The massive consumption of thrillers dated from decades ago, but is during the 60’s when the establishment of television takes place and, consequently, the capacity of thrillers to extend to this new mass-medium and reach almost every home, everyone’s attention. The links between television, cinema and written thrillers are now tighter than ever; therefore, it seems ironic that a so widespread and important phenomenon is not properly studied. To put it more simply, it is rather evident that the most part of the contemporary readers has at some point being in contact with with a “suspense” plot; a great deal of them is even enthusiast of the genre.

            Nevertheless, the traditional and narrow perspective of  “canonical” English Literature has imposed negative view over thrillers, blaming them for encouraging uncontrolled emotions and the lowest instincts of human being. The proposition is clearly questionable, since a lot of works included in the category of “canonical” literature shows us the most remarkable miseries of its characters. Anyway, the “canonical” view has lately faced the growing interest in the analysis of thrillers, and nowadays it is justified enough to say that Popular Fiction’s studies have even suffered a perceptible evolution.[1]

    In the beginning, the centre of the question about thrillers and Popular Fiction  sparingly laid on the possible effects on the readers or audiences. From a mainly Marxian or Freudian point of view, it was asserted that ideology of upper classes was imposed as natural and unique to the working class. Thrillers, from this perspective, would be a mere expression of this ideology. This conception fitted plainly well with the essential dichotomy of Marxist theories: economic infrastructure produces cultural objects to remain preponderant. These objects are called, in general, superstructure.

            However, that reductionist and a little Manichean view was followed by the structuralist one.[2] Structuralism emphasized the formal qualities of the text and established a distinction between the different kinds of pleasure involved in the term “Popular Fiction”; for example, it was regarded that thrillers’ main pleasure was “suspense”. One of the lacks of Structuralism, however, rested in the ignorance of cultural backgrounds and contexts. Thus, from 1960 some scholars in France started a new way of understanding Popular Fiction, considering that ideology and culture surrounded every literary production in a network of political principles, common thoughts and social behaviours.[3]

            From this basic acknowledgement, individual authors opened their interesting own opinions and analysis to new fields. Louis Althusser explained that “ideological apparatuses” acted in every kind of social relationship, filtering ideology to everyone’s consciousness and preserving the established order. One of these “ideological apparatuses” would be the thriller. On the other hand, Gramsci thought that the basis of social order resided on consent. Consent made upper classes’ actual hegemony unalterable and stronger, and Popular Fiction was one of the most useful tools devoted to conservatism.[4]

            Considering the category of “thrillers” as involved in Popular Fiction, it is advisable to wonder whether these texts -or films- become such a way of preserving the social status quo. It is not helpful to conclude that thrillers are conservative because they all follow the same conservative pattern of “order-enigma-resolution”.[5] In fact, this pattern emerges from the very essence of narration. It would be better to say that every imaginable novel is able to be analysed according to this process, although not every novel is a thriller. Consequently, it is obvious that the pattern of thrillers is the same, but the intensity of “suspense” gives them a specific atmosphere which permits us to study their plots separately.

            In study thrillers, one immediate evidence appears from the very beginning: they generally ensure the process of socialisation; in other words, their conservative pattern surrounds even more conservative contents. Social integration has its basis on the massive approval of some principles by the whole society -maybe not the whole society, but the most part of it-. From their childhood, individuals are incessantly impregnated of social exigencies and correspondent social rewards. The acceptance of this socialisation reaches its peak when the individual is able to manage, voluntarily, his/her own learning choices of what is socially useful or socially inconvenient.

            When the reader finishes a thriller, he/she has had the opportunity to explore the “dark side” of the society, “the boundary between the permitted and the forbidden” and he/she has been able to “experience in a carefully controlled way the possibility of stepping across this boundary”.[6]

            The latter evidence is presented by John G. Cawelti as one of the four possible interactions between literature in general and cultural-social consciousness of the reader. These four interactions are successfully adaptable to the specific category of thrillers, as well as they suggest how “formulaic literature” becomes so popular and widely approved.[7]

            Apart from the possibility of exploring the mentioned “dark side” of a given society, thrillers can confirm some strongly held cultural-conventional views owned by a concrete society. To provide an example, let us examine this fragment from Mickey Spillane’s “I, the Jury”, chapter 13:

Man-hunt. The things the cops were best at. Go get them. Don’t miss. If they try to run, kill the bastards. I don’t care if I don’t get them myself, so long as someone does. No glory. Justice.

