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Does your summer reading include a good thriller?
Page-turning crime novels dominate airport bookshelves at this time of year – but what makes a really good thriller, a whodunnit or a why-dunnit, whether psychological or police procedural?
As crime writers and lovers of their books gather for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, two best-selling crime writers, Mark Billingham and Elly Griffiths, offer their take on how authors keep you on the edge of your seat.
Mark Billingham
Settings don’t always have to be dark and creepy, says the actor and stand-up comedian, whose most famous policeman, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, was played by David Morrissey in the eponymous TV series.
“Ten or 15 years ago Scandi noir was the big thing, with settings in Iceland, Sweden or Norway, bleak, cold and largely unfamiliar to readers in this country.
“It sounds like a flippant comment, but blood looks very good against snow, so they were trendy for a while, and there wasn’t that much darkness.
“But new fashions are creeping in. A couple of years ago almost every other thriller I read was set on an island and of course you’ve got an in-built problem there in that nobody can leave. The landscape becomes very important because you’ve trapped all your characters straight away.
“From what I’ve been reading and forthcoming thrillers, holidays are a thing, books where a group of people are in a holiday paradise and what can possibly go wrong?
“An idyllic setting can feel like paradise, but there is something very nasty lurking. That’s often more effective than a dark, forbidding moor. Sometimes the landscape has to work against the plot.”
Pace and character form the crux of a good thriller, he continues.
“Pace is obviously considered to be very important, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be 100 miles an hour for the whole book. I think that gets wearing quite quickly, it’s too exhausting,” says Billingham, whose latest book, The Shadow Step, is the third in the Declan Miller series.
To build tension or suspense the reader must care about the character, he continues.
“For a long time I used to think the suspense was all about these tricks of the trade that we have as crime writers, the cliffhange, the reveal and the twist. But they’re just weapons in our armoury and they can be overused.
“If I’m reading a book that has twist after twist after twist, I stop caring, and that’s when you don’t have any suspense at all.”
Short chapters are another trick that thriller writers use. “You lie in bed, read them and think, ‘Oh, I’ll just read another one, it’s only two pages’ and before you know it, you’ve read 60 chapters and are halfway through the book.”
We tend to do two types of thrillers in the UK – the protagonist-antagonist thriller, which is often a cop on the trail of one person, such as a serial killer. Those two characters have to be three-dimensional and engaging, even the villain, he explains.
Psychological thrillers or domestic noir has become much more popular in recent years – quite often you don’t know who the antagonist is or who the protagonist is because there isn’t one of each. You’ve usually got a group of people who are neighbours or who have gone on holiday together. They’ve all got to be convincing.
“It’s not a new thing. Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell wrote psychological thrillers, so it’s not like anybody’s reinventing the wheel, but there’s a huge boom in them at the minute.”
As far as explicit violence and gore is concerned, less is more if you want to create tension, he says.
“I’ve learned that a reader’s imagination is far better at conjuring up horrific images than anything any writer can put on the page,” he says.
“A single spot of blood on a pristine kitchen floor is a far more powerful image than the message daubed in gore on the wall. Let the reader do the work.
“I think its more important to show what violence does to people than show the violence itself. The fear of violence, the aftermath, you drop that stone in the pond and let the ripples do the work.”
He agrees that male authors have a different take on crime novels to female writers.
“I wasn’t really aware of this and then I spoke to the wonderful Val McDermid, a good friend of mine, who said most men write about what violence looks like, while women write about what it feels like because they’re used to being afraid.
“From the moment they are 14, 15, 16, walking home on their own, looking over their shoulder, it’s something they have to be aware of. Men don’t grow up with this.”
Elly Griffiths
“Tension and suspense comes from caring what happens to a character,” says the best-selling author, who has been nominated for the eighth time for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award, with her book The Frozen People, a crime novel featuring time travel.
“If readers relate to your characters, I think they’ll forgive some plot points that are slightly more fantastical,” says Griffiths, whose festive murder mystery novella The Case Of The Christmas Card is published in October.
Settings are also important. “Crime novels that have really stayed with me include Beulah Height by Reginald Hill (set against the backdrop of the North York Moors), and The Drowning Place by Sarah Hilary (featuring an inexplicable murder in the Peak District).
“A setting adds layers of tension and also sometimes layers of folklore and legend,” she says.
Humour is also important, Griffiths continues.
“My favourite novels are ones where you have this really dark atmosphere and sense of dread, that something very sinister is going to happen, and then you have a bit of humour.
“Jokes are really important in crime novels because quite often, and I do this myself, writers hide a plot point behind a joke, so if you’re reading a crime novel – and this works for Agatha Christie – and something makes you laugh, go back because there’s a clue there, a place to hide a clue after a joke.”
Griffiths doesn’t write graphic descriptions of violence, but says it’s important that every crime writer acknowledges that murder is violent.
“Murder is terrible. It has to be front and centre on the page that a murder is a terrible, violent thing, even if you don’t get descriptions of it.”
She enjoys cosy crime novels, although they don’t always fuel tension.
“Cosy is how you feel when you’re reading it, but my only caveat is that I want people to acknowledge that a murder is a terrible thing. Richard Coles’ books do that really well. The vicar at the centre of them always acknowledges how the murder has affected the whole community.”
She agrees with Billingham about female authors’ approach to crime novels compared with their male counterparts.
“Women know a little bit more about what it’s like to be frightened, what it’s like to walk home on a dark night and experience that fear.
“And women like justice, when justice is served. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two Agatha Christie books that sell best today are Murder On The Orient Express and And Then There Were None. They’re books in which justice is meted out in an unconventional way.”
Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival runs from July 23-26.
