Thriller

Historically, the thriller, an eclectic form of narrative, can be seen to have emerged in the early decades of the 20th century. The thriller caters to a mass-reading public (predominantly male) of reasonably advanced literacy, and is dependent as a commodity on a sophisticated marketing and advertising apparatus. Initially, thrillers tended to be genre products: that is, formulaic works which swamp the market, no single title selling supremely well. Around the mid-1940s (with the landmark success of Spillane's I, the Jury), thrillers began to feature on British and American best-seller lists. With the mid-1970s popularity of writers like Frederick Forsyth, the “blockbuster” thriller emerged, often accompanied by a big-budget film or television mini-series. British writers tended to dominate the field in the early 20th century; American writers have dominated in the latter decades. The literary quality of the thriller is not, in general, high (lower than the best of science fiction or detective fiction in the same period, insofar as any broad judgement can be made). Nonetheless a group of literary writers (notably Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Brian Garfield, and Len Deighton) have contrived to produce thrillers of literary distinction.