II. Changing Crimes

After assassinations, war, and rebellion, new voices are heard and the private-eye novel begins to evolve into something bigger, darker, more violent, and more ambitious – the modern thriller -- as trailblazers like Lawrence Sanders, Elmore Leonard, Tom Clancy, Sue Grafton, Thomas Harris, and Scott Turow take aim at the best-seller lists.

5. The birth of the thriller

The triumph of the thriller built slowly, then reached a tipping point in 1981, when an unprecedented four crime novels were among the year’s fifteen bestselling books.
Looking back, we can see the transformation begin with the 1961 assassination of John F. Kennedy, on a November day that was the end of innocence for a generation. The madness continued with Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam and the resurrection of Richard Nixon. By the time the war fizzled out, Watergate played out, and Nixon slouched into exile, the old America was gone. The Fifties world of Doris Day movies, the Hit Parade, sock hops, slumber parties, virgin brides, and cockeyed optimists had become a darker place. Bob Dylan was its poet laureate, “Like A Rolling Stone” its anthem, Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson its bards. Change came fast in popular music and the movies, with angry works like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Nashville, Shampoo, and Taxi Driver. Cynicism was in our bones; noir was the new reality. 

Change came more slowly to publishing. Hardback books are expensive; the people who buy them are older and cling to comfortable habits. Yet, inevitably, publishing began to reflect the changing America. The bestseller lists for the Sixties and Seventies continued to be dominated by familiar names writing familiar novels, but new voices emerged. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying four years later reflected post-pill sexuality with a new candor and tremendous zest. Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, the first great crime thriller, turned the genre on its ear with its portrayal of mobsters as men of respect, businessmen. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby showed that a clever writer could concoct a bestseller by installing the devil in the Dakota, and Peter Benchley’s Jaws wove a dynamite thriller out of another of our primal fears. Evil lurked out there and readers were ready to embrace it. 

Crime fiction began to change too. The important crime novelists of the Fifties and Sixties weren’t respectable like the mainstream authors who dominated the lists. Crime fiction was still déclassé. When it sold, there was usually a reason, a justification. Meyer Levin’s Compulsion made the list in 1957, but it was a novelized version of the Leopold and Loeb “crime of the century.” Being history made it acceptable. The next year, Robert Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder made the list, helped by the fact that the author was an honest-to-God real-life judge. (I am drawing on 20th century sales figures compiled by Publishers Weekly.) In 1966, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which he called a “nonfiction novel,” was third on the nonfiction list; however defined, it was an exceptional piece of reporting and writing. Its success inspired an outpouring of true-crime books that would later include Norman Mailer’s novelistic look at the Gary Gilmore case, The Executioner’s Song. Both Mailer and Capote, literary lions of the postwar era, wrote their best books when they used real crimes to provide the structure, suspense, and passion that their novels sometimes lacked. 

The International Thriller Writers list of all-time top thrillers included several that reflected the anger of the Vietnam and Watergate eras. James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), a quintessential literary thriller, was a Southern poet’s brooding look at the violence and class hatred that were tearing America apart. David Morrell’s First Blood (1972) introduced that formidable Vietnam veteran John Rambo. In James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor (1974), written when he was 24, rival elements of the CIA are at war. In Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers (1974), a small-time journalist smuggles heroin from Saigon to California, encouraged by a corrupt CIA agent. 

Writers kept cropping up who defied category. Richard Condon’s truly subversive The Manchurian Candidate (1959) was a stunning satire of Cold War paranoia. The writer who called himself Trevanian (and was really Rodney Whitaker) began a series of sophisticated spy thrillers. Some of the most influential writers of the post-Vietnam renaissance included James Crumley, James Ellroy, Richard Price, and Kem Nunn. They updated the Hammett-Chandler tradition and added an angry new edge, producing outlaw fiction with a rock-and-roll beat. Crumley gave his most celebrated novel, The Last Good Kiss (1978), a title, a plot and an opening line that all reflect his admiration for Chandler. Here’s the opening line: 
“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”

Crumley claims it took him eight years to write that line and all across America he has fans who can recite it from memory. Trahearne is an alcoholic writer whose ex-wife has hired C.W. Sughrue, Crumley’s hard-drinking Montana-based PI, to find him, all of which recalls Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. The title of another of Crumley’s novels, The Mexican Tree Duck (1988), is his wry tribute to Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. 

