WHAT IS A THRILLER?
One of the most difficult popular fiction genres to define with any precision is the “thriller.” Years ago in a book review (I can’t recall which one right now), John Updike wrote, “At some level, every novel aspires to be a thriller.” Or words to that effect. I think he meant that even avant-garde novelists who eschew plot and tension in their works probably aspire to thrill their readers with dazzling prose or brilliant insights into the human condition or some clever form of literary experimentation – or perhaps a combination of all three. No doubt every writer longs to hear that his work is thrilling. But, for the last half century or so, when publishers or p.r. reps or reviewers have applied the word “thriller” to a novel, it has usually been done to convey to potential purchasers that the book is fast-paced and suspenseful, a novel you “won’t be able to put down.” Such books are also sometimes called “page-turners” or, if they contain some aspect of supernatural horror, “chillers.”
On her self-titled blog, Savannah Gilbo, a so-called “book coach,” has compiled a helpful list of “Ten Things Every Thriller Novel Needs.” But even this list leaves room for some quibbles. For instance, Gilbo lists “a crime” as the first element that every thriller novel needs. I disagree with her. I consider Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws to be one of the greatest thrillers of the twentieth century, but it isn’t a crime novel. The villain of Jaws isn’t a criminal; it is a force of nature. Likewise, I consider Michael Crichton to be one of the preeminent thriller-writers of the last sixty years, but in many of his novels – Timeline, Jurassic Park, Sphere, The Lost World, Disclosure, The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, etc. – crime is not a major part of the plot. The 1962 novel Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, is one of the greatest thrillers of the Cold War era but it isn’t a crime novel. It is about a series of technical and procedural failures that causes the U.S. to accidentally target the Soviet Union with warplanes carrying nuclear weapons that could wipe out all of Moscow and its environs. You could argue that annihilating a huge civilian population without provocation is, indeed, a heinous crime. But, in the novel, no one is criminally liable and the top military brass in both the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. work together in an effort to stop the bombing. The 1958 airplane thriller Runway Zero-Eight, written by Arthur Hailey and John Castle (the latter a pseudonym for the writing team of Ronald Payne and John Garrod), tells the nightmarish tale of what happens when the pilot and co-pilot of a passenger jet flying across Canada are stricken with a case of food-poisoning and can no longer fly the plane. Early on, foul play is eliminated as a cause of the food-poisoning. This is a thriller with no bad guys and no crime. But it is nonetheless riveting. More recently, Lawrence Wright’s 2020 novel The End of October delivered plenty of thrills without being what is traditionally thought of as a crime novel. That very timely novel, written before the COVID-19 pandemic but published just as the pandemic was shutting down much of the U.S., is a thriller about, what else, a pandemic. Plenty of crimes are committed during the course of the novel as many cities around the globe descend into anarchy, but the novel isn’t really about crime. It is about the intersection of science and politics. There is some suggestion that the pandemic was inflicted upon the world by Vladimir Putin, which, if true, would constitute a crime of Hitlerian proportions. But the question of exactly how the pandemic was started remains pretty much a mystery to the end. The book, nonetheless, was described by many reviewers as a thriller. Rightfully so, I believe.
So, if a thriller isn’t necessarily a mystery or a crime novel, what is it? I would argue that, at the very least, all thrillers need a relatively brisk pace and a great deal of suspense. They also need relatively high stakes. Ira Levin’s 1967 novel, Rosemary’s Baby, is widely regarded as one of the best American thrillers of the twentieth century. The stakes are high: a young pregnant woman tries to prevent a satanic cult from sacrificing her unborn child to the devil. Levin does a good job of ratcheting up the suspense, so that the final one hundred pages or so of this relatively short (218 pages in paperback) novel fly by. The book has been justifiably described as a horror novel and a novel of psychological suspense. It is also a crime novel as well as a mystery. But, for me at least, the term “thriller” seems almost tailor-made for books like Rosemary’s Baby. This is clearly a book meant to be gobbled up in a sitting or two. Though it is a horror novel about Satanism, Levin doesn’t delve too deeply into the history of Satanism or its impact on world culture, the way that Anne Rice’s novels often stretch back centuries in order to explore vampirism or witchcraft. Rosemary’s Baby is meant to thrill the reader, not to provide her with a treatise on evil in the modern world. And that is why I believe that “thriller” is its true genre.
