I’m Not Thrilled

I used to love thrillers. Grew up reading them in what I think of as the Golden Age of the genre: Alistair MacLean, Ken Follett, and the master, Frederick Forsythe. To me, the crowning achievement in the history of thrillers is Forsythe’s Day of the Jackal, in which (not really a spoiler alert) the reader is kept on seat’s edge, even though he knows this is not how DeGaulle dies; what the hell happens? (The movie, starring Edward Fox as The Jackal, is just as riveting.)

More than any other genre, thrillers depend on suspension of the reader’s disbelief. Some would say it’s science fiction that carries this burden, but in sci-fi you can create a world with your own rules. So long as you stay within the rules you set up, you’re fine. Need a spacecraft to fly at several times the speed of light and still get radio communications? No problem. Life expectancy of 150 years? Child’s play. Be fair with the reader and you can get away with just about anything. (Play fair, though. Sci-fi fans can be vindictive SOBs.)

Thriller writers have to live in the world we do, with all the limitations of the laws of physics, yet still keep you thinking, “Yeah…yeah, he could do that.” MacLean can have a handful of commandoes who’d never met before parachute into a mountain-top German compound to rescue a captured British general and get him back to England safely, with one spy on the team and another back at headquarters, and the reader thinks, “Damn. These guys are good.” (This is the basic storyline of Where Eagles Dare, another great book and movie combo.)

Not anymore. Modern thriller writers aren’t interested in working around the suspension of disbelief; they’re writing for a public that will believe anything. I was asked to review such a book last week. It hit all the major food groups that make modern thrillers what they are(n’t):

· Protagonists with bizarre backstories. In this, the male lead was raised as a sociology experiment, in a box. Alone. Swear to God. His female partner has a freakish gift for seeing patterns in data and images. And she has a serious martial arts background.

· Of course, they have sex.

· Gruesome levels of detail. No one has a pair of binoculars; they have Nikon Prostaff 12x25 binoculars. Julbo Micropores sunglasses. Two pages are spent describing a character getting out of the car, removing something from the trunk, and walking thirty feet to a motel room. True, she’s taking hi-tech counter-surveillance measures, but Jesus Christ, two pages? Later we’re treated to a page-and-a-half of the hero hitting someone. Once. Yes, with a ruler, but, still.

· The bad guys work for a private company to which much government security and intelligence work has been outsourced. (Okay, I believe that part.) They have an uncanny ability not only to track our heroes, but to get where they’re going first, even when our heroes didn’t know where they were going until they left.

· The scenario is, of course, apocalyptic. The other bad guys—not the ones who are chasing our heroes, who hired them in the first place and are pretending to be good guys—aren’t going to steal a bomb or sabotage a reactor; they stole a reactor.

· The puppetmaster who sets this world-wide operation in motion leaves obscure clues our heroes unfailingly interpret correctly, and in the nick of time. Everyone ends up where he wanted them to go, and does what he wanted them to do, even though the puppetmaster died before the two protags got together.

The end result is a little like The DaVinci Code meets Terminator 2.

To be fair, the author pulls this off pretty well. It is explained why several groups of killers are so easily dispatched. Sure, they’re incompetent, but he tells why such boobs were sent. The writing isn’t nearly so mind-numbingly repetitious as Dan Brown’s. When [author’s name redacted] allows himself to write, and not worry about contemporary conventions of the genre, things zip along nicely.

I’ve tried to be careful not to spoil the plot for anyone who comes across this book; it’s not really a fair review. These kinds of things are not my cup of tea. Anyone who has read the book will recognize it. If you enjoyed it and my grousing harshes your mellow, my apologies.

Thrillers used to be about suspense, and how the story layered it so it built at a pace to hold the audience. Now they blow shit up and kill people, hoping against hope things move so fast, or are so impenetrable to read, there’s no time to realize what’s being described makes no sense.

