Thriller

Aficionados of detective fiction have long known that the differences between the soft- and hard-boiled school are so profound that, as P.D. James observed, it seems stretching a definition to place both groups in the same category. Over here we have, or used to have, a comforting story concerned with restoring order to the mythical village of Mayhem Parva; across the Atlantic, the detective novel is expected to tackle the rotten, usually urban, underbelly of the American Dream. Violent, cynical and disquieting, it has also become a significant challenge to the more refined attempts at the Great American Novel. James Ellroy’s detectives are not only inured to confronting vice but

Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they blend two elements of the genre that are rarely seen together. First, they are grounded in a wholly plausible version of the intelligence community, where decisions evolve in Whitehall committee rooms and the wiles of politicians and bureaucrats are just as important as the machinations of moles. Secondly, their central characters often recall an older tradition of gentlemen patriots that goes back to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay. The combination shouldn’t work but in Judd’s novels it does. These elements meet in the character of Charles Thoroughgood, who has already appeared

The title of Charles Cumming’s seventh novel is both a nod to the comfortable polarities of Cold War and also a reminder that our modern world is in some ways even chillier and less stable than the one it replaced. Once again, the central character is Thomas Kell, the MI6 agent who was trying to claw his way back from unmerited disgrace in Cumming’s previous novel, A Foreign Country. Even now, Kell is still on unpaid leave — which, though tiresome for him, is convenient for Amelia, the current ‘C’. They are old colleagues and, up to a point, friends, and she knows him for what he is: a fine

Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides. Judith Flanders’s career bridges this divide. She is now best known as an author of innovatory and formidably detailed books on Britain’s social history in the 19th century. But she also has worked as a publisher, which gives her an insider’s knowledge of the murkier byways of literary London. Hence the setting for her first novel, Writers’ Block, an entertaining thriller whose narrator, Samantha, is ‘a middle-aged, middlingly successful editor’ in a publisher’s Bloomsbury offices. One of her authors delivers a biography of a recently deceased fashion designer. Unfortunately, the

The single most terrifying moment of my adult life occurred at 8.55 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 5 August 2008. I had a written a novel, Typhoon, in which disenfranchised Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province riot against the Han government. By coincidence, a few days before publication, large numbers of Uighurs started doing exactly that, in a curious real-life echo of the book. James Naughtie had read Typhoon and wanted to get me onto the Today programme to talk about it. It was like receiving a royal summons. But as the minutes ticked down towards the interview, I was transformed into a pitiless, gibbering wreck, so nervous of

Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to its title. It’s the name of an online game, set in Jack the Ripper’s London. Six players — five teenagers and an elderly man — inhabit their personas with fanatical fervour. They switch their forensic attentions to modern San Francisco when the corpse of a security guard is found obscenely displayed in a high-school gym. The father of Amanda, the group’s games master, is the deputy chief of San Francisco’s homicide department. Her divorced mother is Indiana Jackson, a Reiki healer whose patients are often more interested in her Barbie-doll

Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel every decade or so. Her first book, The Secret History (1992), was about some highly affected college students who took to studying ancient Greek in a cult and murdering one another in Dionysiac revels. It was a genuinely popular success — chic, macabre and supremely well-constructed. Her second, The Little Friend (2002), pursued a small girl through her attempts to pin the murder of her brother on the wrong culprit. It confirmed Tartt’s gift for an intricate plot, escalating into some furiously exciting action. The handling of suspense in both

Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in his native East Kentucky. His creator, Elmore Leonard, is a maestro of American noir; Raylan (Weidenfeld, £18.99), his latest thriller, presents a familiar impasto of choppy, street-savvy slang and hip-jive patter that verges on a kind of poetry. Typically, Raylan charts a murky underworld where criminals are in cahoots with politicians, and where murder is a consequence of this corruption. In his curl-toed cowboy boots, Federal Marshal Givens is summoned to investigate a case of trafficking in human body-parts. A man has been found moribund in a bathtub with his

The South American rain forest is the perfect environment for a dank, uncomfortable thriller. It’s brutally competitive; life is thrillingly vulnerable; you can’t safely touch or taste anything, and, beyond a few yards, you can see nothing at all. Even Amerindians are anxious in this environment, and credit it with all manner of horrors. In my own experience, it is, in every sense, a spine-tingling environment. So novelist Edward Docx has chosen well in the setting for his dark tale. It’s not a complex plot but there’s the constant feeling that you’re not seeing the whole picture, and that nothing is quite as it seems. Docx is a master of

Tim Waterstone is the man who set up the bookshop chain in 1982, so you might expect him to have read a few books, and be OK at writing them. In fact, he’s more a businessman than a writer. He began life as a broker in Calcutta, before becoming marketing manager for Allied Breweries and W. H. Smith. But it turns out that Waterstone is rather a skilled thriller writer; his publicity people are doing him a disservice in their promotional literature by comparing him to Jeffrey Archer (the novel’s gallumphing Archeresque title apart). He has wisely chosen two worlds he knows about to set his thriller in — business

Thriller writers, like wolves and old Etonians, hunt in packs. In the summer months, roaming from city to city, we can be found at assorted festivals and crime fiction conventions, gathered on panels to discuss the pressing literary issues of the day: ‘Ballistics in the Fiction of Andy McNab’, for example, or ‘The Future of the Spy Novel in the Age of Osama bin Laden’. The high tide of these get-togethers is the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which takes place every July, over four days, in Harrogate. This year, the guest of honour was Jeffery Deaver, recognised across the pond as one of America’s pre-eminent thriller writers. To

Michael Ridpath, best known for his excellent financial thrillers, explores new territory in Where the Shadows Lie, which combines elements of the American cop crime novel with J. R. R. Tolkein and post-credit-crunch Iceland. Magnus, a detective with the Boston Police Department, is a key prosecution witness in a case that may bring down a Dominican drug gang. For his own safety, he’s temporarily transferred to Iceland to advise their police department on modern criminal methods. He’s promptly provided with work experience — the killing of a philandering academic. Why did a suspicious Yorkshire truck driver with a fetish for Tolkein have an appointment with the dead man? How does