Crime thrillers are like striptease acts. The subject in question begins fully clothed in largely irrelevant trappings, and then these are discarded one by one until the naked truth is finally revealed.
You could even make a direct comparison with pornography, a form whose primary aim is sexual arousal. Critics, and many writers too, have condemned pornography because its intention to arouse sexually is so different from, and often antithetical to, the usual aims of literature — to fascinate, inform, console, give a sense of the marvelous, and so on. It could therefore be argued that the crime thriller’s aim of exciting and maybe frightening us is also surplus to what we expect from the best kind of books.
But this would be to ignore what you could call the thriller-element in numerous literary masterpieces. Aristotle even claimed that the essential aim of tragedy was to purge the spectator’s emotions through pity and terror.
It’s a literary genre, then, with a long history, yet it persists in feeling distinctly contemporary. Still, the modern thriller also has its conventions and traditions. The detective who has his own demons, that nevertheless don’t get in the way of those presented by the case he’s investigating, is one of them. Another is the detective who, though formally retired, returns to work to solve one last murder mystery. Both these elements are prominent in Think of a Number, the first novel by John Verdon, a former US advertising executive.
The book’s action takes place in the Caskills region of upper New York State, an idyllic bolt-hole where the super-detective has purportedly retired to with his long-suffering wife. Autumn and the onset of a New England winter form the scenic backdrop to the story, with excursions into the far less charming Bronx area of New York, and to Connecticut.
The story opens with an apparently impossible conundrum. The director of an upmarket New Age therapy center receives two death threats, each of which contains the instruction to think of a number between one and 1,000, and then open an envelope (in the first case contained with the original letter, in the second in his mailbox) and find there, seemingly incredibly, the number he’s just thought of.
One of the characteristics of crime fiction generally is that it’s ruthlessly materialistic and has no truck with easy solutions such as extra-sensory perception. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was distinguished by this kind of logical, scientific calculation, as if he was representing the first, wholly materialist, generation after the presumed “death of God.” This makes it even more extraordinary that Conan Doyle himself went on to become a full-time advocate of spiritualism, as if he’d explored materialism to its outer limits and become dissatisfied with it. Holmes is even quoted in this new thriller to the effect that when you’ve eliminated the impossible you should start to investigate the improbable, however unlikely it appears.
And so it is that the “think of a number” game does eventually get a pair of rational explanations, and just about the only ones imaginable. But a great deal of water passes under Verdon’s bridge before that becomes evident.
A sequence of murders soon makes it clear that a serial killer is at work, with motives that initially can only be guessed at. Alcoholism, spooky poems written in red ink, taunting “evidence” left at the scene of the crime to baffle and mock the police, a phone message from the killer that’s successfully recorded but leaves the cops none the wiser — all these contribute to a tale that’s familiar in its trademark incongruity, but isn’t the less gripping for that.
Meanwhile, at home on his gentrified Catskill farmhouse, the half-retired super-sleuth is plagued by memories of the death of his son, killed in a road accident by a hit-and-run drunk driver when out on a walk with his father. Relations with his taciturn but astute wife are frosty at best, a situation that’s not improved by a return to work to confront the unexpected local murder.
Reading this undoubted page-turner makes you think that thrillers must be plotted backwards. The author constructs the crime or crimes, then thinks forward to the disconnections and inexplicable features that will be presented to his sleuth when he first arrives on the scene, backed, needless to say, by a posse of unimaginative, and even caricatured, police officers.
Given this scenario, you come to expect the culprit to be the least likely member of the author’s assembled cast. This was certainly the way Agatha Christie worked, for example. But these days that, too, has become too predictable — yet I nonetheless fell into the trap by imagining that perhaps the detective’s wife was the guilty party. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything if I say that I was quickly wrong-footed in this naive solution.
The fundamental reason thrillers of this kind can be so unnerving is that the reader is led to think that perhaps there’s a potential serial killer hidden somewhere inside him as well. This is because all manic crime of this sort is perceived as having its roots in some childhood trauma in the killer, and we all have those. So in a strange way you, the reader, are the one being pursued. You become scared as the detective gets closer and closer to solving the mystery because it’s maybe you, and not the fictional killer, who he’s really after.
Think of a Number is being offered by publisher Michael Joseph as its lead thriller of the year, and its novice author as a major discovery. All I can say about these claims is that this book certainly made sure I had time for thinking about little else while I was reading it. That it will one day be filmed seems a foregone conclusion.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
A sultry sea mist blankets New Taipei City as I pedal from Tamsui District (淡水) up the coast. This might not be ideal beach weather but it’s fine weather for riding –– the cloud cover sheltering arms and legs from the scourge of the subtropical sun. The dedicated bikeway that connects downtown Taipei with the west coast of New Taipei City ends just past Fisherman’s Wharf (漁人碼頭) so I’m not the only cyclist jostling for space among the SUVs and scooters on National Highway No. 2. Many Lycra-clad enthusiasts are racing north on stealthy Giants and Meridas, rounding “the crown coast”
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and