Mystery vs thriller vs suspense vs...

Sandra Parshall

 Many of us who write about murder and mayhem aren’t eager to put neat little labels on our books, and we use the all-inclusive term “crime fiction” more often than any other.

Labels are important to publishers, though, and to readers who want to know in advance what they’re getting, so the debate about the difference between mysteries and thrillers continues. Last week at the Virginia Literary Festival, I was part of a panel that tossed out some old definitions and debated new ones.

We were a diverse group: Katherine Neville (our panel moderator) and Irene Ziegler write what’s called literary thrillers; Brad Parks writes books that combine comedy and mystery with suspense elements; David Robbins writes novels with lots of action and global stakes; and I write books that have been called mysteries, suspense, and thrillers.

A lot of people cling to the old definitions: a mystery is about discovering who committed the crime; a thriller is about trying to prevent something terrible from happening; a mystery has a limited setting and cast and smaller, personal stakes, while a thriller is set on a broad stage and the stakes are national or global. But those simplistic definitions apply to very few books being published now. Yes, cozies are pure mysteries. Some books, such as David Robbins’s war-and-action novels, are pure thrillers. Most of today’s crime fiction, though, blends elements of several subgenres into a new sort of hybrid.

The term “thriller” is widely misused by the marketing people at publishing houses in the hope that it will increase the sales of any book carrying the label. (Not too long ago“A Novel of Suspense” was the favored label for any book that had a crime in it.) I’ve grown used to reading “thrillers” that turn out to be plodding, decidedly unthrilling courtroom dramas in which the story is told not through action but through endless pages of Q&A between witnesses and lawyers. I don’t think publishers are helping themselves or their authors with this kind of mislabeling. 

Readers of crime fiction are more sophisticated and demanding than ever, and if they’re choosing books from the broad selection that lies between cozies and pure action thrillers, they expect enough suspense to hold their attention, and they want fully developed characters they can love and worry about. “Tension on every page” has become a mantra among crime fiction authors, whether they’re writing about police investigations or a woman trying to escape a stalker. Forget about long passages of witty dialogue or beautiful description. Keep the plot moving or you’ll lose readers who have been trained to be impatient by the brief, punchy scenes on TV shows.

My personal reading preferences don’t run to stories in which the fate of the world is at stake. I’m more readily engaged by a single compelling character whose survival – physical or psychological – is threatened. The most engrossing book I’ve read in recent memory was Before I Go to Sleep, a stunning first novel by S.J. Watson, which is told entirely through the viewpoint of a woman who has lost her memory and gradually comes to suspect that her whole life is a lie. The book is called a thriller. It’s also a mystery. It is “literary” in the sense that’s it’s beautifully written and  insightful. And it’s loaded with almost unbearable suspense. Yet I’m sure readers who prefer a lot of action would find it slow and dull and would feel misled by the thriller label.

The labels won’t go away, because publishers think they need them, but I believe they’ve become useless to many readers. If you’re familiar with an author’s work, you know what to expect and will disregard the label in any case. If the writer is new to you, look at the story summary and read a few pages to get a sense of the book’s tone. Don’t avoid a book because it’s labeled a thriller and you “never read thrillers” – meaning you don’t like books about vast conspiracies or government intrigue. Chances are the jacket copy and a quick read of a few pages will reveal the novel to be a hybrid, a mystery/suspense/thriller story. In other words, crime fiction.

Walt Longmire and Lew Archer: The Solitary Brothers of Detective Fiction

by Julia Buckley
I’ve always been a Ross MacDonald fan, and until recently I was content to believe there was no one like him. MacDonald’s style is singular—a blend of a great story, a lonely and moral protagonist, and a powerful use of simile and metaphor that elevate his work to the realm of literature. Many mystery writers today have cited MacDonald as an influence, including Sue Grafton, whose “Santa Teresa” is an homage to MacDonald’s fictionalized version of Santa Barbara.

There has never been a match, for me, to MacDonald’s style. But recently I read my second book in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, and I realized that Johnson’s writing parallels MacDonald’s in many ways.