Levin’s novel undoubtedly had a profound influence on William Peter Blatty’s 1971 bestseller, The Exorcist. The Exorcist is, among other things, a crime novel, a mystery, and a thriller. But I believe that it is best categorized as a horror novel. The Exorcist is steeped in Catholic theology and, specifically, the rite of exorcism. The supernatural is much more important to The Exorcist than to Rosemary’s Baby. You are certainly free to disagree with me, but while I think of Levin’s novel as a thriller, I think of The Exorcist as a horror novel. Both are excellent.
Here are some of the other novels from the same approximate era that I would categorize as thrillers: William Goldman’s The Marathon Man (despite also being a crime novel) and Magic (despite also being a crime novel and a psychological – as opposed to a supernatural – horror novel), Ken Follett’s The Eye of the Needle (despite also being a spy novel, a war novel, and a historical novel), James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor (also a spy novel and a crime novel), Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (also a sci-fi novel and a social satire) and The Boys From Brazil (also a sci-fi novel, although cloning, which was theoretical at the time, is no longer science fiction), Stephen King’s Carrie (also a horror novel), John Farris’s When Michael Calls (also a crime novel), The Day of the Jackal (also a crime novel), Trevanian’s The Eiger Sanction (also a crime novel and an adventure novel), and Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are the Children, A Stranger Is Watching, A Cry In the Night, and The Cradle Will Fall (all of which are also crime novels).
Do I have a foolproof formula by which I can separate the thrillers from the crime novels, or from the horror novels, or from the spy novels? No, not really. What Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography is true of me and the thriller novel, “I know it when I see it.” Or, perhaps more accurately, “I know it when I’ve read it.” Many fans of the genre say that a ticking clock (or a hard-and-fast deadline of some sort) is a necessity for a good thriller. I don’t think a ticking clock is an absolute must for a thriller, but I do prefer thrillers that take place over a relatively short period of time. Andrew Klavan’s 1995 novel True Crime (the source of the 1999 Clint Eastwood film) is a classic of the ticking-clock thriller genre. It is the tale of a crusading journalist who has just a few hours to find evidence that will prove the innocence of a man scheduled to die in the state’s gas chamber for a murder he didn’t commit. Many of Michael Crichton’s novels unspool over a short period of time. Rising Sun covers just three days. Congo unfolds over the course of thirteen days. Disclosure begins on a Monday and ends four days later on Friday. A Case of Need begins on Monday October 10 and concludes on Monday October 17. Airframe begins on Monday and concludes a week later on Sunday. The Terminal Man begins on Tuesday March 9, 1971, and concludes on Saturday March 13, 1971. The Andromeda Strain covers a span of just five days. Robert Harris’s 2011 technothriller reads like a Michael Crichton thriller and it unspools in just two days.
Are suspense novels and thrillers the same thing? I don’t think so. I think of Patricia Highsmith as a writer of suspense novels (which are usually also crime and/or mystery novels). Although her novels sometimes provide thrills, they are generally much more slowly paced than traditional thrillers. Graham Greene called her “a poet of apprehension.” Her novels are full of tension and unease, but they often move very slowly (by intention). Highsmith didn’t write “page-turners,” she wrote “slow burners.”
Although John D. MacDonald was capable of writing good thrillers – such as Cape Fear – his best-known works, the Travis McGee novels, are detective stories rather than thrillers. Thus I think of MacDonald as a crime writer or a detective novelist. The same is true of Ross Macdonald. Michael Connelly writes novels that contain thrills, but he seems more interested in exploring the dark side of the Southern California milieu where most of his novels unfold. I think of him as a crime writer. Elmore Leonard packed some excellent thrills into both his Western novels and his crime fiction. He was also capable of packing humor into his novels. But I don’t think of him primarily as a humorist or a thriller writer or a Western novelist. To me, he’ll always be a crime writer. Crime writer (or mystery writer, or spy writer, etc.) is not a lesser designation than thriller writer; it is simply a different designation. I consider Lee Child and Harlan Coben to be thriller writers, even though crime and mystery permeate their works. I consider Thomas Harris to be a thriller writer, even though his books all deal with crime. I consider Robert Harris to be a thriller writer, even though some of his books could be categorized as historical novels (or even alternate histories). Although the novels of Ruth Rendell and P.D. James contain plenty of thrills, I consider both women to be mystery writers. (Curiously, the two most thrilling of Rendell’s novels – The Brimstone Wedding and The Crocodile Bird – were published under her penname Barbara Vine, so I think of Vine as a thriller novelist and Rendell as a mystery novelist.) Although her books contain plenty of crime and mystery, I consider Mary Higgins Clark to be a writer of thrillers. The same is true of Tess Gerritsen.
