IV.

The Thriller in America

Distinctive forms of thriller have developed in the United States. Drawing on the Gothic narratives of Edgar Allan Poe, “chillers” (a hybrid of thriller and horror story) have produced the record-breaking 1980s and 1990s best sellers of Stephen King. King's Cujo (1981) and Gerald's Game (1994), narratives with no supernatural dimension, are classic exercises in the protracted suspense which has always been the staple element in thrillers. “Hardboiled” crime fiction, originating with Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (both 1929) by Dashiell Hammett, was given a best-selling twist in the “vigilante thrillers” of Mickey Spillane, beginning with I, the Jury (1947). Vigilante thrillers were boosted by Brian Garfield's more sophisticated tale of urban middle-class revenge, Death Wish (1972), a novel which became a long-term best seller following its hugely successful film adaptation (directed by Michael Winner, starring Charles Bronson), in 1974. Vigilante thrillers are notable for a sadistic degree of physical violence—something which, after the 1950s, increasingly appealed to readers.

The gangster thriller, given mass popularity with novelizations and spin-offs of the James Cagney movie, The Public Enemy (1931), and reworked in James Hadley Chase's unashamedly trashy No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), re-emerged as Mario Puzo's super-selling Mafia epic, The Godfather (1969)—a work which incorporates in its massive and sprawling structure many features of the traditional crime thriller.

With The Andromeda Strain (1974), Michael Crichton popularized a genre which has come to be known as the “technothriller”, narratives lavishly embellished with reference to science and technology. The genre was further exploited in the Cold War technothrillers of Tom Clancy, with their heavy reliance on an insider's knowledge about advanced weaponry. Clancy's technothrillers (particularly after the filming of the 1984 novel, The Hunt for Red October, in 1990) are among the top-selling novels of the 20th century. Clancy's sales are rivalled by John Grisham's courtroom thrillers, following The Firm (1991). Grisham's novels have also benefited from successful film tie-ins.