               It is plainly clear that this paragraph refers to a very usual idea in hard-boiled novels: the real justice depends on the individual rather than the law. Law is often useless without the brave intervention of the hero, and the hero is able to go beyond the law because it is justified in order to catch the criminal and reassert social harmony.

            Reflecting a bit more on this basic concept of justice, it is possible to allege that it appears in westerns. If it is regarded that both western and hard-boiled stories are typical American categories, the conclusion is evident: American culture is deeply rooted in an “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” concept of justice. This proposition would be confirmed by other facts like the maintenance, in the United States, of capital punishment and the widespread and licit possession of arms.

            Anyway, the reassurance of conventional principles is only one of the four points analysed by John G. Cawelti. Two of them have not been mentioned yet: the ability of literary formulas to adjust themselves to new social tendencies and the ability, too, to resolve social conflicts of ambiguities.[8]

            Thriller, as a literary formula and an efficient means of social control, is able to change according to varying social circumstances. This is the reason of the relatively successful “oppositional thrillers” as black action films in the 70s and the feminist thrillers of Sara Paretsky, for example. Nonetheless, the capability of thrillers to adjust their plots and characters to changing common values is not surprising at all, since they are orientated to a capitalist market. In other words, formulas and “formulaic literature” are products of  the free trade, so they depend on their economic success to exist. If a brave author is courageous enough to strongly alter the “formulaic thriller”, e. g. letting the male hero to be tied and  restricted by a spouse or a family, he/she will be definitely fortunate if this alteration is welcome and shared by the fantasies of the major part of readers.

            Anyway, the adjustments are usually lighter than the one suggested. One satisfactory example is the Americanisation of the classical detective story in the hard-boiled thriller. Another one appears in Agatha Christie’s novels: she slightly innovates the old model of male hero -Sherlock Holmes, for example- constructing a relatively new one, Hercule Poirot, who does not share some of the traditional attributes of undoubted masculinity:

A dapper figure stopped by their table. Hercule Poirot, faultlessly and beautifully apparelled, his moustaches proudly twisted, bowed regally.

      “Mademoiselle”, he said to Ginevra, “mes hommages. You were superb!”

      They greeted him affectionately [...].

      He beamed round on them all and when they were all talking he leaned a little sideways and said softly to Sarah:

      “Eh, bien, it seems that all marches well now with la famille Boynton”.

            It is difficult to conceive a similar scene in a Conan Doyle’s story. In this paragraph of the Epilogue to “Appointment with Death”, Agatha Christie adds a significant deal of affability and even coquetry to Poirot’s behaviour. It is hardly imaginable to see Sherlock Holmes described as “beautifully apparelled” and so affectionately greeted by a group of people.

            Although it is possible, then, to introduce alternatives in the formula of thrillers, it is not advisable, on the other hand, to break with the basic characteristics of the genre. As a result, is just to say that thrillers, as a genre, are clearly conservative.

            The fourth and last connection which Cawelti enumerates between culture and formulas is the resolution of ambiguities or social conflicts.[9] Social integration and status quo require a general consent over a few central conventions. Nonetheless, in certain circumstances, a sudden tension emerges from within a culture, an internal disagreement which is likely to confront the expectancies of opposite social groups. The obvious danger of total disruption and disorder may be mitigated e. g. by the use of legitimated violence, as it occurs in “I, the Jury” or “The Day of the Jackal”. The latter being a thriller is a large discussed matter; anyway, the torture executed over Kowalski by the very state bureaucracy of France is a clear example of legitimated violence in order to solve an impending crisis.[10]

            The fact is that thrillers develop, as a formula, understandable ways of social integration. Maybe it will be even more obvious if two authentic models of integrated individuals are shown: Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. Both are, primarily, magnificent specimens of Englishness and social usefulness.

            At the end of the nineteenth century, the so called “Pax Britannica” during the Victorian age had constructed a stable society plainly dominated by middle-upper classes. Conan Doyle creates a character that gives self-reliance and security to these social sectors in the beginning of increasing worker’s movements.[11] Holmes can efficiently resolve the most torturous crime, usually committed either by a member of lower classes or by an old-fashioned aristocrat.[12] Franco Moretti explains why precisely these two kinds of individuals: they are a threat to monopoly capitalism, because they try to accumulate capital against the settled rules of free trade and competitiveness. Upstarts and nobles represent, thus, a not-tolerated kind of individualism, individualism being a typical Victorian high value though.