Dean Koontz strikes me as a special case. He has written mysteries and crime novels and suspense novels and science-fiction novels and fantasies and many other types of genre novels. But most of his novels are designed primarily as page-turners and, thus, for the sake of convenience, I tend to think of him as an author of thrillers. Stephen King, on the other hand, pretty much defies categorization at this point. For decades he was described mainly as a horror novelist. Many people probably still think of him as primarily a horror novelist. But over the past six decades or so he has produced crime novels, fantasy novels, time-travel novels, thrillers, straight-forward literary fare, and much more. Many of his novels – Carrie, Firestarter, Cujo, Christine, Pet Semetary, Thinner, Misery, etc. – strike me as flat-out thrillers, but I would hesitate to dub him a thriller author. He is so well-known that there really is no reason to label him any more. He is Stephen King and he writes Stephen King novels.
Now let’s talk a bit about the various subcategories of thrillers. Michael Crichton was said to specialize in techno-thrillers. The term seems fair to me, even though some of his thrillers (such as The Great Train Robbery and A Case of Need) contain nothing that would strike a contemporary reader as cutting-edge technology. Tom Clancy was also often described as a writer of techno-thrillers but, although military hardware figures prominently in most of his books, I think of him as more of a writer of political thrillers or military thrillers. Clive Cussler made his name as the author of underwater adventures. He, too, has sometimes been referred to as an author of techno-thrillers. His books often contain plenty of high-tech gadgetry, but I tend to think of him as a writer of nautical adventures (although that term doesn’t describe all of his books). Robin Cook is the master of the medical thriller. The Genesis Code, John Case’s 1997 novel of cloning and international adventure, has been described as a bio-medical thriller. That sounds about right to me. Other books in that might be dubbed bio-medical thrillers include Richard Setlowe’s Experiment, John Darnton’s Neanderthal, Nancy Freedman’s Joshua, Son of None, Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil, and nearly half of Crichton’s oeuvre.
And then of course there are Scott Turow and John Grisham and all of their fellow lawyers-turned-bestselling-authors. When Turow’s Presumed Innocent was published in 1987, the publisher could have promoted it as a “legal novel” or a “courtroom drama,” appellations that had been applied to earlier bestsellers such as The Caine Mutiny or The Anatomy of a Murder. But, by the 1980s, “thriller” was the term of choice for the kind of books that were known to keep pop-fiction junkies sitting up all night in their armchairs. And so the publicity department for Farrar Straus & Giroux promoted Presumed Innocent as a “legal thriller.” It might not have been the first use of the term, but it was the first time the term was applied to a cultural juggernaut, a book that, in its way, would become as seminal as Rosemary’s Baby or The Day of the Jackal or Jaws. Four years later, when John Grisham, a lawyer like Turow, broke into the big time with his second novel, 1991’s The Firm, the appellation was just waiting there to be exploited. As it happened, Grisham would go on to be the most successful author of legal thrillers (as measured by book sales) of the twentieth century and (so far, at least) the twenty-first. Of all the subgenres of thriller, the legal thriller is probably America’s most popular, thanks in large part to Grisham. For nearly two decades, Michael Crichton’s techno-thrillers often appeared on the same bestseller lists as Grisham’s legal thrillers. Alas, Crichton’s death in 2008, at the age of 66, slowed down (but hasn’t completely halted) the release of new titles from the king of the techno-thriller. These days, the American thriller market is dominated by three men: Grisham, Coben, and Child.