First, the protagonist: It is true that the lonely detective is a part of the American hard-boiled tradition, but Johnson’s Walt Longmire has a similar kind of lonesomeness to Lew Archer, even though the former lives in the wilds of Wyoming and the latter does his work among the wealthy and elite of California. They both wear their loneliness like a shield, and they reveal very little of themselves to other characters or to the reader. Both men were once married, so they are able to feel the absence of their wives as a reminder of companionship.

In HELL IS EMPTY, the latest Longmire mystery, Walt is asked by his deputy if he’s sure he wants to pursue a dangerous criminal alone. He responds, “Yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure I don’t, but there isn’t anybody else for the job” (Johnson 58).

Similarly, in MacDonald’s great novel THE UNDERGROUND MAN, Lew Archer is approached by a young woman who feels he’s the only person who can solve her dilemma. It is Archer’s day off, but he takes on her task with a shrug: “I’m a private detective. I do these things for a living” (MacDonald 15).

Each detective sees his role as inevitable, and something he must do alone.
My favorite thing about MacDonald’s writing is the way he can take a scene and make it profound with imagery and metaphor—something Johnson has mastered, as well. Here are both narrators, Archer and Longmire, describing fire:

(from THE UNDERGROUND MAN): “I walked toward him, into the skeletal shadow of the sycamore. The smoky moon was lodged in its top, segmented by small black branches. . . . I looked back from the mailbox. Sparks and embers were blowing down the canyon, plunging into the trees behind the house like bright, exotic birds taking the place of the birds that had flown” (MacDonald 40, 52).


(from HELL IS EMPTY): “Lodgepole pines were exploding with the heat, and a crisscross of timber fell down the incline. The darkness lifted long enough to reveal massive logs exploding as the resin inside them reached boiling levels, branches, pine cones and needles swirling in armies of winged fire devils” (Johnson 202).

Both writers take the reader inside the experience with deft language and an immersion in setting—both Santa Barbara and Longmire’s Wyoming forest are prone to forest fires, and so they become a part of the mystery in each novel.

Finally, both detectives have an outlook that is existential but starkly beautiful. Here is Longmire describing his mountains: “Maybe our greatest fears were made clear this high, so close to the cold emptiness of the unprotected skies. Perhaps the voices were of the mountains themselves, whispering in our ears just how inconsequential and transient we really are” (Johnson 123).

And Lew Archer, confronting a suspect: “His heavy gaze came up to my face. He seemed to be trying to read his future in my eyes. I could read it in his: a future of fear and confusion and trouble, resembling his past” (MacDonald 240).

I love the spare and beautiful prose of both writers, honest and poetic as both of their lawmen follow a quest for the truth.

MacDonald has always been a part of my permanent collection; Johnson will now be in that collection, as well.

Works Cited

Johnson, Craig. Hell is Empty. New York: Viking, 2011.

MacDonald, Ross. The Underground Man. New York: Vintage Reprint, 1996. (Original pub date: 1971).

Read A Mystery, Get A Life

Elizabeth Zelvin

As a reader and a writer, I love a mystery. But why? Do I love it for the puzzle, the slow unfolding of the clues and evidence that will show me at the end who done it, er, did it? Do I love it for the theme of wrongs righted and justice done? For the plot, the necessity that in every mystery, unlike certain literary novels, something happens? All of these are pleasures associated with mysteries. However, none of the above provides the burning desire to plunk my money down the minute a new hardcover by a favorite author comes out. I’m a hardcore series reader. I love to return to protagonists I already know and revisit the worlds they inhabit, both in new books and by rereading. And I’ve finally figured out what clinches the attraction.

On the back cover of Margaret Maron’s latest Judge Deborah Knott book, there’s a quote from a review by the Associated Press: “The considerable strength of Maron’s writing lies in giving her sleuth a life.” I read that and thought: “That’s IT!” Judge Deborah is one of my favorites for just that reason. I feel the same about Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak, and a number of others.