            Returning to the main figure of Sherlock Holmes, he appears as a final court of appeal to whom last attempts are addressed when all else has failed.[13] People sending desperate letters to the inexistent 221B Baker Street is not a contemporary phenomenon, it occurred already between 1887 and 1894, while Holmes’ adventures were being published.

            This amazing confidence in the hero can easily be translated to the confidence in the system that he embodies. Howard Haycraft, an enthusiast of classical detective stories, relates how during the early beginning of the Second World War Mussolini prohibited English detective stories.[14] A bit later, in 1941, it was declared illegal to sell this sort of novels in Germany, so they were systematically removed from every bookshop. In the same year, Haycraft argued that “the detective story is and always has been  essentially a democratic institution”, because:

            1. In the detective stories no convict appears without a reasonable proof of his/her culpability.

            2. The strictest logic is followed in order to obtain this proof and to develop the trial.

            3. Reason dominates in these processes. Justice is guaranteed.

            Lord Hewart of Bury, an ancient Lord Chief Justice of England, said that there was no obstacle in asserting that Britain’s long-time-ago democracy was the reason of the flourishing English detective stories. He alleged that it was only possible “in a settled community where the reader’s sympathies are on the side of law and order, and not on the side of the criminal who is trying to escape from justice” (italics are mine).

            One selected paragraph of Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, included in its 12th chapter, reveals how the rules of the social body are always taken in account by Dr. Watson and, of course, Sherlock Holmes. Selden, a convict who escaped from prison, has just died because he was dressed on Sir Henry’s clothes and the hound has killed him by mistake:[15]

Boots, shirt, cap -it was all Sir Henry’s. The tragedy was still black enough, but this man had at least deserved death by the laws of his country. I told Holmes how the matter stood, my heart bubbling over with thankfulness and joy.

            Decades after, the figure of James Bond relieves Sherlock Holmes as a model of social integration. Nevertheless, Bond seems to be a more complicated one. From the 60s Britain is entering a new Englishness, plainly different from that of old Dr. Watson and Holmes.[16] Ian Fleming’s works appear just with the irremediable decline of British Imperialism. It is very significative that the first Bond’s story was to appear in 1953, with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and the last one with Churchill’s death in 1965. This period is undoubtedly critical: to the loss of colonies it is necessary to add the failed Suez affair and the French veto on Britain’s aim to join the European Economic Community.

            Although Bond, in the beginning, is a symbol of British Imperialism -it is possible to read Strangways’ death in “Dr. No” as a threat to it which has to be resolved-, in the end of that period he appears as a model of impeccable modernity. Some ties with the past had to be saved, as liberalism, professionalism, individualism and male preponderance; in spite of that, the new Bond era adds to his personality cosmopolitanism and those virtues of the self-made, young and classless man of the twentieth century.

            To put it more simply, a model of social integration.

            Thrillers not only describe, as mentioned above, the aceptable way to become a proper member of a given society (in that case, the English society), but they actively promote a tight control over population. From the very beginning of the detective stories, it is possible to find a serious concern about growing cities and the ineluctable loss of individual identities behind the comfortable shield of multitudes. Even before introducing to us the first classical detective (Auguste Dupin), Edgar Allan Poe creates the figure of the flaneur, the man who observes the crowd and is able to read in the appearance of each individual his/her life and personality. In “The Man of the Crowd”, Poe thus presents the embryo of the detective stories in the urban environment of Paris. There, according to Dana Brand, “anything can happen to anyone at any time”.[17]

            Insecurity reigns over great metropolis. Just because the flaneur is not able to deduce the identity of one anonymous man, he pursues him through Paris. The only fact of anonymity makes him a potential criminal; far away from the optimistic and democratic view of Haycraft, innocence is not supposed.[18]

            At the end of the nineteenth century, the dangerous developments of Trade Unionism and working class struggle created the urgent need of identification. Until that moment, signature had been sufficient, but the sensible reduction of analphabetism increased the possibility of fake identities and, therefore, easier forms of criminality. In 1888 Galton discovers and develops Purkyne’s former ideas and the possibility of checking the whole population, individual by individual, becomes real.[19] Fingerprints complete the long and someway totalitarian desire of social transparency. In fact, some of the plots in the classical detective stories are basically built upon a problem of past offences and identities. Identification becomes essential for the proper appliance of law and order. Sherlock Holmes is not an exception; this paragraph of “A Case of Identity” plainly shows that he completely shares the same aim:

“If we could fly out that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on [...] it would make all fiction [...] most stale and unprofitable”.

