Down With Thrillers

The controversy about whether thrillers are as good as literary fiction is like the murderer in Halloween. It just won't lie down and die, whether it's shot, stabbed or pushed out of a window. Now, in the current Observer, Edward Docx writes that a thriller is necessarily and intrinsically inferior to a literary novel: 'even good genre...is by definition a constrained form of writing.'

The trouble is that the only two authors he discusses are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown, authors he considers to be bad genre. His listing of their failings is entirely beside the point. In order even to begin to make his point, Docx would need to identify a really good thriller, define its qualities, and then set it next to a second- or third-rate literary novel and show that the literary novel is still superior. 

If we're playing this slightly tiresome game, I would take a really first-rate thriller, like Simenon's The Widow and set it beside an obviously literary novel of the same era like Camus's The Stranger. Except that Andre Gide already did that at the time and he thought (as I do) that Simenon's novel is superior. Does that prove anything except that all that matters about books is how good they are? 

Docx's fallacy reminds me of a similarly illogical argument in Bryan Magee's generally outstanding book, Aspects of Wagner. He writes:

'When we consider opera - any opera, not just Wagner's - it is clear that the deciding factor in whether a particular work dies or survives is the music and the music alone.' He goes on to say (wrongly in my view) that many beloved operas have terrible librettos. And then continues: 'As against this, I would challenge anyone to give a counter-example and name an opera whose music is generally held to be worthless yet which goes on being performed for generation after generation because the story or the characters or the words have some special appeal.'

But that is clearly not the right counter-example. The more important question is whether there are operas featuring great music that aren't performed because the librettos make them unstageable and the answer is yes. Haydn and Schubert both wrote ones containing some of their greatest music but they are never performed because the stories they weaved them around remain hopelessly intractable. (Another example: many of feel that Berstein's score for Candide is even better than that for West Side Story, but it will never equal the earlier show's popularity because Bernstein could never get the book right, although he spent most of his lifetime getting it rewritten by different, very distinguished hands.)

Meanwhile, go and read Simenon's The Widow, and don't worry about whether it's really a thriller or not.