Wired to the Word: On Reading Thrillers

Abstract

The appearance in 2003 of 21 Georges Simenon novels in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade reaffirmed a widespread consensus that French-language crime fiction, especially the roman noir with its vigil over the political and social ills of the nation, had secured its position as an important vector of French cultural history. Its sister genre, the thriller, has fared less well. Justly criticised for its expedient style and limited intellectual horizons, the thriller continues to appeal to a mass readership drawn from all sectors of society.This article locates its attractions in the ways in which we might once have engaged with the adventure stories of our collective youth that furnished our first solitary contact with literary fiction. It argues that our response to narrative suspense in adventure stories consumed in early adolescence is later rekindled and developed in the more adult thrillers of the modern age. Working within a conceptual framework that includes the psychologically based thrillers of Boileau-Narcejac and Sébastian Japrisot juxtaposed with the adrenalin rush of events supplied by Dan Brown and Maxime Chattam, it analyses the different modalities of suspense and their concomitant reading pleasures, concluding that the thriller meets the expectations not of a certain group of readers but of a certain type of reading experience.