Reader Emotions and Thrillers, High and Low

Harry Connolly once drew a distinction between what he called "high" as opposed to "low" thrillers. High thrillers tend to involve high stakes situations, exotic locales and glimpses of the world's larger workings that taken in the "big picture," in part because they are set on society's commanding heights. By contrast low thrillers tend to involve "low-level criminals or regular citizens in danger" in "everyday" settings. Spy fiction tends to partake of the former, with this certainly going for the Frederick Forsyth or Tom Clancy type of story. By contrast crime fiction tends to be of the latter type, especially the James Cain or Raymond Chandler type of hardboiled tale.

Way back when I first started thinking about these matters, and studying the bestseller lists accordingly, I was surprised when my survey of the bestseller lists revealed that stories of the second type seemed to me to be more popular; that police detectives did better than super-spies, and crime stories and life on the street had a bigger audience than "international men of mystery."

After being surprised I was also puzzled. How could some yarn about a small-town half-wit who stumbles upon a small-time drug dealer's cache of money or has an affair with some woman looking for some dupe to get rid of her husband compare for sheer appeal with international crises and globetrotting and techno-military hardware (and the action scenes that went with them)?

One thought I had about the matter was that the "low" thrillers had an advantage in being less intellectually demanding. The mundane settings and situations require less "information-processing" on our part. The small-town half-wit's being tantalized by a few hundred thousand dollars'worth of drug money never sparked my imagination the way that intrigues involving hundreds of billions of dollars coursing through the world economy did. But it may be that most find it easier to wrap their minds around that "little" cache of tangible bills than the big financial operations involved in those hundreds of billions--and respond to it emotionally, where the hundreds of billions are too big, too abstract, to elicit a really visceral response from them. There is, too, that visceral edge to the situation of the chump being manipulated into murder by a femme fatale. (Aldous Huxley is supposed to have said that "An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex"--and it seems that very few persons really are intellectuals, even when they happen to be holding a book in their hands.)

These hypotheses still seem to me to not just have explanatory value, but to account at least for some of that difference. Yet, I no longer think they are the whole story, so to speak, Goethe and Schiller affording not just an additional explanation but perhaps the key to the mystery in their essay "On Epic and Dramatic Poetry."

As Goethe and Schiller conceived it, in the epic form you have people taking in large-scale stories--"man working outside himself: battles, journeys, every sort of undertaking"--with a "quietly hearkening" interest. By contrast, in the dramatic you have them taking in small, personal dramas that all but plead for intense identification with the protagonist and their largely internal struggles. Indeed, while they do not say that explicitly, it can seem that there is an inverse relationship between the scope of a story, and its personal resonance.

Quite obviously the high thrillers tend toward the epic, the crime stories toward the intense, tightly focused, personal dramatic. And this seems especially the case in the kind of high thrillers I favored, those with far and away the widest scope, simply because of how the world was changed. Today power is rooted in organizations, and indeed, divided among many organizations of many different kinds. Despite the exaltation of the holders of high public and corporate office in a media whose operatives are least unkindly described as their courtiers, the reality is that those organizations depend on innumerable faceless technicians whose skills and work leave the "top men" scratching their heads. And glorified as the top men are, office and office-holder are separate. The result is that power, agency, becomes a dispersed thing, often dispersed almost to nothing. Richard Neustadt is not altogether wrong about the power of the president being essentially the power to persuade, the larger affairs of the world decided much more by broad elite consensus put into effect through those vast machineries by organization men than single, commanding personalities--the "strong characters" so often demanded of writers. And just like the matter of agency, the substance of the issues at hand is similarly abstract, international crises turning on scientific minutiae lacking immediate, emotive impact--like the technical details of the nuclear fuel cycle. Reflecting all this the high thrillers often scarcely manage to offer a protagonist at all--our nominal hero apt to be just one among many different good guys working along different tracks to save the day from that threat of an abstruse and abstract nature.

All that, I think, speaks less forcefully to most imaginations than the story of a single "ordinary man" desperately trying to save his life, and only that. This is all the more so because the ordinary man (like that small-town half-wit who finds the drug money) is, after all, an ordinary man, and at least potentially more relatable than other, more colorful or exotic or powerful protagonists, and so much is made of relatability. Indeed, many will speak of it as the very first duty of a writer, even when they are offering nothing more than unpretentious entertainment--let alone when they are looking for something more.