Thrillers and mysteries: Rowland weighs in

Ingrid D. Rowland wallops The Da Vinci Code and ruminates on The Rule of Four, then considers Q, in a very witty and reflective review article.

Thrillers are a conservative genre. Like Greek tragedies and murder mysteries, they upset society's balance in order to right it, and to re-affirm it in the righting. Like Wagner's operas, they keep an unresolved chord going for hours just to set up the sheer biological joy of its final resolution. A good thriller must provide comfort after the thrill. Many people have read The Da Vinci Code while riding on airplanes, senses irked into a state of low-grade discomfort and dulled by oxygen deprivation, dehydration, and slipping time zones. The characters in a thriller should not grab them too insistently or they will weep into their chicken Chernobyl; the plot must obey only the logic of the jet-lagged, and no suggestion of philosophical anarchy should threaten to bring down the premises by which airline passengers continue to believe that lift plus thrust will keep them airborne to their destination.

Comments

[Steven Kaye]

Thrillers are a conservative genre. Like Greek tragedies and murder mysteries, they upset society's balance in order to right it, and to re-affirm it in the righting.

There are certainly numerous murder mysteries and thrillers which do not fall into this category - for example, Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios. Stephen King tried to make the same argument for horror in Danse Macabre. The world's moved on since Agatha Christie and genteel drawing room mysteries.