The joy of crime fiction: thriller writers on their favourite crime fiction
Paula Hawkins
Author of The Girl on the Train
What makes a great thriller/crime novel?
Memorable and compelling characters. Plot twists and cliffhangers can feel manufactured, but a great character never does.
What’s your favourite thriller of all time?
Barbara Vine’s A Dark-Adapted Eye, in which the mystery is not a murder but the puzzle presented by the fraught relationships, secrets and lies of a dysfunctional family. Vine’s shrewd psychological insights are applied not to serial killers or criminal masterminds but to us – ordinary people.
What’s the best one you’ve read recently?
Danya Kukafka’s Notes on an Execution, which subverts traditional serial killer narratives in a taut and compelling thriller and asks searching questions about the way we talk about (and write about) crime.
Richard Osman
Author of The Thursday Murder Club
What makes a great thriller/crime novel?
Characters we care about, set an impossible problem, or facing impossible obstacles. We live in a world where, increasingly, our problems seem to have no clear solutions. But in crime novels, however impossible the initial problem, the author promises you there will be a solution. That’s the contract that makes crime fiction so addictive and so enduring.
Favourite thriller of all time?
Such an awful question, I love it. I think I would have to go for Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley.
Best recent read?
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better by Benjamin Wood. Is it a thriller? I really couldn’t say. That’s the joy of beautifully written crime fiction.