Dennis Lehane, who would emerge in the 1990s as one of the best writers of his generation, calls The Last Good Kiss a turning point for him and many others. “That was the single most influential novel. It was a huge influence on Michael Connelly, on George Pelecanos, on me. And then all of a sudden James Ellroy came along. I remember reading Black Dahlia in my college dorm room and not getting off the floor all night and saying, Oh my God! This is truly what you can do. And then all of a sudden there was a flood of people coming from everywhere writing at a level that’s at a higher pitch than ever.”

Richard Price, born in 1949, grew up in a housing project in the Bronx, where his father drove a cab, and attended Cornell and then the graduate writing program at Columbia, where he wrote his first novel, The Wanderers, about a teenage gang in the Bronx. It was published when he was 24. Other ultra-realistic novels followed, including Bloodbrothers, Clockers, and Freedomland, gritty looks at young people, drugs, poverty, race, and crime. His influence on younger writers like Lehane and Pelecanos would be enormous.

Although Stephen Hunter remained stateside during his 1969-70 army duty, he went on to write more than a dozen novels that reflect a post-Vietnam focus on conspiracy, corruption, and the art of killing. His breakthrough came with his 1993 novel Point of Impact, which introduced Bob Lee Swagger, a Southern-born marksman who was credited with 87 kills in Vietnam. Twenty years later, after the CIA betrays him, he too brings the war home.

For all their innovations, few of these writers scored major commercial success. Then in 1981, the triumph of the thriller exploded into view when four crime writers gained the respectability of the bestseller list. 

Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park was in fifth place and thus became one of the first bestselling American cop stories, although the cop is a Russian and the crime is in Moscow. Farther down the list, three more first-rate crime thrillers announced a new day: The Third Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders in eighth place (his Tenth Commandment had been fifteenth the previous year); ex-LA cop Joseph Wambaugh’s The Glitter Dome at ninth; and just under the wire, at fifteenth, the veteran John D. MacDonald’s Free Fall In Crimson. 
The success of Smith, Sanders, Wambaugh, and MacDonald only the start. All over America, a new fiction was bubbling up, gaining readers and respectability. It was rooted in crime, and used suspense and ever-greater violence to grab the reader, but it increasingly offered first-rate writing. Soon it would soon carry crime fiction far beyond the boundaries that Hammett and Chandler had observed. 

In Detroit, a lawyer named Scott Turow thought he could write a better novel about lawyers than the Perry Mason potboilers, and down in Mississippi a lawyer named John Grisham had the same wild notion. In Annapolis, a myopic insurance agent named Tom Clancy wanted to proclaim his admiration for the U.S. military. In Detroit, Elmore Leonard had written successful Western novels, but that market was drying up so he decided to focus his off-beat vision on cops and robbers. In California, an unhappy screenwriter named Sue Grafton was at work on a novel about a female PI, and in Chicago Sara Paretsky, who hated her job with an insurance company, had the same plan. In Boston, a college professor named Robert B. Parker, who’d written his thesis on the novels of Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, was out to update their tradition with a private eye who was plenty tough but also a gourmet cook, respectful of women, and highly literate – Sam Spade for Yuppies. 

Soon, Clancy would write the first blockbuster military thriller, Turow would write the first great legal thriller, Grisham would begin an amazing series of bestsellers, Grafton and Paretsky would send forth female private-eyes, Parker would gain huge success with his Spenser novels, and Elmore Leonard would write some of the most original crime fiction ever. 
A new generation of spy novelists was also emerging. In 1964, an English writer who called himself John le Carre opened the door to serious Cold War fiction with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In 1973, Robert Littell, a Newsweek correspondent, published his off-beat The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, in which both American and Soviet intelligence agents are less concerned with national security than with their careers. The next year, former CIA operative Charles McCarry answered with The Tears of Autumn, his meditation on the Kennedy assassination. 