            The main ally to realize this aim is scientific method. Returning to Conan Doyle, who was a doctor himself, confidence in deduction and logic reasoning is absolute. Holmes applies his privileged intelligence following the strict pattern of common sense. Nonetheless, as Franco Moretti argues, this systematisation of “common sense” is not the real science, but a degraded one: a science for the educated mass. The myth of the pure science remains untouchable in the hands of the social elite.[20]

            Control by the masses is thus exercised, in Conan Doyle’s stories, by scientific methods. Watson and Holmes heal the social disruption of crime blaming the individual and, therefore, demonstrating the innocence of the social body as a whole. In other words, they restaurate the “univocal links between social signifiers and signifieds”, avoiding entropy and ambiguity within the general consent.[21] Thus, a hidden form of hegemony, a semantic one, is imposed through the apparently pure application of deductive methods and “common sense”, in the Gramscian concept of the latter term.[22]

            Pierre Macherey contributed to the ideological reading of thrillers with a radically new vision: besides of what it is said in a text, we should consider what cannot be said.[23] Macherey introduces, from this perspective, a deconstructive analysis of the story. It would be better to say that in every narration, next to the aspiration to completeness is the actual and unavoidable incompleteness. This means that social contradictions are implicit in the even unconscious attempt to hide their own description. Catherine Belsey, for example, warns us that behind the appearance of scientific behaviour in Holmes’ cases, we must analyse one essential lack: why the figure of woman remains mysterious and unexplained.[24] This omission, voluntary or not, speaks by itself about a male-preponderant society where the women’s point of view is systematically avoided, perhaps even unknown.

            Nevertheless, obvious contradictions like these are only perceptible from the distance of the theoretician appraisal of the text. In fact, we are more likely to fall in the pleasure of a formula which indicates us how to maintain our attitudes within the realm of what is permitted. Thrillers are one of the most efficient tools ever applied in order to reinforce “consent”, because they are not only expressions of the social order, but they are able to shape it, too.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Longhurst, Derek (edited by); “Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure” (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)

• Ashley, Bob; “The Study of Popular Fiction. A Source Book” (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989)

• Cawelti, John G.; “Adventure, Mystery and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture” (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1976)

• Palmer, Jerry; “Thrillers” (London: Edward Arnold, 1978)

• Bennett, Tony (edited by); “Popular Fiction. Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading” (London, 1990)

• Haycraft, Howard; “Murder for pleasure” (New York: Biblo & Tannen Inc., 1941)

• Popular Culture – U203. Block 5. Units 21, 22 and 23; “Politics, Ideology and Popular Culture 2″ (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1982)

• Popular Culture – U203. Block 4. Units 16 and 17; “Form and Meaning 2″ (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1981)

• Pawling, Christopher; “Popular Fiction and Social Change” (London: MacMillan, 1984)

• Knight, Stephen; “Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction” (London: MacMillan, 1980)

FOOTNOTES

[1]  Longhurst, Derek (edited by); “Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure” (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)

[2] Longhurst, Derek; op. cit. p. 2

[3]  Ashley, Bob; “The Study of Popular Fiction. A Source Book” (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989)

[4]  Ibid.

[5]  Ibid.

[6]  Cawelti, John G.; “Adventure, Mystery and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture” (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1976)

[7]  Ibid.

[8]  Cawelti, John G.; op. cit. p. 4

[9]  Cawelti, John G.; op. cit. p. 4

[10]  Palmer, Jerry; “Thrillers” (London: Edward Arnold, 1978)

[11]  Longhurst, Derek; op. cit. p. 2

[12]  Bennett, Tony (edited by); “Popular Fiction. Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading” (London, 1990)

[13]  Longhurst, Derek; op. cit. p. 2

[14]  Haycraft, Howard; “Murder for pleasure” (New York: Biblo & Tannen Inc., 1941)

[15]  It is suggested, as well, that he has found his death because of the inappropriate action of disguising himself as a member of an upper class, against the established social order.

[16]  Bennett, Tony; op. cit. p. 7

[17] Bennet, Tony; op. cit. p. 7

[18]  Haycraft, Howard; op. cit. p. 8

[19]  Bennett, Tony; op. cit. p. 7

[20]  Bennet, Tony; op. cit. p. 7

[21]  Ibidem

[22]  Ashley, Bob; op. cit. p. 3

[23]  Ashley, Bob; op. cit. p. 3

[24]  Ibidem