I’ve just written my first novel, Dying Days, and friends who have seen early copies keep telling me it’s a thriller. It’s about love, hate, and sacrifice. It’s set in the world of newspapers and politics. There are bombs, bullets, and poison, and a lot of very nice characters suffer agonizing deaths.
But Dying Days, at its heart, is a story about the power of love — the madness it can provoke and the sacrifice people will make in its name.
It’s also a story about the dying days of newspapers, and the changing world of information — the mindless lies and nutty conspiracies pumped out on social media and the unrelenting attacks on traditional news media that is destroying trust to the point millions have trouble knowing what they can believe. I wanted in this story to imagine the catastrophic consequences of what is happening.
I agree there’s a great deal of bloodshed and treachery; but didn’t think about it as a thriller. I just attempted to write an exciting story that employs fiction to throw light on our real and terrifying world.
But I can see now my friends are right; I’ve gone and written an accidental thriller and I’m delighted to accept that designation.
It set me thinking about how difficult it can be to categorise books. I’ve never been sure when to use the term thriller in describing one.
My reading tastes developed at an early age. My first recollection of turning pages that were more filled with words than pictures happened when I was going on seven years old. It was one Sunday in my grandmother’s two up two down in the docklands of Bootle, Merseyside.
Gran loved The News of the World and I had been sitting the previous Sunday reading it by the big fire in her back room. I was a decent reader for my age, but didn’t understand all the words this newspaper used. So I asked my grandmother.
‘Gran,’ I said. ‘What does indecent assault mean?’
That newspaper, as you can imagine, was snatched straight away from my six-year-old fingers.
“Don’t be reading things like that,” she said.
The following Sunday, when we next visited grandma, she had a gift for me. It was a book titled Five on a Treasure Island by Enid Blyton. This book was full of danger, with a shipwreck, a treasure map, gold hidden in a dungeon, and terrifying bad guys.
It was scarier than anything I ever read in The News of the World . . . well, at least scarier than any story in which I could understand all the words.
The battered Oxford Concise dictionary I’ve had since I was fifteen describes the word ‘thrill’ as an experience that ‘penetrates with a wave of emotion or sensation.’
By that measure, Five on a Treasure Island was without doubt my first thriller.
Looking back over the books I’ve enjoyed reading and re-reading all my life, they were all thrilling, or else I stopped reading them. I confess, though, that I was about thirty before I stopped feeling guilty for giving up on a book I wasn’t enjoying. It was the author’s fault, not mine.
Starting in my teens, I discovered Hemingway, Greene, Waugh, Fleming, Fitzgerald, Christie, Melville. And Shakespeare, of course; he wrote some top thrillers.
Some of them were dazzling writers, others were brilliant at thinking up damn good stories. Take Lee Child, with his unadorned ratatat prose and the simplicity of his mysterious, lonesome hero Jack Reacher, every male reader’s invincible alter ego, wandering from one adventure to another in the way gunslingers did in the Zane Grey books my dad loved.
Did Cormac McCarthy ever write a thriller? The Road might be the most terrifying book I ever read — that scene when they find a basement stored with human parts being kept for food. Maybe that would be classified as horror.
And Amor Towles; such an elegant writer. His A Gentleman in Moscow is so convincing I felt trapped in that hotel with his hero. Jeffrey Archer never seems to run out of great plot ideas. His books are probably a mixture of thriller and saga and have made him one of the world’s best sellers. And Michael Dobbs: his House of Cards books gave birth to one of fiction’s great antiheroes – Francis Urquhart in the books and Francis Underwood the smash hit Netflix series. Both names with the initials FU, which I don’t need to spell out.
Every one of these authors wrote books that thrilled me. Their work has been stewing in my mind for years. I’m sure they in some way they helped me write Dying Days, though when I’m trying to write I avoid reading any of their books.
Towering genius can be intimidating.
Dying Days, by Les Hinton, Whitefox Publishing, to be released 6th November
