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.
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