Flip open your newspaper to the bestseller lists any week and you’ll see the fiction one rife with – if not outright dominated by – thrillers. But it wasn’t always that way, and Patrick Anderson charts the genre’s birth and upward climb ever since in THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER: HOW COPS, CROOKS, AND CANNIBALS CAPTURED POPULAR FICTION.

It may be no more than a lengthy essay, but it’s to Anderson’s credit that, at times, it’s as much fun to read – and in some cases, even more so – than the titles he discusses. A thriller writer and reviewer himself, Anderson knows of what he speaks, and with very little exception – his statement that John Grisham is a better scribe than Stephen King, for example – it’s hard to disagree with him.

After all, see if this quote from Anderson doesn’t sound an awful lot like the credo of a popular Internet book review site: “A lot of people have a hard time making the leap from officially approved ‘literary’ fiction to novels that are fun. … There is time for, say, Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane along with Dickens and Shakespeare. … Let us be wary of literary elites. They are not that different from political elites or sorority-house elites; they seek to accumulate and keep power, and they favor their friends.”

Amen, brother! Thrillers have come a long way from being considered the morass of the publishing world to the reliable tentpoles and sales behemoths they are today. But before they could make that transformation, they had to be invented, and Anderson cites Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as not only the birth of the detective story, but the genesis of the thriller – reins quickly taken up by Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins and Agatha Christie.

From there, the genre gained a hard edge – not to mention a salacious rep – in the ’30s and ’40s pulp offerings of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, as well as a well-schooled pool of immediate followers – prolific Ed McBain and Mickey Spillane among them.

The ’80s saw authors moving away more from the gumshoe aspect into high-concept waters, and that’s when the modern-day thriller as we know it took off. Tom Clancy kicked it into high gear with the 1985 publication of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, and the chapter devoted to him easily finds Anderson at his most entertaining, taking Clancy to task for outright ridiculous prose like this amazing – and amazingly racist – snippet of dialogue from THE TEETH OF THE TIGER, told by a Marine to a dying terrorist: “Hey, raghead, I’ve got something for you. I want you to carry this to hell with you. It’s a football, asshole, made from the skin of a real Iowa pig.”

Anderson saves high praise for Scott Turow, whose PRESUMED INNOCENT bore the legal thriller and marks “a remarkable marriage of craft and commercialism,” and Thomas Harris, whose landmark THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS he calls “the greatest of modern thrillers. It does not transcend the genre but defines it. More than any other single novel, it is the triumph of the thriller.” But HANNIBAL? Not so much.

Michael Connelly, Robert Littell and Alan Furst are among Anderson’s current favorites, and he sees Charlie Huston and Karin Slaughter as rising stars. However, he holds well-placed disdain for James Patterson (”the absolute pits, the lowest common denominator of cynical, scuzzy, assembly-line writing”) and David Baldacci, and his Washington Post reviews of such are riotous and reprinted here in full.

Few female authors are covered in TRIUMPH, but that’s because most choose to delve into the romance side of things, which he dubs “nitwit lit.” Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Patricia Highsmith are among the few ladies making the grade. Don’t get him started on Patricia Cornwell.

TRIUMPH is not an exhaustive overview of the genre. At less than 300 pages, it can’t be, and especially if a thriller superstar like Michael Crichton remains suspiciously absent. It’s the views of one man and one man only, but that man has the benefit of authority and good taste.

I walked away from this nonfiction delight with several titles to add to my already overflowing reading list: Lawrence Sanders’ THE FIRST DEADLY SIN, Frederick Forsyth’s THE DAY OF THE JACKAL and John Burdett’s BANGKOK 8, et al. You should add THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER to yours. It’s a sheer treat to read someone speak about thrillers with such infectious passion, thorough understanding and barbed wit. –Rod Lott

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THESE AUTHORS:
• ALREADY DEAD by Charlie Huston
• THE AMATEUR by Robert Littell
• THE ANDERSON TAPES by Lawrence Sanders
• THE BEST HORROR STORIES OF ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE by Arthur Conan Doyle
• BLACK ALLEY by Mickey Spillane
• CORONADO by Dennis Lehane
• DAME AGATHA ABROAD by Agatha Christie
• CRIME BEAT: A DECADE OF COVERING COPS & KILLERS by Michael Connelly
• THE DELTA FACTOR by Mickey Spillane
• ECHO PARK by Michael Connelly
• THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE by Ed McBain
• HANNIBAL RISING by Thomas Harris
• THE KILLING MAN by Mickey Spillane
• THE LAST COP OUT by Mickey Spillane
• LEARNING TO KILL: STORIES by Ed McBain
• LEGENDS by Robert Littell
• LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE DEAF MAN by Ed McBain
• THE LONG WAIT by Mickey Spillane
• MURDER IN VEGAS: NEW CRIME TALES OF GAMBLING AND DESPERATION edited by Michael Connelly
• THE PUSHER by Ed McBain
• TRANSGRESSIONS edited by Ed McBain