Kay Lansing grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, daughter of the landscaper to the wealthy and powerful Carrington family. One day, accompanying her father to work, six-year-old Kay overhears a quarrel between a man and a woman that ends with the man's caustic response: "I heard that song before." That same evening, young Peter Carrington drives the 19-year-old daughter of neighbors home from a formal dinner dance at the Carrington estate, but she is not in her room the next morning and is never seen or heard from again.
I Heard That Song Before: A Novel Mary Higgins Clark
So, if a thriller isn\u2019t necessarily a mystery or a crime novel, what is it? I would argue that, at the very least, all thrillers need a relatively brisk pace and a great deal of suspense. They also need relatively high stakes. Ira Levin\u2019s 1967 novel, Rosemary\u2019s Baby, is widely regarded as one of the best American thrillers of the twentieth century. The stakes are high: a young pregnant woman tries to prevent a satanic cult from sacrificing her unborn child to the devil. Levin does a good job of ratcheting up the suspense, so that the final one hundred pages or so of this relatively short (218 pages in paperback) novel fly by. The book has been justifiably described as a horror novel and a novel of psychological suspense. It is also a crime novel as well as a mystery. But, for me at least, the term \u201Cthriller\u201D seems almost tailor-made for books like Rosemary\u2019s Baby. This is clearly a book meant to be gobbled up in a sitting or two. Though it is a horror novel about Satanism, Levin doesn\u2019t delve too deeply into the history of Satanism or its impact on world culture, the way that Anne Rice\u2019s novels often stretch back centuries in order to explore vampirism or witchcraft. Rosemary\u2019s Baby is meant to thrill the reader, not to provide her with a treatise on evil in the modern world. And that is why I believe that \u201Cthriller\u201D is its true genre.
Levin\u2019s novel undoubtedly had a profound influence on William Peter Blatty\u2019s 1971 bestseller, The Exorcist. The Exorcist is, among other things, a crime novel, a mystery, and a thriller. But I believe that it is best categorized as a horror novel. The Exorcist is steeped in Catholic theology and, specifically, the rite of exorcism. The supernatural is much more important to The Exorcist than to Rosemary\u2019s Baby. You are certainly free to disagree with me, but while I think of Levin\u2019s novel as a thriller, I think of The Exorcist as a horror novel. Both are excellent.
And then of course there are Scott Turow and John Grisham and all of their fellow lawyers-turned-bestselling-authors. When Turow\u2019s Presumed Innocent was published in 1987, the publisher could have promoted it as a \u201Clegal novel\u201D or a \u201Ccourtroom drama,\u201D appellations that had been applied to earlier bestsellers such as The Caine Mutiny or The Anatomy of a Murder. But, by the 1980s, \u201Cthriller\u201D was the term of choice for the kind of books that were known to keep pop-fiction junkies sitting up all night in their armchairs. And so the publicity department for Farrar Straus & Giroux promoted Presumed Innocent as a \u201Clegal thriller.\u201D It might not have been the first use of the term, but it was the first time the term was applied to a cultural juggernaut, a book that, in its way, would become as seminal as Rosemary\u2019s Baby or The Day of the Jackal or Jaws. Four years later, when John Grisham, a lawyer like Turow, broke into the big time with his second novel, 1991\u2019s The Firm, the appellation was just waiting there to be exploited. As it happened, Grisham would go on to be the most successful author of legal thrillers (as measured by book sales) of the twentieth century and (so far, at least) the twenty-first. Of all the subgenres of thriller, the legal thriller is probably America\u2019s most popular, thanks in large part to Grisham. For nearly two decades, Michael Crichton\u2019s techno-thrillers often appeared on the same bestseller lists as Grisham\u2019s legal thrillers. Alas, Crichton\u2019s death in 2008, at the age of 66, slowed down (but hasn\u2019t completely halted) the release of new titles from the king of the techno-thriller. These days, the American thriller market is dominated by three men: Grisham, Coben, and Child.
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