What is a Thriller?

From June 11, 2006

As I get ready to attend Thrillerfest, the question keeps popping up: what’s a thriller?

An article in Publishers Weekly tried to explain it to me, but, as usual, I have to come up with my own definition.

I think the closest I’ve come to the understanding of “thriller” versus “mystery” versus “suspense” is a book by Carolyn Wheat called How to Write Killer Fiction: the Funhouse of Mystery and the Rollercoaster of Suspense.

With apologies to Wheat if I make this too simplistic: people who read mysteries are more into control. They want their investigator or even their amateur sleuth to gather up the facts and figure things out along with the reader. Suspense readers, on the other hand, like being out of control. They like that roller-coaster ride. They like the idea that a normal person is somehow thrown into a frightening situation and has to use resourcefulness to get out of it.

So where does the thriller part come in? My own belief is that the thriller designation covers both mystery and suspense. In mystery, it is that melding of investigation and nail-biting heart-pounding suspense. This piling on, the tension from page to page until you reach critical mass, is what raises a book to a new level. It’s bigger, has more scope, more twists, puts the investigator in danger (sometimes). Mystery thrillers generally start to take off by the midpoint of the book.

In suspense, a thriller is, to coin a Colbert-like phrase, suspensier.

Where does that leave me?

It leaves me on the mystery side of thriller.

No secret which writers I admire the most: Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Lee Child, T. Jefferson Parker, and Jonathan Kellerman. All these guys are on the “control” side. Control that, at some point, starts to lose its grip as the thriller aspect kicks in.

Recently I experimented with the beginning of a suspense novel, throwing a character headfirst into a scary situation. It didn’t stink, but when I read over what I’d written, it didn’t have the tension or what I perceive as the “addiction” of the writing I have in my police procedurals. It didn’t have the pizzazz, even though I tried to force pizzazz into every freaking word.

That’s because I’m a builder and a piler-onner. Look at it like a nest. You put one straw or twig on another and you build and build and build. It’s a different kind of writing from, say, Harlan Coben’s thrillers.

When in doubt, I always go back to horseracing. One of these days I’m going to write a book called, “All I ever learned I learned from Horseracing”. Sport distills truth like nothing else.

In horseracing, there are front-runners, stalkers, and come-from-behind horses. Each horse has his own style, his own way to win. Jockeys know that it’s not a good idea to take the horse out of his style of running, even if his style of running doesn’t suit a particular race. If you have a horse like Sinister Minister, who just has to have the lead or he’ll use all his energy fighting you, you have to let him do what he wants to do, even if he’s running a mile and quarter and will likely burn himself out. No matter what, you don’t want to take that horse out of his game.

By attempting a suspense standalone, I took myself out of my game. The writing I had come to be so proud of suddenly was flat. I knew I was in way over my head.

I know what kind of writer I am. I know where I’m most effective. I’m a thriller writer who comes from the mystery side of things.