In 1975, a reporter named Thomas Harris published Black Sunday, a prophetic novel about PLO terrorists who work with an embittered Vietnam veteran to hijack a television blimp and blow up the Super Bowl, thus killing thousands, including the U.S. president. Next, Harris published Red Dragon, which introduced that most original, most widely-known villain of modern fiction, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. As he continued the Lecter saga with “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Hannibal,” Harris became the emblematic post-Vietnam thriller writer; no other American has given us bestsellers this disturbing and violent. 

All these writers were reinventing American crime fiction in the post-Vietnam era. The private-eye novel had spawned a big, dark, sometimes frightening offspring, the modern thriller. Let’s look more closely at two great originals who emerged in the 1970s, Lawrence Sanders and Elmore Leonard. Between them, these two very different writers did much to give the emerging thriller a new and unpredictable voice.

Commandments and Deadly Sins

One day in the 1980s a friend gave me a paperback copy of Lawrence Sanders’ The Seduction of Peter S and said “You have to read this!” She was right – Peter S was a wry tale about an out-of-work New York actor who starts a male brothel for rich matrons. At first he is wildly successful but there are complications, such as the mob moving in. I was soon searching the used-book stores for everything I could find by Sanders, whose first ten novels I had unaccountably missed. I read them one after another, savoring their richness and variety. Peter S had been, for Sanders, light comedy; his best novels were the Deadly Sin and Commandment series, big, dark, Gothic, and utterly unlike what anyone else was writing. 

Lawrence Sanders was the pen name of Lesley Andress (1920-98), a magazine editor who in the late 1960s he sold a dozen stories about an insurance investigator to Swank, one of the Playboy imitators that had replaced the pulps as an outlet for crime fiction. His first novel, The Anderson Tapes, was published in 1970, when he was fifty. The novel tells the story of a mob robbery through a series of tape recordings. It won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar award for best first novel of the year and became a Sean Connery film. 
Sanders’ next novel, The First Deadly Sin, appeared in 1973, and nothing in The Anderson Tapes has prepared readers for the boldness of its concept or the originality of the writing. Although it stars a cop, it was not a traditional cop novel; it was, rather, one of the first modern thrillers. It announced its originality from the outset. Traditionally, crime fiction had gotten right to it. Spade meets Brigid on the first page of The Maltese Falcon. Marlowe visits the Sternwood mansion on page one of The Big Sleep. But The First Deadly Sin is big and discursive, some 560 pages, and there is no corpse, crime, or confrontation on page one. Instead, we meet an odd duck named Daniel Blank. Daniel is 36 and divorced, works for a New York publishing house, is a physical fitness nut, wears wigs over his shaved head, and also favors women’s underwear. We may suspect that this weirdo will wind up a killer but that doesn’t happen right away. Instead, Daniel goes to a party and meets a woman even stranger than he is. 

Her name is Celia Montfort and she lives in a town house on East End Avenue with a butler who lisps and a beautiful twelve-year old boy she claims is her brother. “Her hair was so black it is almost purple, parted in the middle, and fell loosely below her shoulders without wave or curl.” Celia talks about “sex as a religious rite and a dramatic ceremony” and says that “true evil has a kind of nobility” and when they get around to sex it is unlike anything he has known before. (“’Scream if you like,’” she said, “’no one can hear.’”) Dan decides that she is his soul mate and has brought forth the real him: a killer.

We spend 53 pages getting to know this fun couple and then we meet Captain Edward X. Delaney, Commanding Officer of the 251st Precinct, NYPD. Delaney is a big, shambling man. He served five years in the army during wartime and is nearing thirty years with the NYPD. He is tough, shrewd, proud, compassionate, and when necessary ruthless. His beloved wife Barbara is dying; her pain and the frustrations of dealing with doctors are driving him half-mad. Finally, after 98 pages, Daniel Blank commits his first murder, driving his mountain climber’s ice ax into a stranger’s skull on a dark street, and Delaney must deal with a serial killer as well as with his wife’s distress. 

