In most romantic suspense, the writer gives her protagonist a choice of two (at least) men vying for her attentions. One is considerate, respectable, helpful, supportive, kind, and available. The other is argumentative, disreputable, obstructionist, contrary, rude, and withholding.
Guess which one is Prince Charming?
You've got it: Mr. Rude Guy is her knight in shining armor, the one who is really on her side even if he acts like he's not. Mr. Nice Guy turns out to be the bad guy, the one who's trying to drive her out of town, the one whose daddy killed her daddy back in the past, or the one who's cheating her out of her inheritance.
Our heroine not only has to show her moxie by sticking around in a dangerous situation and her cleverness in unraveling the secrets and lies, she has to prove her ability to judge people by (finally) realizing which of her suitors is really meant for her.
"Romantic intrigue" takes this basic template and adds international spy elements to it. This time hero and heroine play out their drama against the backdrop of world events. M. M. Kayes series of books featuring exotic locales in the titles are great examples, and this kind of story is the mainstay of the Harlequin Romantic Intrigue line.
Relationship Suspense
Can a woman find happiness in a suspense novel if she's already married? Are her days as a suspense heroine over? Ask Daphne du Maurier, whose Rebecca set the tone for a subgenre I call "relationship suspense."
Rebecca brings its nameless heroine to Manderley, a big seaside house on the rocky coast of Cornwall that would be very much at home in a gothic romance. The house itself, along with its sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, provides a great deal of the atmosphere that makes the book so compelling. The heroine is in a hostile environment and the only person she can trust is her new husband.
But can she trust him? Does he regret marrying her because she can never measure up to the dead Rebecca, his first wife?
Our relationship suspense heroine is married, but did her husband marry her for love or money? She swings between both views, alternately worrying that she's about to be killed for her inheritance and reassuring herself that he loves her for herself alone. It's as if she married both Mr. Rude Guy and Mr. Nice Guy rolled into a single character. The issue for her: Which one is her real husband?
Even without wealth and great houses, fear that a marriage is not what the wife thinks it is makes for a compelling story. Marilyn Wallace's So Shall You Reap examines a Hudson Valley wife's increasing doubts about her husband in a modern variation on the gothic tradition. See Jane Run, by Joy Fielding, is a fast-paced, intense psychological study of an amnesic woman with a husband she can't remember whether to trust.
Personal Jeopardy
Personal jeopardy is at the heart of most gothic-tradition suspense novels. A child is kidnapped, a woman is stalked, a man is targeted by very bad dudes for reasons he can't explain. An ordinary person must pit his or her entire being against powerful enemies, and the suspense lies in whether or not our hero will survive and prevail. The person in jeopardy is not always the protagonist; parents become heroes to rescue their children, a husband or wife fights for a spouse captured by the enemy.
The key is the struggle, the David-and-Goliath confrontation in which a person very much like ourselves must become braver, stronger, more heroic in order to win the unequal fight. Watching the transformation from victim to victor is the heart of the reader's joy in this kind of book.
Why is this ordinary person suddenly the target of Really Bad Dudes?
Sometimes the protagonist made bad choices. The young lawyer in The Firm chose to work at The Firm not knowing the full truth about his new employers. In other books ghosts from the past come thundering into the present, as happens in Carla Neggers's romantic suspense novels. A child is kidnapped for ransom, or a wife is held captive to put pressure on the husband. Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much put James Stewart's life (and that of his wife and child) in danger because he heard a man's dying words—even though he had no idea what those words meant. Ignorance is no defense in the world of personal jeopardy.
Jan Burke turned the tables on "husband rescues kidnapped wife" by having her reporter-hero Irene Kelly free her police officer husband in Hocus (he'd already done the same for her in Dear Irene). Worse than being in jeopardy ones elf is having one's child in jeopardy. Judith Kelman, Meg O'Brien, and Aljean Harmetz have all covered that heart-stopping territory in their suspense novels.
What all these subgenres have in common is that the immediate danger is limited to a single person, a family, a small unit within the larger world. Even the fanatics who plan to blow up the Texas state legislature in Mary Willis Walker's All the Dead Lie Down won't wipe out more than a city block or so if they succeed. The world is not at stake.
Spy Fiction Offshoots _
In spy fiction, the world is at stake. The danger has implications for entire countries, not just the protagonist and her immediate family.
There's an abstract quality to spy fiction that arises out of that fact. If I tell you 5,000 children a month are killed in the United States, you're shocked but not emotionally engaged. If I start telling you about the child in northern San Diego who's been missing for two weeks, if I show you her school picture and the video of her running through the garden hose-spray on a summer afternoon, you'll feel pity and sadness. (In fact, since I wrote those words, her burned body was found in the woods and you probably saw the news on television and can perhaps recall her name even now.) One child captures our attention far more than a mass of children.
That's human nature. So one challenge for the spy branch of the suspense tree is to make the conflict personal without losing the big-picture impact of its high stakes. Giving the reader a character to identify with at every turn helps a lot. Don't just tell us a bad apple in the CIA barrel is about to rat out our man in Moscow; introduce us to that man so we will grieve his death and hate the traitor for causing it.
