The Evolution of the Thriller

Last year I published a pair of papers over at SSRN about the declining presence on the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly bestseller lists of both spy fiction and military techno-thrillers after the 1980s--and along with this, the shift of the thriller genre away from high politics and international affairs, to domestic settings and "ordinary" crime (and in particular, legal thrillers, serial killer profiler thrillers, forensic thrillers).

The articles were more concerned with empirically checking the (widely held) impression that this was going on against the available data rather than explaining it or discussing its implications.

However, it seems to me that there are a number of such explanations.

One may be that the genres themselves were a bit played out. As I have argued for a number of years, by the 1970s the spy genre had been around for three generations, about the normal lifetime of a literary genre, and showing it--not least in its increasing tendency to look backward, and in its penchant for self-parody and for borrowing from other genres to make new hybrid genres (because what it had to offer itself was looking less fresh).

The military techno-thriller seemed fresher and newer in the '80s, but it, too, was part of that very old tradition, and it seems to me that its essential requirements (politico-military scenarios, novel weaponry) were limiting, enough that it, too, was getting a bit worn-out by the '90s.

Another is that this was a matter of the Cold War's end. The plain and simple truth is that international politics only became a major theme of American popular fiction in the '60s because of that conflict, and it was only natural that its passing would mean a decline in such interest.

However, alongside these issues of exhaustion or diminished topicality there is the matter of the sort of reading experience these books offered. Thrillers about spies, techno-military crises and the like are "big picture"-oriented and information-heavy, particularly regarding the "machinery of civilization." In this they tended toward what Goethe and Schiller called the "epic." This is, in fact, part of their appeal for many. (It was certainly part of their appeal for me.)

But I suspect most readers are looking less for the epic than the "dramatic" (Goethe and Schiller's term again)--fiction offering the reader close identification with with a protagonist whose struggles they follow with baited breath, and never mind all the big picture, informational stuff that tends to get in the way of that kind of experience. It seems to me that domestic settings, ordinary legal and criminal stuff, fits in with those more easily than flying missiles and Presidents on the hotline to the Kremlin, reading about which the quotidian and character-type stuff only gets in the way. (I admit it: reading Jack Ryan novels I was never really interested in Jack Ryan's home life, just the crisis stuff and high-tech stuff and action stuff.)

The tilt toward dramatic rather than epic apart, it may even be that people were inclining more toward easy-to-read books--which the techno-thrillers, with their multiple plot threads and density with technological and other material detail often were not, the reader having to keep track of too much, process too much. (Jack Ryan is only on the page for a third of The Hunt for Red October, and in the paperback edition, does not show up for a hundred pages amid all the diplomatic and military maneuvering of a full-blown superpower chess game where A-10s buzz the Kirov battle-cruiser, and American and Soviet naval aviators shoot it out in the sky.)

I suspect this all the more looking at the work of perhaps that most dramatically inclined of the era's bestselling spy novelists, John le Carre. His fiction was indeed character-oriented, but his oblique, Show-don't-tell-oriented prose style made a very heavy demand on the reader, so much so that in high school I found him nearly unreadable, and even after having become a fan, am astonished that he managed to sell so many books. (As Raymond Benson declared some time ago, by the '90s Ian Fleming would have been deemed "too hard" for the broad market--and his prose was a walk in the park compared to le Carre's.)

I suspect all this, too, looking at the other sorts of popular fiction that have flourished in recent years--like that penchant for young adult-oriented dystopias. As I argued in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry, what we tended to get in works like Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games and Veronica Roth's Divergent were dystopias with little-to-no politics (!) or world-building, information-light stories that were narrowly focused and intimate in their presentation of protagonists with whom our identification was everything; and as young adult stories, all the easier to read.