With the invention of Edward X. Delaney, Sanders, like Hammett and Chandler before him, had found his man and his voice, but it was a new kind of voice. The First Deadly Sin is one of the first times an American crime writer had gambled on a big, richly detailed novel as fat as anything Herman Wouk or James Michener was churning out. Most crime novels ran not much more than two hundred pages. It takes great self-confidence to write two or three times that. When you ask a reader to stay with you for five hundred pages you’d better deliver. Sanders did. He had a rare ability to create believable characters, voices we recognize, emotions we share, and thus to draw us in to his world. His books often feel less like reading than eavesdropping. Delaney is not a fantasy figure; he is, like McBain’s Frank Carella and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, a real, believable cop. Over the course of several novels, we come to know this man. With Delaney, Sanders achieved a psychological depth rarely seen in crime fiction. 

Sanders alternates between Delaney’s methodical investigation and Daniel and Celia’s growing madness – between good and evil. His portrayal of the crazed lovers is enhanced by the fact that, thanks to court decisions and a general loosening up of the culture, he can write explicitly about sex. The days are gone when Norman Mailer had to have American soldiers saying “fug” instead of “fuck.”

Sanders produced novels annually into his seventies. I remember the Deadly Sin and Commandment series with pleasure, as well as The Tomorrow File, his venture into science fiction, and The Case of Lucy Bending, the fascinating (and, to some, troubling) story of a sexually precocious eight-year-old with an all-too-suggestive name. Sanders’ novels were uneven but for two decades they were never without interest. In 1992, however, he began the Archie McNally series. I read one of them with dismay; some of his fans refused to believe he had written them. The McNally books were popular, however, and continued to appear after Sanders’ death, written by someone else, which neither Sanders nor we deserved. This great original came from nowhere, helped change popular fiction, and now is largely forgotten. In the scope and perversity of his novels he is unlike any other writer we’ve looked at. You have to go back to Wilkie Collins or forward to Thomas Harris to find anyone as sardonic, as deliciously Gothic.

Cowboys and Crooks

There is a certain irony to linking Lawrence Sanders and Elmore Leonard; aside from both being wonderful writers, they could hardly be more different. Sanders wrote big, inclusive, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink novels (in fact, he included the kitchen sink, which is where Delaney liked to stand and eat the big, wet sandwiches he loved), while Leonard is a minimalist. He once announced his ten rules of writing and they all had to do with leaving things out and keeping it simple. Never open a book with the weather, he said. Use only “said” to carry the dialogue – not “declared” or “exclaimed” or “snarled” or “hissed” or “whispered” or “intoned” or the other words favored by writers who think “said” is dull. Limit yourself to two or three exclamation points per book. Minimize descriptions of people and places. And, his golden rule: Leave out the parts that readers will skip! 

Leave out the dull parts --what a concept! Forests saved! Books enjoyed! This revolutionary fellow was born in New Orleans in 1925 and grew up in the Detroit area. As a schoolboy he was nicknamed Dutch in honor of a baseball player named Dutch Leonard. He wrote for his high school paper, served in the Navy, and in 1946 enrolled in the University of Detroit, where he began writing short stories. After graduating, he went to work for an advertising agency but he was writing in his spare time and sold his first story, a western, to Argosy in 1951. His novel The Bounty Hunter came out in 1955 and more western novels and stories followed. A couple sold to the movies. But the market was drying up – cowboys were out, private-eyes were in. So Leonard switched to crime fiction. 

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he published a series of wildly original novels. These were not traditional cops-and-robbers, good-guys-and-bad-guys stories. Leonard liked his crooks. We usually ended up rooting for them. His books were often more like comedies set among petty criminals than traditional crime novels. Books like Fifty-two Pickup, Swag, Gold Coast, City Primeval, Split Images, Cat Chaser, and Stick won him a growing audience. By the 1980s, a lot of people were waiting for Leonard’s breakthrough novel. He was waiting for it too. 
“I knew what I was doing,” he told an interviewer. “It was a matter of the reviewers catching up.” He added, “I learned by imitating Hemingway, until I realized I didn’t share his attitude about life. I didn’t take myself or anything as seriously as he did.” Far from sharing Hemingway’s considerable ego, Leonard, a recovering alcoholic, has a sweetness, a humility, that help make him both an engaging writer and an attractive human being. There is no bluster to his novels, no bigotry, no moralizing, just an amused, compassionate, unblinking eye fixed on the human comedy. 

