Customer Reviews

The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Every Monday, Patrick Anderson writes a book review column for the Washington Post. Instead of covering literary books, Anderson reviews what is popularly known as "thriller" fiction. THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER is Anderson's effort to explain the history and popularity of thrillers, as well as offer his opinion of today's best thriller writers.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER is a highly informative book overall. Anderson produces a short history of the thriller as a genre, and provides his opinions of writers as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Lawrence Sanders and John McDonald. He also focuses a lot of attention on modern thriller writers, including the four authors he considers "modern masters" -- Michael Connelly, Thomas Harris, Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos.

I liked this book, because I enjoy reading thrillers. But THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER has some real problems. Most notably, it's highly slanted in favor of Anderson's view of what a good "thriller" is supposed to be. In Anderson's opinion, the best thrillers are serious, dark novels that explore deep psychological issues. For example, Anderson does not consider John Sandford to be a modern master. Why? Because, in Anderson's words, Sanford is "too entertaining" to be taken seriously. Since when is being entertaining a liability? In taking this position, Anderson's views border on the literary elitism that he decries in the later chapters of this book.

Also, Anderson has a rather elastic definition of what a thriller is. Is Sue Grafton a thriller writer? He seems to believe so, but I always thought that Grafton wrote mysteries. And why include Sue Grafton and not Robert Parker? Why isn't Harlan Coben even mentioned? He writes some of the best thrillers around. And what about medical thriller writers like Robin Cook, Michael Palmer, and Tess Gerritsen? Or psychological thriller writers like Jonathan Kellerman and Stephen White? They are all completely ignored. Instead, Anderson devotes precious pages to a writer like Nicholas Sparks, who nobody in their right mind would categorize as a thriller writer.

Mr. Anderson also offers some unorthodox opinions about certain prominent writers. For example, he largely dismisses Robert Crais and Lee Child as writers who do not write about "interesting characters" but "killing machines." Anderson has a right to his opinion, but this view is totally out of the mainstream, given the enormous amount of critical and popular acclaim that both Mr. Child's and Mr. Crais's books have deservedly received. My advice is to give both writers a try -- they are two of the best thriller authors in the business.

In short, THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER is okay, but it essentially boils down to one man's rather idiosyncratic opinion of what good thrillers are. In the end, your satisfaction with this book will depend on how in sync you are with Anderson's personal tastes. In my personal opinion, this book is worth a look, but it should be taken with a heavy grain of salt.

Beyond a doubt, the best seller lists of today bear little resemblance to best seller lists of the '50s and '60s that were dominated by novels about movie stars, sex, money and the wanton lifestyles of those who had more money than sense. Those lists were dominated by writers like Harold Robbins, Irving Stone, Jacqueline Susann, Herman Wouk and James Michener. According to Anderson, it was the Kennedy assassination in 1963, the "end of innocence for a generation," that made possible a move by the thriller genre to near domination of today's best seller lists.

The Triumph of the Thriller is perfect for those readers not familiar with the thriller genre because Anderson provides its history beginning with what he considers to be the "first great crime thriller," Mario Puzo's The Godfather, right up to the best thriller fiction being written today. Along the way he gives credit to those who most influenced today's thriller writers, starting with Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett, moving on to Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald, Ed McBain, Ross MacDonald and Charles Williford, and finishing with today's class.

Anderson finds that the "triumph of the thriller reached a tipping point in 1981" when, for the first time, four thrillers were on the list of the top 15 sellers for the year. Along the way, there were some breakthrough books that made it all possible: Deliverance by James Dickey, First Blood by David Morrell, Six Days of the Condor by James Grady, Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon and The First Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders, among them.

My "To Be Read List" has grown by at least three dozen books as a result of chapters in which Anderson discusses the best writers and books in the several sub-genres included under the thriller umbrella. There are chapters titled: "Dangerous Women," "Lawyers at Large," "Spy Masters" and "Literary Thrillers," all of which, added books and writers to my list for future reading. But, I have to admit that it was even more fun to read what Anderson had to say about certain authors that I've learned to avoid over the last few years. He shows them no mercy.