Even before the end of the Cold War, new variations on the spy novel made their way onto the shelves, using the old format but offering insights into other kinds of large organizations at war with one another and endangering masses of people.
Suspense vs. Thriller
What makes a suspense novel a thriller?
My facetious answer used to be, "A six-figure advance," but I've come to see that it's more than that. Yes, thrillers are big sellers, but they also take the reader to a higher level than an "ordinary" suspense novel. Thriller writers aren't afraid to take their plots, characters, situations, and locales to the max, pushing the envelope of credibility at every possible turn. They pile it on, pitting their protagonists against super-powerful enemies and putting obstacle upon obstacle in the way of success. They squeeze everything they can out of their settings, to the point where the reader ends up knowing more than he ever wanted to know about the internal workings of submarines or dinosaur DNA.
And yet that's part of the thrill inherent in the thriller: the sense of getting more than you bargained for, of being taken inside the inner circle and told things no one is supposed to know. Just when you think the plot can't possibly take one more twist, it throws one more monkey wrench into the hero's plans and spins your head around. It takes you to the highest highs and the lowest lows, and if it does these things at the expense of credibility and ordinary human emotion—well, that's what you want when you're sitting in a plane traveling cross-country, isn't it? (Unless, of course, you're reading Michael Crichton's Airframe.) You want something to rivet your eyes to the page, to let you escape into an exciting, danger-filled place.
The thriller is just one facet of the jewel that is suspense, but it's a powerful one in the eyes of publishers in love with the bottom line. Thriller subgenres dominate the best-seller's list, and each presents the reader with its own special pleasures.
The Techno-Thriller
This is Tom Clancy territory; he began his career with The Hunt for Red October, making the high-tech subma
rine a vital part of the plot and giving so much technical detail that you could practically build your own once you put down the book. For every reader who skipped over the specs section of the book, there seemed to be two others who wanted more.
Many techno-thrillers are based on what-if horror stories about technology gone awry. In fact, one aspect of the thriller market in general is its fascination with "systems gone mad"—we'll see that medical thrillers focus on medical technology gone mad, legal thrillers zero in on the law gone mad, and so forth. In one sense, they're all rewriting Frankenstein, and the only reason they aren't found in the science fiction section of the bookstore is that they purport to be about the present or the very immediate future.
The theme, as exemplified perfectly by Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and its sequels, is that man is too flawed to be trusted with overly ambitious scientific projects. In other words, man shouldn't play God by restoring extinct species to life. Even with the best motives in the world, evil will prevail in the end because hubris, that old human failing, always corrupts.
The danger in writing a techno-thriller is falling in love with technology and forgetting to thrill. A second pitfall is making the technology more interesting than the characters. Remember, readers still have to identify with a living, breathing human being with a goal. Even if the story demands a large cast, the writer needs to narrow the focus to a small number of major characters whose destinies become important to the reader. It's vital that the big-picture writers create a hierarchy of characters and tell the reader up front which are the main characters.
Medical Thrillers
Robin Cook's Coma is the prototype here. Unscrupulous doctors are harvesting organs from healthy people in order to keep rich people supplied with substitute organs.
Other medical thrillers involve rampant diseases (Richard Preston's The Hot Zone), and abuses of reproductive technology (Tess Garritsen's Life Support). All these plotlines play upon an inherent fear of doctors and their ability to save and destroy life—and the fear that these enormous powers, used for evil instead of good, will destroy humanity as surely as those revived dinosaurs.
Political Thrillers
Richard North Patterson takes issues that burn in the public mind and shows how they resonate in the lives of very important political figures. In No Safe Place, a Robert F. Kennedy-like candidate runs for office, haunted by the death of his older brother. Protect and Serve introduces a female candidate for the Supreme Court caught on the horns of the abortion dilemma and a John McCain-like senator who must choose between painful personal revelations and political principle.
Crime Thrillers
One relatively new suspense form is the serial killer novel, a cross between near-horror and police procedural. The horror isn't based on the existence of vampires, or ghosts, or paranormal phenomena, but on the very real horror engendered by true-life killers. Yet the emotional impact on the reader is similar: being scared out of one's wits. The police procedural angle allows the brain to be engaged and a level of understanding to be reached. While many serial killer books are published each year, none have had more impact than Thomas Harris's Red Dragon, which was the first to reveal the secrets of the FBI's profiling unit.
The key to Red Dragon for me wasn't just the amazing and enthralling look into the world of profilers, but the way Harris humanized the serial killer by showing us his horrific childhood. This has become a cliche, but it was powerful when new, and it said something ordinary civilians hadn't really understood before. Patricia Cornwell's books offer a similar backstage look at the autopsy, creating a hybrid form that might be called "procedural suspense."