The 1960s and 1970s brought us a wave of so-called gothic novels, domestic thrillers whose plots were heavily influenced by Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca. These novels, whose covers almost always featured an attractive young woman fleeing a spooky looking mansion, were hugely popular with American housewives. Among the best-known writers of gothic novels during that late-twentieth-century resurgence of the genre were Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, and Phyllis Whitney. But they had plenty of company. Many scholarly works have been written about the phenomenon, including The Gothic Romance Wave: A Critical History of the Mass Market Novels, 1960-1993 by Lori A. Paige, and Women’s Gothic and Romantic Fiction: A Reference Guide by Kay Mussell. But by the 1980s, some writers and publishers of gothic fiction felt that the genre wasn’t being taken seriously by enough pop-fiction fans. An effort was made to rebrand the gothic novel as the “novel of romantic suspense.” The books were also sometimes referred to as “romantic thrillers.” Curiously, just as these publishers and writers were turning against the term “gothic,” the word had suddenly become cool. In the early 1980s, it was adopted by a lot of disaffected young people with a fondness for outré musical acts such as Ozzy Osbourne and Depeche Mode, and slasher movies such as The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and the Friday the 13th franchise. These people tended to refer to themselves as “goths.” A whole subgenre of music was born, and it was called Goth Rock. Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman triggered a resurgence of interest in the caped crusader of Gotham City, which also tended to add luster to the term gothic. The effort to rebrand the gothic romance novel as “the novel of romantic suspense” or the “romantic thriller” was only partially successful. And, nowadays, the term gothic romance is preferred by many fans of the genre, especially those who are particularly fond of the old paperbacks of the 1960s and 1970s. This is one instance where words like “suspense” and “thriller” which have a visceral appeal to most pop-fiction lovers, didn’t quite catch on as intended. “Romantic thriller” never acquired the popularity of terms such as “medical thriller,” “techno-thriller,” and “legal thriller.” But you still see it every now and then in pop-fiction marketing campaigns. As a fan of the genre, I prefer “gothic romance.” Although “gothic chiller” and “gothic thriller” are also fine by me.
And now a word about Westerns. In my experience, at least 95 percent of the novels we dub Westerns are also crime novels. They tend to involve cattle rustling, horse-thievery, stagecoach holdups, bank robberies, saloon shootouts, and other criminal acts. And many of these Westerns are downright thrilling. The four Western novels that Robert B. Parker wrote late in his career, the so-called “Virgil Cole & Everett Hitch Series,” are among the best page-turners I know of. The same is true of Charles Portis’s True Grit and Glendon Swarthout’s The Shootist. But, I’m sorry, no matter how thrilling a Western novel is, I’m always going to mentally categorize it as a Western. Louis L’Amour’s work contains plenty of thrilling novels, but he’ll always be a writer of Westerns in my estimation, even though he also wrote mysteries, fantasies, war stories, historical novels, and other genre work. The Western novel is almost by definition a thriller. This wasn’t always the case. Early Westerns were often just tales of cattle drives and Indian Wars. But Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel Shane, about a freelance gunman trying (and failing) to put his violent past behind him, changed all of that. In many ways, the timing of Shane’s publication couldn’t have been better. Shane is the tale of a warrior trying to readjust to ordinary life, to become a contributing member of a peaceful society. After World War II millions of American men found themselves in the same predicament as Shane. They came home to wives and children and suburban housing tracts and peacetime occupations, but they still, to various degrees, possessed the instincts of the warriors they recently had been. These men couldn’t be satisfied with the rather tame pop fictions that had flourished prior to the war, novels like Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage, or the locked-room mysteries of John Dickson Carr. They wanted fast-paced action and violent clashes between good and evil. Shane spoke to something inside these men. And it inspired countless imitators.On the blog Saddle Bums Western Review, Western novelist Richard S. Wheeler calls Shane “easily the most famous of western novels, and the one that made the most history…It became the watershed novel that changed western fiction into men’s literature featuring the gunman hero. Its success was so phenomenal that publishers thereafter wanted gunman stories and little else.”
Ironically, the Western genre probably produced more actual thrillers than any other genre, but most pop-fiction fans, if asked to name a thriller writer, would likely mention Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Lee Child, Harlen Coben, or Mary Higgins Clark rather than Louis L’Amour, Jack Schaefer, Don Coldsmith, Wayne D. Overholser, Ralph Compton, or Matt Braun. That’s because the Western is such a distinct genre, confined to a specific place (the American West) and time (roughly the mid-nineteenth century to the very early twentieth), that its hard to think of even such thrilling novels as Louis L’Amour’s Flint or Alan Le May’s The Searchers or Elmore Leonard’s Valdez is Coming as anything other than a Western.