As he says, "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." Chief among the culprits? Let's start with James Patterson whom Anderson calls "a writer to avoid at all costs" and whose book The Beach House "unfolds like an unspeakably dumb comic book" that "no one with even a minimal appreciation of good writing could possibly read for pleasure." Anderson believes that Patterson has set the standard for bad writing to such a degree that he even accuses David Baldacci with his Hour Game of having "entered the James Patterson Really Bad Thriller Sweepstakes."

Anderson goes on to skewer Patricia Cornwell (Trace), David Lindsey (The Face of the Assassin), Jeffrey Archer (The Eleventh Commandment), Nicholas Sparks (The Rescue) and Tom Clancy (for everything). With the exception of the fact that I enjoyed some of Lindsey's early work, I have no quarrel with Anderson's assessment of this group. But as Anderson says:

"So what are we to do about all this deplorable fiction? In the long term, our nation must spend fewer billions on foreign wars and more on literacy programs. In the short term, reviewers (heroic fellows, for the most part) must steer people away from this schlock and toward all those good writers out there.

We would also do well to look on the bright side. There is so much wonderful writing. To be a book lover in America today, able to enjoy the wealth of fine writing that we and the rest of the world produce, is to be blessed. Ultimately, the purveyors of crap are only a nuisance."

The bottom line is this. If you are already a lover of thriller fiction, this book will provide you with a quick and easy way to expand your world. If you know little about the genre, maybe even looking down your nose a bit at it and its authors, the book should make you aware of some of the great writing that you've been missing. Then the rest is up to you.

Given how thin the book it, it was bound to be quite superficial and selective in its treatment of authors. I have no problem with that. I read this book to get some ideas on who might be good to read now having grown up on the classsics like Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Agatha Christie. Because he does write some quite detailed analyses ( in particular his treatment of Chandler ), the book was bound in other places to just become a litany of "I like this one and the plot is...". That was OK. It was what I wanted. No Harlan Coben was fine with me too. In fact I liked the brief chapter where he put the knife in the authors he really didn't care for best of all.

So, a short book, very subjective, very superficial in parts, very patchy in its coverage. But still pretty interesting for all that.

In this plea for "middlebrow" culture, novelist and Washington Post book reviewer Anderson argues that since the "thriller" has risen to dominate bestseller lists over the last 25 years, it's high time the genre got taken seriously. While I don't argue with this premise, Anderson's book is only a shaky -- though entertaining -- first step in that direction. An overarching flaw in the book is Anderson's definition of what constitutes a thriller. If you're going to champion a genre, you should at least give a clear explanation of what the genre's parameters are -- but the closest he comes is to call it "crime-related fiction", which is so sweeping as to be of no use whatsoever. Hence, the book suffers greatly in that most of what Anderson writes about is what most would unambiguously call "crime fiction," from Agatha Christie to Elmore Leonard. But lumped in with this are Tom Clancy technothrillers, John Grisham legal thrillers, and John Le Carré spy novels. This is broad and bewildering scope highlights the book's lack of comprehensiveness (which he readily admits to in the introduction), how are we to understand what a thriller is if the above are discussed, but not writers such as Stephen King or Michael Crichton? This, of course, is part of the problem of "genre" as means of categorizing fiction -- the lines are awfully blurry.

The book's arrangement reflects Anderson's loose approach to his topic. The twenty chapters are divided into four sections, and many chapters read as standalone pieces or profiles, with little or no connection between them.The first section is the most coherent, providing a potted history of the origins of the crime genre and its early popularizers, highlighting such luminaries Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, Raymond Chandler, Micky Spillane, Ed McBain, Ross Macdonald, Charles Willeford (a curious omission is Jim Thompson, whose name appears nowhere in the book). This section gives a taste of Anderson's true strength as a critic, which is a refreshing willingness to dissect the canon and point out its flaws, from bad characterizations to hoary plot devices and plain mean-spiritedness (notable in Chandler).

