Thrillers

1.   The first convention of a thriller is that there must be a crime. And with a crime, you must have perpetrator/s and victim/s, either corpse/s, the assaulted or hostage/s.

2.   The crime must occur early on in the telling.

3.   The crime must reveal a clue about the villain’s Macguffin.

A Macguffin is the object of desire for the villain. If the villain gets the Macguffin, he will “win.” Some familiar Macguffins are a) the codes to the nuclear warhead, b) 1,000 kilos of heroin, c) microfilm, d) and in the case of The Silence of the Lambs, the final pieces of skin to make a woman-suit. The Macguffin must make sense to the reader. It doesn’t necessarily have to be realistic, just believable. I think Alfred Hitchcock coined the term when asked about the device in “North by Northwest.” Macguffins are essentially the antagonist/s literal objects of desire.

1.   There must be a brilliant and/or incredibly powerful master criminal, and an equally brilliant and/or powerful investigator/detective/sleuth. But the balance of power between the two is heavily in favor of the villain.

2.   The villain must “make it personal” with regard to the protagonist. The criminal may from the very beginning want to kill/humiliate/destroy/damn the investigator; or he may come to this attitude during the telling. But the crime must escalate and become personal. The protagonist must become a victim.

3.   There must be clues and red herrings in the storytelling. The protagonist investigates and follows leads in order to find and/or trap the criminal. Some of these leads are dead ends, and misdirect the protagonist and the reader.

4.   The value at stake in a crime story can progress from justice to unfairness to injustice to tyranny. Most crime stories end at Injustice…will the detective get his man? He usually does. But in a thriller, the value is often driven to the limit. If the detective/investigator/protagonist does not bring the villain to justice, tyranny will be the result. The protagonist’s failure to get the criminal takes on a universal quality. If our best investigators can’t stop the worst villains, the villains have won. There is no justice. We live in tyranny.

Lastly, many thrillers also have an additional convention that derives from the Action genre, a clock. At a critical point in the story, a time limit is placed on the protagonist to get the villain. If the protagonist does not do so, the villain will get what he wants by default.