{"id":11168,"date":"2024-09-11T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-11T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11168"},"modified":"2024-09-11T07:49:45","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T11:49:45","slug":"keep-them-in-suspense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11168","title":{"rendered":"Keep Them in Suspense"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What is suspense? In the world of mystery, crime, and thriller fiction, it can seem like an all-purpose label for books that don\u2019t fit the other, increasingly blurry categories. Know who the villain is?\u2014not a mystery. Single narrator?\u2014not a typical thriller. Bad things happening but not, technically, crimes?\u2014not crime fiction. Occasionally, I\u2019ve had to justify reviewing a book for the UK website CrimeFictionLover.com<\/a> by saying something like \u201cif you think it\u2019s a crime for governments to deceive their citizens\u2026\u201d Not everything that\u2019s a crime, writ large, is illegal. Just ask the fake news purveyors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few months ago Kathryn Schulz wrote an interesting New Yorker<\/em> piece on suspense<\/a>. \u201cLike a lot of fun things,\u201d she wrote, \u201csuspense has a bad reputation,\u201d and its detractors think of it as just a cheap trick to entertain \u201cthe masses\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been rereading Sherlock Holmes (complete works, 2 volumes, I\u2019m 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\u2019t always entail turning a perpetrator over to the police, though in other situations, he does so gleefully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The critiques are also misapplied, Schulz said, because almost every form of writing\u2014excepting, she says, telephone directories and instruction manuals\u2014makes use of suspense to captivate its readers. (I might disagree with her here, given some of the highly mysterious instruction manuals I\u2019ve 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\u2019s ghost? The late thriller writer Henning Mankell once said, \u201cEvery good story has a mystery in it.\u201d I use that truism as the epigram for my own website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s descendants of the critics whose noses turned up at suspense 150 years ago today cluck over \u201cgenre fiction\u201d\u2014you know what that is. Mystery, romance, science fiction\u2014in 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 \u201cwhat happens next.\u201d That is, suspense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While it might seem that withholding information is the key to creating suspense, Schulz points out that suspense also requires sharing<\/em> information. A reader may not know what\u2019s behind that door, but the writer has implied there are dark doings somewhere in the house; has shown the little boy\u2019s fear; has made the rusty door handle hard to turn, but turn it he does \u2026 ever \u2026 so \u2026 slowly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She cites Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An excellent example of this is the new novel by Robert Harris, Precipice,<\/a><\/em> 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\u2019t 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\u2019ve ever read (my review coming soon). I hope you wait for it with suspense\u2014of the anticipation variety, not the dread kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What is suspense? In the world of mystery, crime, and thriller fiction, it can seem like an all-purpose label for books that don\u2019t fit the other, increasingly blurry categories. Know who the villain is?\u2014not a mystery. Single narrator?\u2014not a typical … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Suspense in story builds on readers' overwhelming desire to know \"what happens next.\" Even if they know.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[174,66,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-suspense","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2U8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11168"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11174,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11168\/revisions\/11174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}