I.

Introduction

Thriller, category of fiction intended to place a reader in state of suspense. Thrillers have exciting, adventure-based plots.

II.

Definition

The term “thriller”, as applied to popular novels (and sometimes plays), first appeared in British reviews and book-trade advertising material in the 1890s. It has never denoted a precisely defined category of literature. In current usage, thrillers constitute a loosely bordered area of “male action” fiction which overlaps with more closely specified genres such as adventure stories, war stories, spy and special agent stories, horror stories, crime stories, and detective stories.

As an affective term (thrillers are intended to thrill), it is in direct line with the German Schauerroman (“shudder novel”) of the Romantic period, the early 19th-century “tale of terror”, the Victorian “shilling shocker”, and the “sensation novel”—all of which identify themselves by their tendency to excite or frighten the reader. The thriller can be distinguished in this respect from those fictional genres which are primarily defined by their content or locations, such as spy novels, westerns, detective stories, or love stories. Thrillers tend to be formulaic (heroes and villains are frequently reintroduced from one novel to the next by particular authors) and are often, though not invariably, characterized by a high level of physical violence, suspense, crime, gunplay, escape and chase scenes, and incidental sexual titillation.

III.

The Thriller in England

Although the term “thriller” had been current for some years, Edgar Wallace, author of The Four Just Men (1905), is claimed to be the first true thriller writer in English fiction. Wallace was a top reporter on the Daily Mail.The Four Just Men incorporated the newspaper's “fast-breaking story” style of narrative, and also its reliance on sales gimmicks (Wallace offered a £500 prize to any reader who could come up with the correct solution as to how Philip Ramon, secure in his locked and guarded Downing Street office, was assassinated). Wallace went on to write 173 novels, of which about half qualify as thrillers. Wallace became known to his admirers as the King of the Thrillers and “the human book factory”. He was hugely popular with readers of his time. In the 1920s, it is estimated that 25 per cent of the books sold in England were by Wallace.

The genre which Wallace had pioneered went significantly up-market with the clubland thrillers of Dornford Yates (the pseudonym of Cecil W. Mercer), which centred on the gentleman crime-buster William Chandos and his partner, Jonah Mansel. The first in the series was Blind Corner (1927). Yates's exaggeratedly upper-class Chandos (who owes much to a Dorothy L. Sayers character, the aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, introduced to the reading public in 1923) popularized the debonair, dinner-jacketed thriller hero. Chandos was recycled as Leslie Charteris's Saint (Simon Templar), John Creasey's Toff, and, most successfully, in the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, with their ritual insistence on the hero's discernment about such things as brands of tobacco and the proper way to mix a martini.

A different kind of hero originates with the influential thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), by John Buchan. Richard Hannay (who also featured in six subsequent thrillers) is a hearty hero—strong, silent, tweed-clad, and given to manly country pursuits such as shooting and fishing when not saving England from caricatured foreigners: dastardly villains with thick accents, narrow-set eyes, sinister designs on English maidens, and abominable manners. Buchan's popularization of the international intrigue theme was further developed in E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation (1920), a thriller which did notably well in America, and set the author on a career of over a hundred best sellers.

Another hearty hero was Bulldog Drummond, hero of a series of thrillers by “Sapper” (the pseudonym of H. C. McNeile), of which the first came out in 1920. Like Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond is in the business of saving England from foreign enemies. Where Hannay had been excessively manly, the beer-swilling, pathologically xenophobic, ex-officer Drummond was a middle-class lout, but he appealed to the popular taste of the time. Sapper's thrillers, like Buchan's, were successfully adapted for the cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, giving the authors a wider American exposure than Wallace had enjoyed.

After Edgar Wallace's death in 1932 (he was working on the Hollywood production of King Kong, at the time), his role as King of the Thrillers was taken by another prolific British author, Dennis Wheatley, whose Black August (1934) introduced the series hero, Gregory Sallust, who combined aristocratic characteristics with the hearty manliness exemplified by Hannay and Bulldog Drummond. By 1940, Wheatley was prominently advertised by his publisher (Hutchinson) as “Public Thriller-Writer No. 1”. For all his sales and the brio of his narratives, Wheatley's narrative style was as crude as Wallace's and Sapper's (both of whom he acknowledged as direct influences).

The thriller was raised to a more creditable level of literary achievement by Eric Ambler, who produced his first Ruritanian spy thriller, The Dark Frontier, in 1936 (Ruritania is a fictional European country invented by Anthony Hope in The Prisoner of Zenda, 1894). Ambler developed a distinctive line in international thrillers (drawing on growing European apprehension about the imminence of World War II) of which the most successful was The Mask of Dimitrios (1939; retitled in the United States A Coffin for Dimitrios). Ambler is a thriller writer who made thrillers intellectually respectable (as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton made the detective story similarly respectable during the same period). Once described by the English novelist Graham Greene as “our [by which he meant Britain's] greatest thriller writer”, Ambler clearly influenced other up-market international thriller writers, notably Greene himself (in what he called his “entertainments”, that is thrillers such as The Ministry of Fear, 1943), Ian Fleming, and John le Carré. Ambler's international themes were successfully developed for late 20th-century readers by Frederick Forsyth (like Edgar Wallace, originally a newspaperman by profession) in best-selling action thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972), and The Devil's Alternative (1980).

IV.

The Thriller in America

Distinctive forms of thriller have developed in the United States. Drawing on the Gothic narratives of Edgar Allan Poe, “chillers” (a hybrid of thriller and horror story) have produced the record-breaking 1980s and 1990s best sellers of Stephen King. King's Cujo (1981) and Gerald's Game (1994), narratives with no supernatural dimension, are classic exercises in the protracted suspense which has always been the staple element in thrillers. “Hardboiled” crime fiction, originating with Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (both 1929) by Dashiell Hammett, was given a best-selling twist in the “vigilante thrillers” of Mickey Spillane, beginning with I, the Jury (1947). Vigilante thrillers were boosted by Brian Garfield's more sophisticated tale of urban middle-class revenge, Death Wish (1972), a novel which became a long-term best seller following its hugely successful film adaptation (directed by Michael Winner, starring Charles Bronson), in 1974. Vigilante thrillers are notable for a sadistic degree of physical violence—something which, after the 1950s, increasingly appealed to readers.

The gangster thriller, given mass popularity with novelizations and spin-offs of the James Cagney movie, The Public Enemy (1931), and reworked in James Hadley Chase's unashamedly trashy No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), re-emerged as Mario Puzo's super-selling Mafia epic, The Godfather (1969)—a work which incorporates in its massive and sprawling structure many features of the traditional crime thriller.

With The Andromeda Strain (1974), Michael Crichton popularized a genre which has come to be known as the “technothriller”, narratives lavishly embellished with reference to science and technology. The genre was further exploited in the Cold War technothrillers of Tom Clancy, with their heavy reliance on an insider's knowledge about advanced weaponry. Clancy's technothrillers (particularly after the filming of the 1984 novel, The Hunt for Red October, in 1990) are among the top-selling novels of the 20th century. Clancy's sales are rivalled by John Grisham's courtroom thrillers, following The Firm (1991). Grisham's novels have also benefited from successful film tie-ins.

V.

Significance

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.