What is suspense? In the world of mystery, crime, and thriller fiction, it can seem like an all-purpose label for books that don’t fit the other, increasingly blurry categories. Know who the villain is?—not a mystery. Single narrator?—not a typical thriller. Bad things happening but not, technically, crimes?—not crime fiction. Occasionally, I’ve had to justify reviewing a book for the UK website CrimeFictionLover.com by saying something like “if you think it’s a crime for governments to deceive their citizens…” Not everything that’s a crime, writ large, is illegal. Just ask the fake news purveyors.
A few months ago Kathryn Schulz wrote an interesting New Yorker piece on suspense. “Like a lot of fun things,” she wrote, “suspense has a bad reputation,” and its detractors think of it as just a cheap trick to entertain “the masses” (like me!). A hundred-fifty years ago, when detective novels and mystery stories began to appear, they were criticized for merely appealing to curiosity, rather than offering nobler forms of fulfillment or ethical example.
I’ve been rereading Sherlock Holmes (complete works, 2 volumes, I’m on page 1052). It turns out The Great Detective provides not only suspense, but many ethical examples. Working outside the law enforcement apparatus, he relies on his personal sense of justice. And it doesn’t always entail turning a perpetrator over to the police, though in other situations, he does so gleefully.
The critiques are also misapplied, Schulz said, because almost every form of writing—excepting, she says, telephone directories and instruction manuals—makes use of suspense to captivate its readers. (I might disagree with her here, given some of the highly mysterious instruction manuals I’ve encountered for electronics manufactured abroad.) Shakespeare certainly deployed suspense to great effect. Will Othello kill Desdemona? Will Macbeth evade justice for slaying Duncan? Will Hamlet follow the order given by his father’s ghost? The late thriller writer Henning Mankell once said, “Every good story has a mystery in it.” I use that truism as the epigram for my own website.
Today’s descendants of the critics whose noses turned up at suspense 150 years ago today cluck over “genre fiction”—you know what that is. Mystery, romance, science fiction—in other words, the kinds of books people like to read. E.M. Forster, in noting that every fictional work must be built around a story, said that for a story to be effective, it must make readers want to know “what happens next.” That is, suspense.
While it might seem that withholding information is the key to creating suspense, Schulz points out that suspense also requires sharing information. A reader may not know what’s behind that door, but the writer has implied there are dark doings somewhere in the house; has shown the little boy’s fear; has made the rusty door handle hard to turn, but turn it he does … ever … so … slowly.
She cites Alfred Hitchcock’s example of a bomb going off in a crowded theater. The reader (or filmgoer) can know the bomb is there in advance, or not. How much more scary is it to know that the bomb is ticking away, while people blithely munch popcorn than it is to have a sudden loud Boom! and a lot of flying body parts and settling dust? Even knowing what will happen, we can feel excruciating suspense.
An excellent example of this is the new novel by Robert Harris, Precipice, set in 1914 on the very eve of World War I. He presents, verbatim, some of the hundreds [!] of love-letters UK Prime Minister H.H. Asquith wrote to young Venetia Stanley. Asquith hears the saber-rattling on the Continent, reads the desperate telegrams from diplomats in Russia and France, but can’t be distracted from his obsessive correspondence. Meanwhile, I was tearing my hair out! Because of the extreme suspense, waiting for the worst to happen, this book was one of the most gripping I’ve ever read (my review coming soon). I hope you wait for it with suspense—of the anticipation variety, not the dread kind.