If I met Deborah or Sharon in real life, I think I’d get along with them just fine. I’ve certainly wished, if not for eleven brothers, at least for a family that got together to make music the way Deborah’s does. I’ve played the guitar since I was 13, and in my folksinging days, my family had a tendency not to pay much attention beyond asking why I couldn’t sing “something more cheerful.” Deborah herself might have liked my mother, who was a pioneering woman lawyer. As for Sharon, I can empathize with her slow transformation from Sixties free spirit with the All Souls Legal Cooperative to businesswoman with a heart and a terrific team.

Kate Shugak, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t think much of me. I’m not rugged enough for an Alaskan, especially someone like the ultra-competent and indomitable Kate. The one Alaskan I do know, a therapist from Kansas, hikes up glaciers in the rain on her lunch hour. When I visited a number of years ago, I couldn’t keep up. Kate (and presumably Stabenow) shares my taste in reading, though. She’d be great on DorothyL. She also has a fantastic bunch of friends.

I suspect those friendships are the key. Like many Americans of my generation, I hunger for community. I’ve had a taste of it at various times in my life, but time, my big-city location (I live in Manhattan), and the nature of life in the 21st century have left me with not only a diminished family, but also friends who are widely scattered and not known to each other. Each of these fictional heroines has a circle of friends, and vicariously, once I open the book, so do I.

Why We Read This Stuff

David Skibbins (Guest Blogger)

Scratch almost any mystery writer and you'll find a voracious reader of the genre. My collection is now threatening to fill a forth bookcase. What keep drawing us back to these stories of 'murder most foul'?

We've read the usual explanations: We like a world where justice is delivered. We are fascinated with evil, particularly if it does not triumph. We get intellectually challenged to solve the crime before the protagonist does. I think all these are true, but in themselves, they are not completely satisfying as an answer. There is a factor that I never considered before actually having to write my own mysteries, the Grace Under Fire Factor.

After my initial success winning the St. Martin's Best Traditional Mystery Contest with Eight of Swords, I thought my next book, High Priestess, would be a shoo-in. Then I got the call from Ruth Cavin, my editor at St. Martin’s. "Well, David, you have two choices. You could start over with a new project, or you will have to do a major revision on this one." Ugh! One of the things she said was that I was too distant from my protagonist, Warren Ritter.

I sat with that a long time. Finally I realized what she meant. I needed to increase the danger, and threat to my hero. David the Nice Guy (that part of me who doesn't want to hurt people or cause more suffering in the world) was killing my novel. I needed to make things continually worse for Warren, and to feel the growing menace of that in my bones in order to write about it from the inside. That would make the book compelling.

And this is what makes good mysteries so gripping to read. It's not just the danger, but it's how the protagonist handles increasing levels of hazard, terror and risk. In our ordinary lives, risk is usually limited to a spurt of momentary terror that arises when a truck cuts us off on the freeway, or the twisting anxiety of going in to the boss's office to apply for a raise. But the intrepid characters in the mysteries we read face physical assault, exhaustion, emotional trauma, isolation, ostracism and death. They go into a land far more perilous than we can imagine.

And they face all that peril with courage, some sort of integrity and valor. Almost always it's the heroes and heroines we remember most, not the villains they face or the victims they seek justice for. These brave men and women live in our imaginations as beacons of what the human spirit is capable of. And they are great role models; flawed, eccentric, foolish at times and very imperfect. Not Gods and Goddesses, but folks not all that different from us, except that they are endowed with an indomitable spirit for discovering the truth. It is their love of the truth, and their courage to go down any 'mean street' in order to follow the path towards justice, that endears these folks to us.

David Skibbins is the author of The Tarot Card Mystery Series. The Star, the latest in the series, has just come out.

Riding the Review Rollercoaster

Sandra Parshall

Now, at last, I understand my urge to publish novels.

It’s not a deep-seated desire to communicate. It’s not a need to purge my imagination of all those crazy made-up people who keep running around in their made-up world, doing shocking things. It’s not, heaven knows, a belief that publication will make me rich and famous. (I was never naive enough to believe that.)

No, it’s masochism.

