cambridge-crime-fiction

The thriller
It downplayed the jokiness and artificiality of many mysteries, while failing
to recognise that thrillers could work perfectly well on their own terms.
The thriller was not necessarily as far-fetched or as illogical as these critics
implied. Erskine Childers’s bestseller The Riddle of the Sands (1903), a
founding text of the genre, displays a meticulous eye for detail and a high
moral and political seriousness, as befits a seafaring spy novel whose major
concern is with national regeneration in the face of Germany’s growing
naval power. But, as the spy novelist Valentine Williams argued in one of
the rare defences of the thriller, what ultimately matters in thriller-writing
is ‘plausibility’ or verisimilitude, a quality that is largely genre-specific. It is
not what the reader believes that counts: ‘the important aim is to make him
believe it’, to carry the reader along by using pace and surprise to ‘outweigh
any inherent improbabilities of plot’. 7 This maxim is as relevant to a latterday
‘superthriller’ like Thomas Harris’s Black Sunday (1975), which takes us
inside the technicalities of a terrorist plan to bomb the American Super Bowl
by airship, as it was when Williams wrote his apologia forty years earlier.
Despite his insistence that the thriller’s prime focus is upon action,
Williams tended to blur the boundaries between it and the detective story
in a way that would undoubtedly have troubled Sayers or purists like
R. Austin Freeman. In fact, there are good reasons for this confusion. For
one thing, writers were often capable of working in either genre. This was
evidently true of Williams himself, and it was no less true of major figures
like Edgar Wallace and, perhaps more surprisingly, Agatha Christie, some
of whose early novels like The Secret Adversary (1922) orThe Seven Dials
Mystery (1929) were concocted from such thrillerish ingredients as master
criminals, secret societies, and special agents. The picture is further complicated
by the protean nature of the thriller, which has always been capacious
enough to incorporate devices from the detective story tradition. This was
particularly noticeable during the Edwardian period, in the years before the
classic detective novel was perfected. Thrillers as various as Edgar Wallace’s
The Four Just Men (1905) and Sax Rohmer’s novel introducing his celebrated
Oriental master criminal, The Insidious Fu Manchu (1913), made extensive
use of the locked-room murder mystery first devised by Edgar Allan Poe, for
example, but combined such baffling crimes with cliffhanger techniques.
Where the thriller differs from the detective story is not in any disinclination
to resort to deductive methods in solving crimes – though, to be
sure, when present they necessarily occupy only a secondary role. Rather,
the thriller was and still is to a large extent marked by the way in which it
persistently seeks to raise the stakes of the narrative, heightening or exaggerating
the experience of events by transforming them into a rising curve of
danger, violence or shock. The world that the thriller attempts to realise is
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