I have written before about my prejudice in favor of short thrillers. During my formative years as a reader, way back in the 1970s, bookstores and bestseller lists were full of pop fictions that could be read in three or four hours. James Grady’s 1974 thriller Six Days of the Condor ran 192 pages in hardback. It could easily be consumed over the course of a single lazy weekend (Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford made it even shorter when they converted it into the film Three Days of the Condor). Ira Levin’s 1972 thriller The Stepford Wives ran 145 pages, a veritable sliver of a book (curiously, Levin later wrote a novel called Sliver, that weighed in at a slightly less svelte 190 pages). My 1974 paperback edition of William Goldman’s Marathon Man is a zippy 268 pages long. That’s more of a sprint than a marathon. What’s more, his thrillers Magic (243 pages) and Heat (244) were even zippier. John Ball’s 1965 thriller, In the Heat of the Night — a book that inspired six sequels, an Academy-Award winning film, and a TV series that ran for seven seasons — runs to a mere 158 pages in its current incarnation as an entry in the Penguin Classics series. David Morrell’s 1972 thriller, First Blood, a book that inspired the five-film Rambo franchise as well as an animated TV series, was 252 pages in hardback. According to Morrell, First Blood was partially inspired by Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, a classic thriller from 1939 that runs well under 200 pages in most editions. Alistair MacLean’s thriller Puppet on a Chain made the very first New York Times bestseller list of the 1970s and spent a total of 17 weeks there, holding its own with the likes of The Godfather, Love Story, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It runs 224 pages in paperback, which was a fairly typical length for MacLean, one of the mid-twentieth century’s best-known thriller writers. Jack Finney’s 1955 thriller The Body Snatchers was so slim at 191 pages that Hollywood decided to fatten it up by adding two words to its title for the 1956 and 1978 film versions (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). The aforementioned Fail-Safe ran 286 pages in hardback. Both The Body Snatchers and Fail-Safe were originally serialized in magazines (Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post, respectively). Today’s thriller writers seem more interested in spawning 18-part HBO adaptations than three-part magazine serials. Michael Crichton’s The Terminal Man was serialized in three issues of Playboy magazine back in 1972. The hardback novel spent 19 weeks on the bestseller list that year. The book ran a mere 247 pages. And speaking of medical thrillers written by Harvard-educated medical doctors, Robin Cook’s 1977 bestseller Coma weighed in at a slender 280 pages. James Dickey’s 1970 novel Deliverance, which arrived on the bestseller list on the same week that Puppet on a Chain fell off it, packed its numerous thrills into a lean and mean 278 pages. Peter Benchley’s Jaws, arguably the most famous thriller of the 1970s, had less fat on it than a shark, also running a lean and mean 278 pages in the original hardback. I recall my mother reading it in its entirety over the course of a single Saturday. I read it in its entirety the very next day. Mary Higgins Clark’s 1975 bestseller, Where Are the Children?, is one of the most successful thrillers of all time, having been through at least 75 reprints. In hardback it ran 290 pages. For both me and my thriller-loving mother, it was another one-day read. Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Percent Solution was the ninth bestselling book of 1974. A clever Sherlock Holmes pastiche, it delivered its many thrills in a mere 244 pages. It’s two sequels, The Canary Trainer (224 pages) and The West End Horror (222) were even slimmer.