Leonard eventually won bestseller status, but he never had the huge sales of a Grisham or Grafton. He was too off-beat – segments of the mass audience would never quite get him. He had great success, however, with movies of his novels, which have included Get Shorty with John Travolta, Out of Sight with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, and Quentin Tarantino’s near-perfect Jackie Brown, based on Rum Punch.

I recently went back and read a Leonard novel that I’d missed, 1983’s LaBrava. I picked it at random in a used-book store and I was lucky because it’s one of his best. Leonard sets the story in Miami’s funky South Beach, where an ex-Secret Service agent named Joe LaBrava, who’s in his mid-30s, falls for a fifty-something, one-time movie star named Jean Shaw. The novel is most interesting for the reflections Leonard weaves in about the creative process and for his fascination with the elusive line between illusion and reality, as embodied in a fading movie star.

Leonard is known for his off-beat, elliptic dialogue but it’s not a key element in LaBrava. About the only tricks he plays are to have people say things like “I should a let you.” Rather, the novel is memorable for the twin portraits of LaBrava and Jean Shaw, who are revealed less in their talk than in their thoughts. LaBrava left the Secret Service after he learned that he loved photography. He has become friendly with eighty-something Maurice Zola, an ex-gambler who owns a South Beach hotel. Zola is a delightful old scamp who says things like, “I spent most of my dough on booze, broads and boats and the rest I wasted.” 

LaBrava lives in Zola’s hotel and the older man has been helping him sell his photos. He also introduces his young friend to Jean Shaw who, it develops, LaBrava had fallen for upon seeing her in a movie when he was twelve. Jean has gotten mixed up with a dangerous redneck named Richard Nobles and it looks like LaBrava will have to eject this thug from her life. Eventually, there is an extortion scheme, Maurice puts up the money to save Jean, the money is stolen, and the reality of events proves not to be what it first appeared.

Leonard uses LaBrava’s love of photography to comment on the nature of art and on his own work. In the opening scene, Maurice is trying to sell a gallery owner on LaBrava’s pictures. When she says he’s not as good as some photographers she knows, the old man shoots back that he isn’t pretentious, either: “You don’t see any bullshit here. He shoots barefaced fact.” 

A little later, Leonard tells us how LaBrava feels about photography: “He felt himself attracted to street life. It was a strange feeling, he was at home, knew the people; saw more outcast faces and attitudes than he would ever be able to record, people who showed him their essence behind all kinds of poses and trapped them in his camera for all time.” 
That’s a writer talking, proud of his art, intoxicated by the variety and mystery of the world around him. Soon he focuses on Jean Shaw. First LaBrava observes her with perfect detachment: “He watched her take dainty bites of marinated conch, raising the fork in her left hand upside down, her moves unhurried. He watched her break off a piece of French bread, hold it close to her face, elbow resting on the table, wrist bent, staring out of the shade at ocean in sunlight, then slowly bring the piece of bread to her mouth, not looking at it, and he would see her lips part to receive the bread and then close.”

Writing like that looks easy until you try it. Leonard may have rejected Hemingway’s swagger but he embraces Hemingway’s goal of making every word matter. 
LaBrava and the actress talk about his photography. She asks if his style isn’t the absence of style. He’s puzzled by the question. He can only tell her “No tricky angles,” because “he didn’t know if he had a style or not.” She asks him what he sees when he looks at his own work and he tells her, “I wonder if I’ll ever have enough confidence.” And “I wonder, most of all I wonder what the people are doing now. Or if they’re still like that, the way I shot them.”

Is Leonard suggesting that one of the best writers in American might lack confidence? Yes, that’s what good writing is about, getting up every day and wondering if you can get it right just once more. And being so deep in your fantasy that you wonder sometimes if the people you’ve written about are more real in their lives or in your art. Earlier, Leonard said that he was waiting for the reviewers to catch up with what he was doing. Here he is giving them clues. 