I just love putting myself at the mercy of strangers. I take a perverse pleasure in releasing my creative children into the world and waiting, wide-eyed and eager, for the world to shatter my fragile writerly ego with those awful-and-wonderful things called reviews.

As my husband and friends never tire of pointing out, I can ignore reams of praise if I find a single disapproving sentence buried within. So what if the reviewer loved the characters, found the setting evocative, enjoyed the plot right to the end? None of that counts. What counts is that she thought some of my phrasing was... gulp... clunky.

Despair! I will never write again. I will toss the computer out with the trash because I am clearly unworthy to be called an author.

But the Library Journal gave my second book, Disturbing the Dead, a starred review. That means something, doesn’t it? Certainly it does. I am worthy after all! I am an author.

But... but... A reviewer said DTD has too many characters. Omigod. Here is a person who believes that some of the characters I love so much shouldn’t even exist. How can I go on writing now that I know this? Where did I put the razor blades?

Okay, calm down, Sandy, and go reread the advance reviews. Oh, look, Kirkus -- Kirkus, so difficult to please! -- declared DTD “fast-paced, chilling, and compulsively readable.” Whew. My life and sanity saved again.

But... but... Yet another reviewer (they’re multiplying like wire hangers in a closet) thinks DTD has too many Melungeon characters and, furthermore, I made too many of them poor. Now I feel like an insensitive wretch who traffics in stereotypes. Forget the razor blades. Bullets are faster.

What one reviewer praises, another will criticize. And it’s the criticism, seldom the praise, that sticks in my mind. Every review is a source of nail-biting worry before I read it and possible agony afterward. “Don’t take it personally,” everybody says. Impossible advice for someone like me to follow. Everything is personal.

I would not dream of challenging reviewers, because they’re supposed to give their honest opinions and I’m grateful to them for telling readers about my books. In my rare lucid moments, I realize that my reviews have been mostly positive and I have nothing to complain about. I try not to care that at least two reviewers think Disturbing the Dead takes place in North Carolina, even though the characters never venture outside Virginia. (True to form, I’m convinced that misapprehension is somehow my fault.)

But I keep wondering exactly which characters I should have left out of the book and which phrases were clunky. Is it too late to recall every copy and rewrite?

I regard my work-in-progress with a cold eye. Maybe I should kill off Greg right now. Heck, maybe Greg should never have been born in the first place. And clunky writing? Oh, good grief, the book is filled with it. No one will ever want to read the thing. It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless. Getting two books published was a fluke. It will never happen again.

But if, through some miracle, I do publish a third book, I’m not going to read the reviews. Not a one. Zip.

I am finished with this particular form of masochism.

Really.

The Naming of Characters

Sandra Parshall

T.S. Eliot wrote, “The naming of cats is a difficult matter,” and as a lifelong cat-owner, I agree -- but choosing a name for a fictional character takes difficulty to a whole new level. It’s a lot like naming a child. The recipient will live with your decision forever, and if you make a mistake the consequences won’t be pretty.

A baby, of course, is named before the parents have any idea how the kid will turn out. Will little Angelina develop into a tattooed hellion? Will Grace be a hopeless klutz? Or will their names in some way help to shape the people they become? I’m sure that somebody, somewhere, has spent a breathtaking amount of money studying such questions, but fortunately writers don’t have to wonder. We can form the characters, then give them names that suit. We can try out as many names as we like before deciding.

A character’s name has to do a lot of heavy lifting:

It should evoke personality. If a guy is always called Robert, never Bobby or even Bob, what does that say about him?

If ethnicity is important to the story, the name should convey that too. But you don’t have to call every Hispanic character Jose Gonzales. A little effort will turn up less common names that still tell the reader how to see the person.

A name can be a quick way to signal social status. I am not brave or foolish enough to reel off a list of low-class names and risk the fallout, but you know what I mean.

