Books : The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction
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by: Patrick Anderson
List Price: $24.95Amazon.com's Price: $19.46 You Save: $5.49 (22%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.087209
EAN: 9780345481238
ISBN: 0345481232
Label: Random House
Manufacturer: Random House
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: February 06, 2007
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: February 06, 2007
Sales Rank: 836840
Studio: Random House
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
There’s been a revolution in American popular fiction. The writers who dominated the bestseller lists a generation ago with blockbuster novels about movie stars and exotic foreign lands have been replaced by a new generation writing a new kind of bestseller, one that hooks readers with crime, suspense, and ever-increasing violence. Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post’s man on the thriller beat, calls this revolution “the triumph of the thriller,” and lists among its stars Thomas Harris, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Sue Grafton, and Elmore Leonard.
In his provocative, caustic, and often hilarious survey of today’s popular fiction, Anderson shows us who the best thriller writers are–and the worst. He shows how Michael Connelly was inspired by Raymond Chandler, how George Pelecanos toiled in obscurity while he mastered his craft, how Sue Grafton created the first great woman private eye, and how Thomas Harris transformed an insane cannibal into the charming man of the world who made FBI agent Clarice Starling his lover.
Anderson shows Scott Turow inventing the modern legal thriller and John Grisham translating it into a stunning series of bestsellers. He casts a cold eye on Tom Clancy’s militaristic techno-thrillers, and praises Alan Furst and Robert Littell as world-class spy novelists. He examines the pioneering role of Lawrence Sanders, the offbeat appeal of Dean Koontz, the unprecedented success of The Da Vinci Code, and the emergence of the literary thriller.
Most of all, Anderson demands that the best of these novelists be given their due–not as genre writers, but as some of the most talented men and women at work in American fiction. Don’t trust the literary elites to tell you what to read, he warns–make up you own minds. The Triumph of the Thriller will convince many readers that we’ve entered an important new era in popular fiction. This book can be your guide to it.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Thrillers top best seller lists
Sometime novelist and Washington Post book reviewer traces the history and state of "Thrillers"--the crime, spy, and legal novels that dominate the fiction bestseller lists these days (by Anderson's count, 40% of the 130 novels that sold more than 100,000 copies in 2005).
Anderson is a reviewer, not a historian, so the focus is on current writers, their backgrounds, their inspirations, and their stories ("stand-alones" or series). It is interesting how late in life many of even the ... Read More
Rating: - An appreciation of the thriller
Mainstream fiction is often thought of as being non-genre, that is, it may not be particularly literary, but it also isn't pigeonholed into any particular category. Really, though, like a real river system, the main stream should be the biggest particular branch. The argument made in Patrick Anderson's The Triumph of the Thriller is that the thriller is the new mainstream.
The basis for Anderson's idea is based on sheer numbers: in recent years, thrillers have occupied much of the ... Read More
Rating: - Changing Times
Beyond a doubt, the best seller lists of today bear little resemblance to best seller lists of the '50s and '60s that were dominated by novels about movie stars, sex, money and the wanton lifestyles of those who had more money than sense. Those lists were dominated by writers like Harold Robbins, Irving Stone, Jacqueline Susann, Herman Wouk and James Michener. According to Anderson, it was the Kennedy assassination in 1963, the "end of innocence for a generation," that made possible a move by the ... Read More
Rating:  - Enjoyable but Flawed
In this plea for "middlebrow" culture, novelist and Washington Post book reviewer Anderson argues that since the "thriller" has risen to dominate bestseller lists over the last 25 years, it's high time the genre got taken seriously. While I don't argue with this premise, Anderson's book is only a shaky -- though entertaining -- first step in that direction. An overarching flaw in the book is Anderson's definition of what constitutes a thriller. If you're going to champion a genre, you should at least ... Read More
Rating: - Well it was bound to be subjective and patchy
Given how thin the book it, it was bound to be quite superficial and selective in its treatment of authors. I have no problem with that. I read this book to get some ideas on who might be good to read now having grown up on the classsics like Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Agatha Christie. Because he does write some quite detailed analyses ( in particular his treatment of Chandler ), the book was bound in other places to just become a litany of "I like this one and the plot is...". That was OK. It was what ... Read More
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