Jean and LaBrava go to bed. For him, this is a fantasy come true. For her, it’s simply the way she controls men. His thoughts are jumbled: “He had to stop thinking if he was going to be overwhelmed. He had to let himself be overwhelmed.” And, “The idea of it, the anticipation, the realization, was more overwhelming than the doing of it.” Still, he’s troubled when she says he’s the best thing that could happen to her, because he remembers that from one of her movies, a line she’d spoken to Robert Mitchum.

Leonard widens his examination of illusion and reality when he introduces Franny, a young artist who supports herself by selling beauty potions to aging South Beach matrons. One of her most popular items is Bio-Energetic Breast Cream which will allegedly add “bounce and resiliency” to sagging breasts. In fact, as Franny confides to LaBrava, you’ve either got bounce or you don’t. But that reality doesn’t stop women from embracing the illusion that the potion will bring back the glories of their youth. In Leonard’s South Beach, everyone feeds on dreams.

Halfway through the novel, Leonard shows us what LaBrava does not yet know, that Jean Shaw, far from being helpless, is conspiring with Richard Nobles to steal $600,000 from her dear friend Maurice Zola. The scheme follows the plot of one of her movies. Near the novel’s end, Jean has stolen the money and killed Nobles. LaBrava can’t prove it and doubts that the FBI can either. Indeed, he offers to help cover up her crime if she will give Zola back his money. “She said, ‘Would you do that for me, Joe’ Got sad stars in her eyes and said, ‘What a guy.’” By then, LaBrava doesn’t know if she’s quoting from a movie or not. He has to struggle to keep hold of reality. She still has the magic that first seduced him at age twelve, even after she announces that she is going to marry poor Maurice, whom she’ll probably push off the balcony one night.

At its most interesting level, LaBrava is a meditation on art and illusion, but at a more basic level we have a woman who gets away with murder and persuades a former Secret Service agent to help her cover it up. It’s not a family-values sort of message that will make a writer as rich as Tom Clancy but, if you have a taste for the perverse, Leonard is hard to beat. In terms of originality, artistry, discipline, and sophistication, LaBrava and other of Leonard’s best novels strike me as equal to anything Hammett, Chandler, John D. MacDonald, or Ross Macdonald ever wrote, although comparisons are complicated because they were writing conventional crime novels and he is off in the clouds, cavorting with his own sweet muse, playing his own delightful games. 

In 2005, shortly before his 80th birthday, Leonard published his 40th novel, The Hot Kid, set in the Depression-era Oklahoma that Leonard could recall from his childhood. There may have been sensible, law-abiding people in Oklahoma in those days, but Leonard’s world is one of near-perfect ignorance and near-total amorality. Farm boys dream of robbing banks and farmers’ daughters suspect that being a gun moll is a grander fate than chopping cotton. 

I happened to be midway through The Hot Kid when I saw a dazzling production of The Tempest at Washington’s Shakespeare Theater, and the juxtaposition (such are the perils of art) inspired a thought or two. Leonard is our Prospero, a magician who has given us inspired fun for fifty years. He floats above the action, amused; his motto is surely “What fools these mortals be.” In The Hot Kid, Oklahoma is his version of Shakespeare’s enchanted isle, a brave new world where maidens and monsters, outlaws and oilmen, strange creatures all, act out their dubious destinies. At the time I read Leonard’s novel, much was being made of a postmodern extravaganza that featured a precocious 9-year-old, blank pages (for that which cannot be expressed) and a “little flip-flop book of video stills” of people jumping out of the burning towers on 9/11. In Leonard’s novels we are spared postmodern pretensions in favor of old-fashioned pleasure. To paraphrase one of Hemingway’s more naughty asides (about T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad, as I recall), I would gladly grind several of today’s postmodernists into a fine powder if I could sprinkle that powder on Elmore Leonard’s morning coffee and guarantee us an endless supply of his magic.

Patrick Anderson. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House