A name can tell us a character’s approximate age. How many toddlers do you know who are named Hortense or Archibald? How many 80-year-old women have you met who are named Britney or Morgan? The internet allows writers to search databases such as www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ (compiled from Social Security records) and www.babycenter.com/general/ to find out what a character born in a certain year might have been named. Because I prefer classic names rather than the trendy concoctions that are going to seem laughable when their owners hit middle age and beyond, I’m happy to note that Emma has been the most popular name for baby girls in the U.S. for several years. We may have Ross and Rachel on Friends to thank for this. (I have a five-year-old named Emma, but although she believes herself to be an unusually hirsute little girl, she’s actually of the feline persuasion.) All those tiny Emmas, though, are growing up with a nearly equal number of girls named Madison. Aiden was the top male name in 2006, followed by Jacob, Ethan, Ryan, and Matthew. What will Madison and Aiden call their children twenty-five years from now?

The classics fit people of any age, but if the first name is a common one, the last might have to do double duty to give the character distinction. Kate is one of the most common names for female protagonists in mysteries, followed closely by all the variations of Katherine/Catherine/Kathleen -- Kat/Cat/Kathy/Katie/Kay. But Kate Shugak is singular, and so is Kay Scarpetta. In my new book, Disturbing the Dead, I named a lead character Tom Bridger, pairing a first name that conveys a solid, down-to-earth personality with a last name that is common among Melungeons in the Appalachians. The name Bridger is also a metaphor for the position that Tom, a half-Melungeon deputy sheriff, occupies between two segments of his mountain community. The reader may never think about this, but I have.

Sometimes a perfect name comes to a writer through sheer serendipity. When Tess Gerritsen was writing a book titled The Surgeon, she contributed to a charity auction by allowing a reader to purchase naming rights for a minor character, a female medical examiner. The reader named Dr. Maura Isles after a real person. The character grew in importance in subsequent books, and she grew into her name, which perfectly conveys the image of an elegant woman who is isolated within herself.

While searching for the perfect monikers for our characters, writers have to keep some no-no’s in mind: nothing that is impossible for the reader to pronounce; no two names starting with the same letter, lest the poor reader become confused; as few nicknames as possible, again to avoid confusion. Short, one-word names always have the edge, at least in English-language crime fiction. Look at a few U.S., Canadian, and British mystery novels. How many names of more than two or three syllables do you see? How many truly unusual names do you see? You could say this is laziness on the part of writers who don’t want to type long or difficult names again and again, and you might be half-right, but it’s also true that a mystery seems to move faster if everyone has a short, easy name.

A name is the most personal thing about a character, and the choice is not one the writer makes lightly. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could exercise the same discretion over our own names? As innocent babies, we have to take whatever label is slapped on us, whether it fits or not. But most names, amazingly enough, turn out to be good fits. How about yours? Do you love it, hate it, wish you could change it? What name would you have given yourself, and why?

“Why Did I Come in Here Again?” and Other Lost Thoughts

JULIA BUCKLEY
I have memories of my mother, fortyish, wandering into a room where we children lolled about watching television, and hesitating on the threshold, saying, “Now—why did I come in here?”

We’d laugh at her, we heartless children, because we thought it was sweetly eccentric that our mother would often forget the task that had caused her to stride purposefully into a room, sometimes even to open a cabinet and gaze inside, as if hoping the answer lay in there.

But of course her behavior wasn’t eccentric at all. Now that I’m a writer, I realize there are a finite number of thoughts I can fit into my head, and sometimes a few really important ones can get squeezed out. Like—oh! I was supposed to make dinner. Or fill out that endless paperwork that comes home from a grade school—field trip forms, tuition invoices, raffle tickets, notes to teachers, et educational cetera. Or the even more relentless paperwork that goes with my job—the teaching of English to teenaged girls.

And then, beyond all that, there is the Work in Progress. It has to find its way through all of the other thoughts, like water in a jar full of rocks. It has to squeeze through the gaps and bring me the occasional inspiration, even while I’m toiling away with my less inspired but still important mental chores: feed the dog, the cat, the fish. Write those thank you notes, wrap that present, iron his shirt, sew his button.

