Thriller is a broad genre of literature, film and
television, having numerous subgenres. Thrillers are characterized and defined
by the moods they elicit, giving viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement,
surprise, anticipation and anxiety. Successful examples of thrillers are the films of Alfred
Hitchcock.
Thrillers generally keep the
audience on the "edge of their seats" as the plot builds towards a climax.
The cover-up of important information is a common element. Literary devices
such as red herrings, plot twists, and cliffhangers are used extensively. A
thriller is usually a villain-driven plot, whereby he or she presents obstacles
that the protagonist must overcome.
Homer's Odyssey is one of
the oldest stories in the Western world and is regarded as an early prototype
of the thriller.
Characteristics
Writer Vladimir Nabokov, in his
lectures at Cornell University, said: "In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the
villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the
weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to
ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope
that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull
chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine."
Thrillers may be defined by the
primary mood that they elicit: suspenseful excitement. In short, if it
"thrills", it is a thriller. As the introduction to a major anthology
explains:
Thrillers provide such a rich
literary feast. There are all kinds. The legal thriller, spy thriller,
action-adventure thriller, medical thriller, police thriller, romantic
thriller, historical thriller, political thriller, religious thriller,
high-tech thriller, military thriller. The list goes on and on, with new
variations constantly being invented. In fact, this openness to expansion is
one of the genre's most enduring characteristics. But what gives the variety of
thrillers a common ground is the intensity of emotions they create,
particularly those of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and
breathlessness, all designed to generate that all-important thrill. By
definition, if a thriller doesn't thrill, it's not doing its job.
— James Patterson, June 2006, "Introduction," Thriller
Major elements of a thriller
- Suspense
- Themes
and Characters
- Story
and Setting
History in Literature
Ancient epic poems such as the Epic
of Gilgamesh, Homer's Odyssey and the Mahābhārata use similar
narrative techniques as modern thrillers. In the Odyssey, the hero
Odysseus makes a perilous voyage home after the Trojan War, battling
extraordinary hardships in order to be reunited with his wife Penelope. He has
to contend with villains such as the Cyclops, a one-eyed giant, and the Sirens,
whose sweet singing lures sailors to their doom. In most cases, Odysseus uses
cunning instead of brute force to overcome his adversaries.
Little Red Riding Hood (1697), an early example of a
psycho-stalker story, is a fairy tale about a girl who walks through the woods
to deliver food to her sick grandmother. A wolf wants to eat the girl but is
afraid to do so in public. He approaches Little Red Riding Hood and she naively
tells him where she is going. He suggests the girl pick some flowers, which she
does. In the meantime, he goes to the grandmother's house and gains entry by
pretending to be the girl. He swallows the grandmother whole (in some stories,
he locks her in the closet) and waits for the girl, disguised as the grandma.
Little Red Riding Hood illustrated by Gustave Dore
The Three Apples, a tale in the One Thousand and One
Nights (Arabian Nights), is the earliest known murder mystery and
suspense thriller with multiple plot twists and detective fiction elements. In
this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun
al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead
body of a young woman who was cut into pieces. Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far
ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days. This whodunit
mystery may be considered an archetype for detective fiction.
The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) is a swashbuckling revenge
thriller about a man named Edmond Dantès who is betrayed by his friends and
sent to languish in the notorious Château d'If. His only companion is an old
man who teaches him everything from philosophy to mathematics to swordplay.
Just before the old man dies, he reveals to Dantès the secret location of a
great treasure. Shortly after, Dantès engineers a daring escape and uses the
treasure to reinvent himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. Thirsting for vengeance,
he sets out to punish those who destroyed his life.
The Riddle of the Sands (1903) is "the first modern
thriller", according to Ken Follett, who described it as "an open-air
adventure thriller about two young men who stumble upon a German armada
preparing to invade England".
Heart of Darkness (1903) is a first-person within a
first-person account about a man named Marlow who travels up the Congo River in search of an enigmatic Belgian trader
named Kurtz. Layer by layer, the atrocities of the human soul and man's
inhumanity to man are peeled away. Marlow finds it increasingly difficult to
tell where civilization ends and where barbarism begins. Today this might be
described as a psychological thriller.
The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is an early thriller by John
Buchan, in which an innocent man becomes the prime suspect in a murder case and
finds himself on the run from both the police and enemy spies.
The Manchurian Candidate (1959) by Richard Condon is a classic of
Cold War paranoia. A squad of American soldiers is kidnapped and brainwashed by
Communists. False memories are implanted, along with a subconscious trigger
that turns them into assassins at a moment's notice. They are soon reintegrated
into American society as sleeper agents. One of them, Major Bennett Marco,
senses that not all is right, setting him on a collision course with his former
comrade Sergeant Raymond Shaw, who has been activated as an assassin.
The Spy Who Came in from the
Cold (1963) by John le
Carré is set in the world of Cold War espionage and helped to usher in an era
of more realistic thriller fiction, based around professional spies and the
battle of wits between rival spymasters.
The Bourne Identity (1980) is one of the first thrillers to
be written in the modern style that we know today. A man with gunshot wounds is
found floating unconscious in the Mediterranean Sea.
Brought ashore and nursed back to health, he wakes up with amnesia. Fiercely
determined to uncover the secrets of his past, he embarks on a quest that sends
him spiraling into a web of violence and deceit. He is astounded to learn that
knowledge of hand-to-hand combat, firearms, and trade craft seem to come naturally
to him.