Maybe this bothers me so much right now because the day I finished reading this book, The Beloved Spouse and I watched the 2011 version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with Gary Oldman and Colin Firth. More of a suspense story than a thriller, I still spent more time on the edge of my seat during those two hours than during the entire time reading [book title redacted].

Is it just me being more of a grouch than usual? Does anyone else think we need a new name for the thriller genre? “Horseshit” comes to mind, but I’ve been wrong before.

Something Evil's Lurking in the Dark

“Raising the stakes” is the buzzword for thriller writers. Books that purport to tell authors how to write best-selling or breakout novels use the term more than “and” or “it.” Constantly raising the stakes is supposed to intensify the reader’s interest by making a successful outcome more important and less likely all at once. What it’s mainly doing is killing thrillers for anyone looking for more than a comic book.

There are three major symptoms. First is the tendency toward apocalyptic plots. The best example of this is 24, where nothing qualifies as a crisis unless the fate of the nation/world/solar system/galaxy is at stake. It might be fun once, but after that, how far can the tension be ratcheted up before burnout results? The copycats that sprung up are more a reflection of the entertainment industry’s piggyback philosophy than a sea change in taste. Remember, Michael Bay does not make thrillers, no matter what his marketing people want you to think. He blows shit up. Period.

An inevitable side effect of constantly raising the stakes, is the eventual loss of believability. Die Hard was a classic, treading the line between thriller and action movie with a sure touch, and had a manageable group of people in an enclosed space. Die Harder had the people at risk on an airplane that had to land in a blizzard (best case scenario) or blow up (worst case). Die Hard With a Vengeance brought back original director (John McTiernan), who recognized the franchise had crossed over into Bay-like action and treated the whole thing with tongue deep in cheek. Live Free or Die Hard might have been the worst movie ever made. (I’ve not seen Transformers 2, and, if there’s a God, I won’t.)

The Die Hard movies eventually fall apart because the situations become so dire John McClain can’t possibly get out of them. The level of disbelief to be suspended is so great the suspense is killed. You’re back into Michael Bay-land, where all you care about—all you can care about—isn’t whether Bruce Willis pulls it off, but how much shit gets blown up while he does it.

Raising the stakes is a component of the implausibility problem. Another weakness of the modern thriller is used to raise the stakes: the dumbass protagonist. This is a hero/heroine/group of people who, when faced with a decision, will automatically do whatever is calculated to make the situation worse. A perfectly reasonable solution may be in front of them—going to the police now comes to mind—but some reason will be manufactured (lack of trust, bad previous experience) to prevent this.

Let’s say the hero is a middle school English teacher who finds $200,000 misplaced by a killer. The killer wants the money back and promises not to kill the teacher if he gets it. Granted, he’s a killer, so lying is pretty far down his list of transgressions he’s worried about. Still, your choices are: give back the money and (maybe live), or keep the money and use your skills as a middle school English teacher to outwit a professional criminal who kills people for a living. Good luck with that. (If this is a movie, the teacher will be young and hot (think Jennifer Anniston), blind, and confined to a wheelchair.)

Thrillers live through suspense. Suspense is not action; it’s the threat of action. Possibly the greatest thriller ever is Day of the Jackal. While reading (or watching) it, the back of your mind is always aware that the Jackal doesn’t kill DeGaulle, because you know that’s not how DeGaulle dies. Still, how are they going to stop him? Not a lot of explosions, no large body counts, most of the dialog is quiet and terse. Why does it work?

Psycho. Rear Window. Jaws. The Exorcist. Alien The French Connection. How much actually happens in these movies? Hitchcock, Spielberg, Freidkin, and Scott keep you on the edge of your seat because of what might plausibly happen. As soon as it happens, the tension is released. There might be anticipation of more to come, but the story relaxes until it can be revved up again. As men of my age know, this isn’t as easy as it looks and sometimes takes a while.

Do you distinguish between thrillers and blowing shit up? Do you think constantly raising the stakes intensifies the action, or dilutes it by making it unbelievable?