Thinking About "Thrillers"

First

- a recent book: Amazon.com: The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and ...

- a second recent book: Talking About Detective Fiction by P. D. James (Hardcover - Dec 1, 2009) - Deckle Edge

- a not quite recent book: Cloak and Dagger Fiction: An Annotated Guide to Spy Thrillers (Bibliographies and Indexes in World Literature) (Hardcover) ~ Myron J. Smith (Author), Terry White (Author)

- an older book: Clubland Heroes by Richard Usborne (Paperback - Sep 26, 1983)

- the wikipedia article: Thriller (genre) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- list of Thriller Writers: List of thriller writers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- the Thriller Writer homepage: Official Website of International Thriller Writers, Inc.

Second

I used to read a lot of thrillers. I read few now, so I am a little out of date - and have a fairly narrow focus. I think the genre more or less defined by Kipling's "Kim", published in 1900, Childers' "The Riddle of the Sands (1903), Buchan's "The Thirty-Nine Steps" (1915), and Maugham's "Ashenden" (1928). (For a good non-fiction book along the "Kim" line see The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (Kodansha Globe) by Peter Hopkirk (Paperback - May 15, 1992) (97) ).

Some list various by Poe, Cooper, Collins, Doyle, Conrad, and numerous others (Conrad often being cited as a major defining influence). A number of these are close to my focus, but I think that the thriller did not find its feet until after WWI with such as "Sapper", Oppenheim, Wallace, Wren, Yates, Charteris, and Ambler leading the dance.

The above were British (or British manque). In the U.S. for a time the hardboiled detective genre predominated: Burnett, Hammet, Cain, Chandler, McCoy, et al. But it pretty much peaked and went out of business with Spillane.

With the advent of James Bond (another Britisher and an obvious derivative of Simon Templer - Charteris and Fleming were big buddies), the thriller arrived in the U.S.: sometimes undiluted, sometimes diluted with the hardboiled genre.

Thriller writers I used to enjoy include: Lee Child (a Brit immigrant to the U.S.), Clancy, Coles, Deighton, Follet, Forsyth, Innes, Koontz, Ludlum, McCarry, Quinnel, Sanders.

The immediately preceding list is taken from the Web list of thriller writers. For some reason, they did not have two of my favorites: J. C. Pollock (he wrote numerous thrillers but only one good one "Crossfire") and James Grady (again wrote numerous thrillers but only one good one "Six Days of the Condor" - the movie version, "Three Days of the Condor", I think the best movie thriller I have seen - next best are "Journey Into Fear", "The Great Impersonation", and "The Bourne Identity").

NB - Bobo'theBurbs said that "The Manchurian Candidate", both the book and the movie, was pretty much at the top of his list