Alas, the read-it-in-one-sitting thriller seems to be a thing of the past. Stephen King, whose first novel was the rapidly-paced Carrie (199 pages in hardback), now produces novels like 11/22/63 (880 pages in paperback), Under the Dome (1074 pages), and Sleeping Beauties (720 pages and co-written by his son Owen). If I had to give King one word of advice, it would be the title of one of his pseudonymous Richard Bachman novels: “Thinner, Stephen, thinner!” The same thing seems to have happened to Ken Follett. He went from writing slim thrillers like The Eye of the Needle (352 pages) and The Key to Rebecca (ditto) to writing massive historical tomes like The Pillars of the Earth (983). Elizabeth George’s books were always pretty hefty. Her debut novel, 1988’s A Great Deliverance, ran to 432 pages. But her more recent novels are behemoths. They include The Punishment She Deserves (704 pages), Just One Evil Act (736), This Body of Death (692), and A Traitor to Memory (722). And don’t even get me started on Greg Iles. Natchez Burning is 816 pages long and it’s only the first book in a trilogy! The publisher describes the three-volume work as a single “mesmerizing thriller.” I’m sorry, but there’s no such thing as a 2,480-page thriller. It’s as unthinkable as a 2,480-line sonnet. Other Iles novels that have been described as thrillers include Spandau Phoenix (704 pages) and its prequel Black Cross (656). Whatever else they might be – historical dramas, crime dramas, adventure novels – Iles’ books are not thrillers in the traditional sense. Both Robin Cook and Greg Iles have published novels titled Mortal Fear. According to Amazon.com, one hardback weighs in at 217 pages and 9.6 ounces, and the other at 576 pages and 2.05 lbs. I’ll let you guess which is which. Anne Rice’s first novel, An Interview With The Vampire, is also one of her shortest, at roughly 340 pages in paperback. Not coincidentally, it is probably also her best novel. Later she would give us such duds as The Witching Hour (1056 pages) and Blackwood Farm (770 pages). As she got older, Anne Rice didn’t get better; she just got longer.
If I were appointed America’s czar of popular fiction, I would decree that no book longer than 400 pages could be labeled a thriller. Sadly, I have no such authority. What’s more, I must concede that, over time, I have grudgingly begun to appreciate the long thriller. Stephen Hunter’s nearly 500-page novel Dirty White Boys is one of the most thrilling novels I have ever read. The Thomas Harris thrillers The Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs are both over 400 pages long and I wouldn’t want them even a sentence shorter. The aforementioned bio-medical thriller The Genesis Code, written by John Case (a pseudonym for the husband and wife writing team of Jim and Carolyn Hougan), held me spellbound despite being nearly 500 pages long. Charles Palliser’s massive (787 pages) faux Victorian sensation novel The Quincunx had me turning pages like a man possessed. I even have a grudging admiration for Allan Folsom’s 725-pager The Day After Tomorrow, though I think it would have been much more thrilling at 500 pages. My admiration for these and a handful of other very long thrillers has convinced me that it would be foolish to impose an arbitrary limit on the length a thriller novel can run.
Let me close with a list of authors whom I believe deserve to be categorized as thriller writers. This list is purely subjective, obviously. For instance, it contains far more male writers than females ones. This isn’t because men write more thrillers than women. It’s because I read more thrillers by men then women. The authors on this list might just as easily be categorized as crime writers or horror writers or fantasy writers or science fiction writers or adventure writers. Few of them confined themselves to a single popular genre. But, if forced to categorize them, I’d place them in the thriller genre, as hard as that genre may be to define. Here we go:
Ira Levin
Michael Crichton
Richard Matheson
Thomas Harris
Robert Harris
Stephen Hunter
John Grisham
Ken Follett
Frederick Forsyth
Dean L. Koontz
Mary Higgins Clark
William Goldman
Dan Brown
Lee Child
Harlan Coben
Robin Cook
The writing team of Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston
Allan Folsom
David Morrell
Nelson DeMille
Tess Gerritsen
Alistair MacLean
John Katzenbach
James Rollins
Trevanian
F. Paul Wilson
Jack Higgins
David Wiltse
David Martin
This is just a partial list. Feel free to recommend other thriller writers in the comments below. The above list emphasizes authors who wrote multiple thriller novels. It doesn’t include authors such as Patrick Suskind, who wrote Perfume, one of the most unusual thrillers of the twentieth century, but no other true thrillers. Nor does it include Emmanuel Carrere, whose novel The Moustache is also a truly original thriller, but isn’t typical of his literary output. James Dickey wrote two great thrillers – Deliverance and To the White Sea – but he’s better remembered as a poet than as a novelist, so I left him off the list. Peter Collier’s obscure 1980 thriller Downriver is worth checking out. But I left him off the list because he was primarily the author of biographies written in collaboration with David Horowitz. There are plenty of other one-off thrillers out there, books whose authors either produced only one thriller or, in some cases, only one really good one. Perhaps I’ll devote an entire essay to them at a later date. Until then, stay safe, keep reading, and have a thrilling time.