Two Sides of the Coin

Editor’s note: Once more, The Rap Sheet is delighted to welcome the work of veteran Chicago Tribune books critic Dick Adler. Following yesterday’s post on how he has just created a blog about contemporary thrillers to accompany his previous blog about mysteries, in general, Dick sent along a note saying, “there’s a serious discussion to be started as to what’s the difference between mysteries and thrillers. I'll be happy to kick it off ...” We invited him to do so with this submission. Your responses are invited.

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I called my first blog Paperback Mysteries because it had a ring to it--better than Paperback Crime Fiction, anyway. I figured that people who read mysteries also read thrillers. In the 30-plus years I’ve been reviewing crime fiction, nobody has ever complained to me about not enough thriller reviews--or too many. A good read is what we’re all after, or so I thought.

But that was then. After Paperback Mysteries appeared, a small but loud contingent of folks complained that they never read “mysteries”--and where were all the great thrillers? An equally small but even more noisy group said, how dare I pollute the crystal waters of the mystery genre with thrillers? So I’ve tried to solve the problem by starting another blog, called Paperback Thrillers.

The line between mystery and thriller is certainly a vague one: as I said in my introduction to Dreams of Justice, to my mind, mysteries most often have continuing casts of central characters who reach some solution to the crimes committed by a mixture of rational deduction and inspiration. Thrillers more often deal with larger, single events, occasionally political, and usually end in scenes of violence. The folks over at the International Thriller Writers Saloon seem to agree.

When Diane Vogt of ITW asked me, I said that I think readers love thrillers because of 1) The “What If?” factor: what if a famous painting held a clue to the fact that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a baby? and 2) The “What the Hell Do We Do NOW?” syndrome: those damned dinosaurs in the theme park seem to have developed minds of their own. One hopeful trend is “The Thriller as Samidzat” (or perhaps “The Thriller Writer as Tom Paine”): a growing realization that just because our government says something is true, it ain’t necessarily so.

Does that mean thrillers are the wave of the future, and that mysteries will disappear? You tell me ...

UPDATE: In response to Dick’s comments on mysteries vs. thrillers, novelist John Shannon (Dangerous Games) writes:

Here’s another definition for you, not really universal but interesting--from a one-minute corridor seminar at a Bouchercon given me by Barbara Peters [of Poisoned Pen Press]. Mysteries are about something that has gone wrong and then hunting down the big rock that caused it and turning it over to find out what happened--or something like that. A thriller is a duel. You know the good guy and bad guy at the beginning and you watch them both move toward each other and a final collision. As I say, not universal, but it does account for a lot of them.

And from my point of view, the best mysteries are rooted in place and deal with the social history of the time and place. Thrillers tend to exoticism rather than place and almost never touch on social history. Thrillers are fundamentally more conservative, about crushing some “other” so we can return to the status quo (as are police procedurals.)