The next section begins by identifying 1981 as the "tipping point" of the thriller's rise to prominence. This is said to be the culmination of years of shift in the cultural landscape toward "darkness" and greater acceptance of violence, which began with the JFK assassination and was incubated by the Vietnam War, recession, political scandal, and the bleak films of the '70s. He then proceeds with overviews of several pseudo-subgenres So, there is a section on Tom Clancy (representing the technothriller), Sue Grafton and Sara Parestsky (representing women writers, with a mere page allocated to Patricia Highsmith!), Scott Turow, John Grisham, and Jon Lescraoart (legal thrillers), Daniel Silva, Robert Littell, Alan Furst (espionage thrillers), and then a final chunk on "literary thrillers." As notes above, there is nothing connecting these chapters, and it's left to the reader to wonder why some subgenres (if that's what they are) are included and others, such as medical thrillers or scientific thrillers, aren't. The espionage section also highlights another bizarre omission -- Ian Fleming. I suspect one could make a convincing argument that Fleming's terse thrillers (which bear little resemblance to the Bond films) played a huge role in the rise of the genre in America.

In the third section, Anderson moves on to praise "four modern masters" in some detail: Thomas Harris, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, and Dennis Lehane. His discussion of Harris (whom I've not read) is quite interesting, but his treatments of the latter three (who have been grouped together by countless other reviewers and profilers) isn't particularly fresh or insightful, and borders on fawning at times. The final section is a complete hodgepodge of odds and ends, including a chapter of "Favorites", another on "Brits", another on "Three Young Writers" (Karin Slaughter, Peter Craig, and Charlie Huston), a chapter of least favorites, and some final thoughts.

In discussing all the various authors, Anderson's mode is to talk about a few specific books in detail, which often results in a ratio of far too much plot synopsis vis a vis critical analysis. Still, it's often worth wading through these potted summaries and spoilers to get to the good stuff. It's the rare book critic in the U.S. who is willing to flat out criticize prose and plot the way Anderson does. In the introduction, he warns readers that he is merely offering his own tastes, and that they may not align with that of the reader -- to wit, fans of James Patterson or Patricia Cornwell may not care for the dismissal he visits on their work. There are occasional missteps in his writing, for example he says Elmore Leonard's work has gotten stellar treatment from Hollywood. This has only been true in recent years, and Leonard has been on record for decades about how he's hated the film versions of most of his work. Another example is how in his praise for the plot of Daniel Silva's bestseller "The Unlikely Spy" (1996) he fails to mention that the book's premise was the basis for three previous bestselling thrillers (1974's The Cooler by George Markstein, 1978's Eye of the Needle by Ken Follet, and 1986's Night of the Fox by Jack Higgins)!

I agree with Anderson's conclusion that the best thriller writers should be considered as talented novelists, however this "anti-genre" conclusion is somewhat at odds with his opening attempt to champion the thriller as a genre. Ultimately, I enjoyed the roundup of reviews and critiquing, but wish the book had been a little more thought out and organized.

Mainstream fiction is often thought of as being non-genre, that is, it may not be particularly literary, but it also isn't pigeonholed into any particular category. Really, though, like a real river system, the main stream should be the biggest particular branch. The argument made in Patrick Anderson's The Triumph of the Thriller is that the thriller is the new mainstream.

The basis for Anderson's idea is based on sheer numbers: in recent years, thrillers have occupied much of the best-sellers list. Of course, this would not mean that thrillers are the best fiction (if popularity equaled quality, then McDonalds would sell the world's best food), but it also doesn't mean that thrillers do not have the potential to be as good as anything else. In fact, some of the novels that Anderson cites can arguably be considered classics of literature.

