A tour of the genresto a healthy new body) was the author able to conjure a conspiracy
with a true terror quotient.
Perhaps global suspense will revive; indeed, there are promising
signs. U.S. good guys have teamed with overseas counterparts to
useful effect in Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith and other novels.
Foreign spies might also find a following here. A recent thriller by
American author Steve Hartov, The Heat of Ramadan, gave us a com-
pelling Israeli intelligence agent and an equally fascinating Arab
assassin who is hunting him.
World War III novels and technothrillers also kept the action
going overseas for a while, but those categories are fading. For the
most part, American readers are today finding their villains at
home. The one arena in which they frequently pop up is the court-
room. No doubt about it, the formula of the moment is the legal
thriller. Every lawyer is writing one.
There have always been courtroom novels—consider Erie
Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason mysteries—but it was really Scott
Turow's Presumed Innocent that kicked off the current wave of court-
room suspense in 1987. John Grisham is another big wheel in this
area; Richard North Patterson is, also. Is there room at the top for
more best-sellers? Perhaps, but the competition is fierce and the
market leaders are already in place. New authors will have a hard
time making their mark in this crowded subcategory. Sorry.
If it is any consolation, our changing world will always supply
new sources of mass terror. The trick is to identify those that pro-
duce a gut-level response in the public, and then to make those
threats utterly credible. It is not easy to do.
For example, take viruses. In this age of AIDS, the Ebola virus has
triggered a widespread panic response. This is good for thriller writ-
ers. So far, however, no novelist has been successful at making the
virus threat feel real, except perhaps Michael Crichton in The
Andromeda Strain. Indeed, the most successful virus book has been a
nonfiction title, The Hot Zone.
Credibility is the problem, too, with several perennial types of vil-
lainy one sees in slush-pile novels: small-town corruption, comput-
er hacking, and corporate conspiracy. These are indeed real-life ter-
rors, but few manuscripts really make those threats palpable. Hooks