My mother, though she’s the most mature woman I’ve ever known, must take the occasional secret pleasure in watching me fall into all of the traps I was sure, as a bold and sarcastic youth, that I would avoid. In her day, she had to maintain her mental equilibrium while caring for FIVE children, a husband, a cat and a dog. I only have two children, and yet I understand, now, how really extraordinary my mother was. She got a college degree later than most, at age fifty, and she wrote for pleasure, for sheer pleasure, which was the same reason that she would read.

My mom is the one who got me hooked on mysteries. She’s still an addict herself. Back when we were kids, she would reward herself for daily chores with quick little doses of whatever book she had at the time: Georgette Heyer, Phyllis Whitney, Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt. She’d read a chapter or two, then jump up and say, “Now, why did I get up?”

So today I found myself wandering into a room, initially with a firm purpose. I still felt the urgency by the time I reached my destination, but I had forgotton the task. “Why did I come in here?” I asked my sons, who, as tradition would have it, were watching tv.

“We don’t KNOW, Mom,” my eldest said dryly.

Ah, just you wait.


(image: www.pevexenterprises.co.uk)

My Love Affair with Mysteries

Judy Clemens (Guest Blogger)

Growing up, I was not a kid who sat down and read through every Nancy Drew book. In fact, I don’t think I read even one. I had a couple of Trixie Belden books, although I can’t find them anymore. And I do remember reading some Agatha Christie. Some Encyclopedia Brown. But my reading consisted of a wide variety of things: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Black Stallion books (I have them displayed today in my office), Little House on the Prairie, All Creatures Great and Small, and Katie John. My love affair with mysteries didn’t happen until I was in college.

As a member of a college touring choir, I had the opportunity to travel all over the United States, as well as in Europe. During one of those trips, driving across our country’s western states, I was in desperate need of something to read. At our next stop I found a bookstore, browsed the fiction section, and picked up Have His Carcase, by Dorothy L. Sayers. I had never heard of her before, let alone read any of her books, but something about it attracted me.

I adored it.

From then on during the choir trip, whenever we stopped at the next city I ran to the closest bookstore and picked up one or two more of Sayers’s books. I took the time to write the date on each one, and the entire series of purchases ranges from May of 1989 through 1990. (No, the trip didn’t last that long – I just couldn’t finish the entire series in less than two weeks.) I now have the series displayed in my office, right alongside those Black Stallion books.

I entered the mystery genre as a fan by finding new series and reading everything in them: P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh books, Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax, Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael…the list goes on. Since I hadn’t spent much of my life reading mysteries up to that point, I had everything out there to enjoy and inhale. It was exhilarating.

As a writer, it wasn’t until that point that I realized what exactly I wanted to write. In college I took every writing course I could, and learned about writing non-fiction, short stories, and plays. My first published piece was actually a one-act. But finally, in the year after I graduated, I sat down to write my first mystery novel. And I did it. I finished it, re-wrote it, and started that journey of sending it out to agents. It wasn’t until years later, after writing a partial sequel and the first of my Stella Crown books, that I realized how bad that first book really was!

But I refuse to be ashamed of it. That’s how we learn, right? I’m not saying I’d every show it to anybody (other than those people tortured with it when I first wrote it), but I treasure that book as my first glimpse of the “real” writing life. I put my heart into it, and I learned an immense amount.

My hope as a writer is that I continue to learn. That each book I write takes me further along the road to perfecting my craft (knowing full well that journey will never end). That each book helps me to learn something about myself and the world around me. I just finished the first draft of a book that is not a Stella book. It was completely different, from the viewpoint, to the format of the book, to the gender of the protagonist. It was a challenge. It was a learning experience. It was a joy.

That’s a lot of what I hope to gain as a reader, as well. That each book I read brings me closer to my fellow humans, teaches me something about myself, and brings me a taste of something previously unknown. It happens. Often.

So here’s to reading. Here’s to writing.

Here’s to great books, whatever genre they may be.

Note: Judy Clemens is the author of the Agatha-nominated Till the Cows Come Home and two more mysteries in the series about dairy farmer and biker Stella Crown.