brown was certainly a huge improvement over Tom Clancy’s right wing techno-phallic fantasy. Brown at least can actually write and draw a half decent character, and at least when I read him I don’t feel like I’ve been trapped in a room with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck for two or three hours.

12. Mike Ripley Says:
    October 26th, 2010 at 6:04 am

    When it comes to the quality of writing in thrillers, I have one golden rule which has never let me down.
    Any book where gunfire is spelled out (“DA-DA-DA-DA-DA…” etc) is almost certainly going to disappoint.

13. Tony Pollard Says:
    October 26th, 2010 at 3:01 pm

    Mike,

    Some very interesting discussion here but all I really wanted to say was thanks for including me on the list. You made my day. I’m reading Martin Cruz Smith’s latest at the moment – still one of the best.

    cheers,
    Tony Pollard

14. Joe Poyer Says:
    October 31st, 2010 at 5:41 pm

    I also appreciate being added to your list. Thanks very much.

    Best, Joe Poyer

15. PB210 Says:
    February 12th, 2011 at 12:06 pm

    David Morrell co-edited a book called Thrilers 100 Must Reads.

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