Thrillers

Abstract

Tragedy, Aristotle tells us, ‘does not produce any chance pleasure, but the pleasure proper to it’;¹ tragedy — especially Greek tragedy — is far from our subject, but Aristotle’s principle is universal: any formula, or genre, conforms to this description by producing a form of pleasure which is specific to it. The form of pleasure evoked by thrillers is, by common consent, suspense, but suspense is a term which is capable of many definitions: at its broadest, aesthetic suspense consists of reading a story in order ‘to find out what happens’. As Colin MacCabe argues, ‘every narration is always a suspense story’, in the sense that it is in the resolution of narrative — the ending — that the sense, the identity, the closure, of the narrative can be experienced.² Whatever the truth of this assertion, there is clearly a discernible difference — even if one is that subordinate to the principle MacCabe elaborates — between suspense in (say) George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Tolstoy’s War and Peace, on the one hand, and in a Mickey Spillane or a James Bond novel on the other.

Gabe was a great reporter, but he could be a royal pain in the ass. He lived in a world of plots and conspiracies, and because the real world had in recent years often approximated Gabe’s most terrible fantasies he had become a celebrated journalist.

Patrick Anderson, The President’s Mistress