Not Even the New York Times Knows What a Thriller Is

By David Griffin Brown

Categories are important. They help us make sense of the world. They help us quantify this from that. They help us communicate. Genres are no different.

There have long been arguments in biology about what constitutes a species or subspecies. Some taxonomists are lumpers, others are splitters.  In fiction, we love to create endless subgenres to classify our reading tastes, or to try to define a book that seems a little bit different than anything that has come before it. But there are still essential elements, structures, and tropes that clearly delineate space opera from cozy mystery and epic fantasy from interplanetary romance.

Thriller, however, is one genre that can feel a bit fuzzy. For a book to be a thriller it just has to be… thrilling, right?

Not really. Thriller is the mystery novel’s juiced up cousin. There is mystery in both of them, but while a true mystery novel is all about figuring out what happened in the past, a thriller is about stopping something bad from happening in the future. Given the common element, there is a lot of crossover. Many books can be classified as both. Pas de problème.

However, if we were to melt down the walls around the thriller genre, we’d be left with a useless and arbitrary category. Being thrilling isn’t enough. If it was, then Lord of the Rings could be considered a thriller. Suspense isn’t enough. If it was, pretty much every horror could be considered a thriller. A criminal element isn't enough; we already have the catchall of "crime fiction" for that. 

So it makes sense to stick to the specific, structural definition of what makes a thriller a thriller. Otherwise, what is the point of having this genre category at all?

This is a question I’d like the New York Times to answer. They recently published the 50 Best Thrillers of the 21^st Century. Over a THIRD of the novels on this list aren’t thrillers.

Of the most ridiculous suggestions: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. This is a bildungsroman—a character-driven literary drama that details the tragic life of young Theo Decker from age thirteen into adulthood. It is zero percent a thriller. There is no mystery. There is no ticking clock. And while Theo is reasonably stressed out about a secret he’s keeping from the world, the turmoil is internal, heightened by his lack of maturity and uncertainty, with consequences that, should he be found out, would be much less significant (as a minor) than he dreads. It’s a fantastic novel with exceptional characterization, but it’s one of the least thrilling books I’ve read this year. Another famous Tartt novel, The Secret History, is about murder and deception and control, and there’s even a mystery element, but it’s not a thriller either. And that’s okay.

Perhaps a worse offender on this list than The Goldfinch is Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’s an epistolary literary novel about the aftermath of a school shooting. There is no future threat to stop and no mystery to solve. Like Tartt’s masterpiece, it’s a character study.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is a literary historical spy novel framed as a confession in a re-education camp. That puts the events of the story prior to the narrative present—a reminiscent narrator. The story takes place between 1975 and 1979. Yes, there are spies, and yes, there is some suspense, but that doesn’t mean we need to shoehorn the novel into the thriller genre.

Emma Donoghue’s Room is a psychological survival drama told through a five-year-old’s perspective. There is no investigation and no ticking clock. Again, literary fiction, this time about captivity. While little Jack’s mother plans and orchestrates their escape, which is certainly thrilling, it’s not a “stop future X” scenario, nor is there a mystery.

Are you seeing the pattern here?

Turns out this isn't the work of one overwhelmed culture reporter. The NY Times included a note on how the list came together: they polled hundreds of contributors, “writers of every kind of crime fiction, from legal thrillers to spy novels to cozy mysteries, as well as librarians, editors, critics, and Bookstogrammers,” and asked each for their ten best thrillers published since 2000. So it turns out the literary padding stems from the decision that any fiction even tangentially involving a crime counts as "thriller."

Crime fiction! Cozy mysteries! WTAF?

This is a symptom of a larger issue. Genre tick-boxes help publishers sell books. The more Amazon genre categories they can pin a novel with, the better the potential reach. When clients come to us asking for help with their query submission package for literary agents, they often want advice on how best to describe their novel in terms of genre. The truth is, scattershot genre classification is increasingly a marketing reality. Of course you don’t want to pitch your light-hearted romantasy manuscript as literary spec, but if you pitch it as a cozy fantasy, you’re probably fine—because it will likely end up tagged as both in sales listings across the interwebs.

The watering down of the thriller genre (and the subsequent literary encroachment) relates to the reader’s-side-of-the-fence version of what agents and publishers call book club fiction and upmarket fiction. There are differences between the two, but they are slight. Essentially, upmarket and book club are literary-leaning books that are a bit more exciting than plodding character pieces.

The biggest sales numbers in the book world are persistently romance and mystery, with romantasy taking the world by storm in recent years. What doesn’t sell well: literary fiction. So how do you convince readers to take a shot at a weighty and brooding Donna Tartt tome of 784 pages? Throw it on a list of the top 50 thrillers of the 21st century, I guess.

Thrillers look forward while mysteries look backward. They are kin. Even though there is crossover, they are each doing something specific and unique. And for the people who love these genres, that specific and unique thing is what we shell out our dollars for. If we try to lump every novel featuring a spy or a cop or a bit of suspense into the thriller genre, the category loses its meaning.

David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling, Story Skeleton: The Classics, and Fake Query Letters by Dead Authors. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his work has appeared in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review, White Wall Review, and Grain. He has published three novels: When the Sky Breaks, We've Come for Your Eggs, and No Country for Old Dragons. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. As an editor, he pays special attention to structure, relationship arcs, and voice. David lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Kosapsum Nations.