Legal Thrillers
The world of the legal thriller is an interesting one. Very seldom is there as much at stake in these as there is in the techno and medical subgenres. Humanity itself is not in jeopardy, and usually, only one life is on the line and the life isn't always that of the lawyer protagonist. Yet the legal thriller continues its commercial reign. What is it about this form that keeps readers coming back for more?
The legal thriller combines the straight suspense novel, with its emphasis on the protagonist's personal danger, with the courtroom drama, which traditionally focused on other people's troubles.
What do I mean by this? Take the best courtroom novel ever. (Yes, if you read it today you'll think it's amazingly slow-paced. It's not a thriller. Never was. Never wanted to be.) Anatomy of a Murder shows us a criminal trial from beginning to end, and one of its most striking features is that the trial itself doesn't begin until Midpoint, halfway through the book.
That's because the author, Robert Traver, who was a lawyer and judge in Michigan, knew what most non-lawyers at that time didn't: that a trial really begins the moment a criminal lawyer meets his client. The lawyer, consciously or unconsciously, sums up his client and his client's situation and begins mentally writing his summation to the jury. In this case, attorney Paul Biegler wants very much to believe that his client killed his wife's rapist in a moment of temporary insanity, or, as Michigan courts demand it be worded, irresistible impulse.
The first half of the book consists of preparation for trial, the second half of the trial itself. This is a common feature of courtroom novels now, but today's thrillers add a lot more personal baggage to the lawyer-hero and often put her in dire jeopardy over and above winning or losing the case.
At the trial, things go wrong. Witnesses lie and deny they ever told the lawyer a different story. The judge rules against the lawyer, keeping out lines of questioning or barring witnesses that she needs to win the case. Just when things look blackest, a witness comes forward, or a previous witness changes her story and tells the truth, and our hero makes a stunning summation to the jury and wins the case. Justice prevails even against institutionalized corruption.
John Grisham added a major new twist to the genre with The Firm. Here the lawyer wasn't engaged in other people's troubles; he was trying to save his own life. There was no courtroom drama; the entire story unfolded outside of the court system and involved a very nasty law firm's machinations to keep a renegade young lawyer from telling all to the authorities. Law, in fact, played very little part in the story. The tale could just as easily have been set in a bank or a multinational corporation or a police department; any organization capable of being totally tainted by Mafia connections would have done as well.
Instead of the hero-lawyer engaged in a symbolic duel with his counterpart on the other side of the legal divide, Grisham's hero stood against a vast array of conspirators with immense, shadowy power. He never knew when he was speaking to someone with connections back to The Firm, and even the FBI couldn't be trusted to protect him and to treat him with decency. In the end, a small outlaw band turns the tables on The Firm and manages to escape the clutches of both the bad guys and the so-called good guys.
Writers like John Lescroart and Steve Martini use the legal thriller to explore complex psychological relationships and legal-political machinations. Their defense lawyer heroes fight for justice for their accused clients, while prosecutors star in Chris Darden's Nikki Hill series and in NancyTaylor Rosenberg's legal thrillers.
Crimes and Capers_
One final branch of the suspense tree is the novel written from the point of view of the criminal. These can be psychological studies (James Ell-roy's Killer on the Road, Donald Westlake's The Ax), step-by-step accounts of intricately planned crimes that depend on nerves of steel and split-second timing (Void Moon by Michael Connelly), or slice-of-life glimpses into the lives of low-level criminals with colorful vocabularies (books by Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen).
The difference between these novels and the usual suspense read is that this time our sympathy is engaged on behalf of someone who isn't innocent. We like the crooks in Get Shorty better than the so-called honest citizens of Hollywood, and we root for the gangs that couldn't shoot straight because they make us laugh. In the lighter side of this subgenre, humor softens the suspense
edge, but the structure is the same as in the spy novel. Many characters with different goals and separate paths step onto the road of life and by the end of the book, all the paths will collide, all the characters will interact in surprising ways, accidents will happen, and no one in the book will emerge unscathed by the experience.
Reading a well-written caper novel is like watching those guys who used to balance spinning plates on the Ed Sullivan Show. Your eyes dart from one plate to the next, watching one wobble and then sighing with relief as the juggler balances it again.
Whichever subcategory of the suspense novel you prefer, the key is to give the reader the roller-coaster experience of intense highs, deep lows, terrifying twists, and a satisfying conclusion to the ride.
ONCE UPON a time, there was a girl named Snow White. She was as good as she was pretty, but her father married a woman who was jealous of Snow White's beauty. The Wicked Queen who was her stepmother tried several times to get rid of Snow White, and she finally sent the girl into the woods with a huntsman who had orders to kill Snow White and bring her heart back to the Wicked Queen.
Now there's a suspense tale! Our innocent heroine, who has no idea why all this enmity is directed at her, steps into the dark, unfriendly woods with a professional animal slaughterer against whom she has no weapons at all. How can this end well?
No weapons except her innate goodness, and the beauty that is the outward manifestation of that goodness. Her goodness wins over the Huntsman, who kills a deer instead of Snow White, and brings the deer's heart back to the W.Q^ as proof that Snow White is dead at last.
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