What, however, is a thriller? The definition seems to elude Anderson, which may be an indication as to how difficult it can be to really to define it (or any genre). For the most part, it seems equivalent to a mystery, but not all mysteries really apply. Suspense seems to be bigger element, though it has to take place in the "real" world; science fiction, supernatural horror and fantasy can have action and suspense, but don't fit in Anderson's niche.

Though The Triumph of the Thriller seems at first to be a study of the development of this genre, it really is more of an overview of the writers who are most prominent in the field. After a couple introductory chapters of historical precursors to the modern thriller, Anderson discusses a lot of different writers, often admiringly, but also critically. Of course, this means there is a lot of opinion and you will not agree with everything he says; I certainly didn't, but I found there was a lot of common ground. And, since this is an overview, you'll find plenty of omissions.

In many books that provide overviews of book or movie genres, I find that the authors misstate key plot points. Anderson, however, appears to be the rare one who hasn't (at least I didn't catch any errors). Well-written and informative, The Triumph of the Thriller makes it clear that reading thrillers can be a worthwhile experience.

I never paid much attention to the "thriller" genre, although I had read a few books that Mr. Anderson writes about. Many of us book lovers have read an Agatha Christie or a Sherlock Holmes story. But in "The Triumph of the Thriller," Patrick Anderson gives us the history of the thriller how it has evolved and what's being written now; from the earliest Edgar Allen Poe and A. C. Doyle stories - through the writings of Chandler and Cain - to present day authors such as Karin Slaughter, Michael Connelly and Peter Abrahams, among many others. After readng Pat Anderson's book, I immediately ordered a bunch of books by his recommended authors and I haven't been disappointed! It was a great read!

Anderson reviews a range of thrillers. It's a personal view, and you can debate his definition of "thriller". However, if you don't expect a definitive survey, then you should enjoy his views, and find some interesting suggestions for your own reading. My tastes aren't too different from Anderson's, so I was pleased that, for example, he identified Dennis Lehane's "Mystic River" as a great novel. I was also interested in the backgound biographical information about the novelists, and the explanations about how the business works (Anderson is a novelist himself).

It's fun to see who is missing. I would have included the Barry Eisner Rain novels, and the superb John Harvey and Michael Dibdin among the Brits. The book doesn't include a European / Scandinavian section, which is a shame when writers like Karen Fossum are doing great work.

When I got this book, I thought, "Finally, a book on thriller." Unfortunately, what I discovered was that the author did what everyone else does when talking about thriller--talk about the crime subgenre as if that's all a thriller is. What happened to the action-adventure thrillers, the medical thrillers, the political thrillers, the romantic thrillers? There's at least a dozen thriller subgenres, but you wouldn't know it from this book. From a book about Thriller, I would have expected more than a discourse on crime fiction.

And why are so few women writers even mentioned? I think I could count the number on one hand.

Unfortunately, this book continues the myth that all thrillers are about crime when they're not. It has too narrow a focus for anything more than one star.

The preface says it all. In the introductory chapter, Anderson gives his view of the genre, reveals what he likes and what he doesn't, makes a good case for crime writers being underappreciated and leaves the reader with a sense that s/he's in the hands of an authority, about to set forth on a journey through thrillers and other forms of crime writing with a guide who has read it all and knows it all.
How unfortunate, then, that the rest of the book is more or less a collection of synopses. The genre is presented in chronological order, basically starting with Dashiell Hammett & Raymond Chandler (and Agatha Christie on the other side of the puddle - but, mysteriously, no Simenon) and Anderson systematically goes through authors and books in chapter after chapter, giving his opinions and resumes.
This makes for dull reading - particularly if the reader is not of the same opinion as the author. (He does not think much of Chandler and less of Ross MacDonald. I love them both.)
The preface is well worth reading, a brisk, refreshing new view of an old form. But after that, the rest is - silence would have been best - simply de trop.