Pradeep Sebastian on why the literary thriller is a double treat for book lovers
When I pick a thriller to read, my choice is made very simple: it is always, always a literary thriller. These rather bookish thrillers capture the drama of bookishness better than anything else in genre fiction. The literary thriller is a double treat for book lovers: you get to curl up with a sophisticated thriller and a book about other books. It began, of course, with Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), the first contemporary literary mystery that kicked off a trend. Eco’s marvellously inventive and erudite novel lead to the historical mystery, the academic mystery, and the literary mystery ? three sub-genres of the literary thriller.
We are all familiar with its plot, of course: several monks in a medieval monastery are murdered because of a forbidden book stashed away in a secret hiding place in the library. Only Brother William of Baskerville, a Benedictine Monk with experience in such matters, can solve the case and find the diabolical killer who poisons the pages of books.
While no literary thriller to date has equalled Eco’s masterpiece, (the first still remains the classic) there have been a few contemporary novels that have at least tried to explore the genre. Four of my recent favourites are:
In Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2008), an antiquarian bookseller uncovers (in Daphne De Maurier’s Rebecca-style) secrets buried in a private library in this Bronte-ish tale of literary family secrets. To me The Thirteenth Tale feels (or reads) like those books we curled up with in school and college — gothic mysteries such as Jane Eyre and Rebecca that gripped our imagination; tales of romance, fantasy, suspense and forbidden secrets. Except here the author, Diane Setterfield, an English academic, updates the fantasy for a 21st century reader by combing these classic elements with contemporary characters and preoccupations.
The Book of Air and Shadows (2007) by Michael Gruber is superior literary entertainment. To say it concerns the hunt for a lost manuscript is to say almost nothing about this erudite, witty book about secret codes, femme fatales, car chases and movie references — and all of it narrated in a stylish, nimble prose. The plot is a quest to find the hiding place of a previously undiscovered Shakespeare manuscript — in the Bard’s own handwriting. There are currently only six samples of Shakespeare’s handwriting — and only on legal documents. Naturally there are many — scholars, collectors and criminals — willing to kill for it.
Four renowned American poets track down a serial killer in Boston in Mathew Pearl’s The Dante Club (2003). The killer models the deaths of his victims after Dante’s Inferno. A killer with intimate knowledge of The Divine Comedy appears to be staging murders that mirror the punishments of Dante's ‘Inferno’. Working on a vast canvas, Pearl keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition. The tension is more cerebral than visceral but this is still a most inventive page-turner. Eco confirmed the enduring fascination that the gothic frisson of the Middle Ages still holds for modern readers.
Literary thrillers have always been around, but their sudden bestselling prominence is due really to a runaway bestselling European novel that galvanised and expanded the boundaries of the genre: Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow Of The Wind. What Zafon’s book did for the genre was to offer a learned, challenging thriller that did not condescend to the reader. (His prequel to Shadow, titled The Angel’s Game, is to be published in the summer of 2009).
The young bibliophile hero of The Shadow Of The Wind tells us that he ‘was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day’. He is referring, of course, to the centrepiece of the story: a gigantic, hidden labyrinthine library called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books that he is privileged to enter and explore.
It will be obvious by now what all these books have in common: books. Or the world of books – libraries, universities, antiquarian bookshops, book collectors, scholars, librarians, bibliomanes. These bookish thrillers capture the drama of bookish obsession with close attention to the atmospherics of books: their physical presence, the craft of making them, and the art of collecting them. Books, not people, are the actual protagonists in these thrillers.
Personalities 
When I pick a thriller to read, my choice is made very simple: it is always, always a literary thriller. These rather bookish thrillers capture the drama of bookishness better than anything else in genre fiction. The literary thriller is a double treat for book lovers: you get to curl up with a sophisticated thriller and a book about other books. It began, of course, with Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), the first contemporary literary mystery that kicked off a trend. Eco’s marvellously inventive and erudite novel lead to the historical mystery, the academic mystery, and the literary mystery ? three sub-genres of the literary thriller. 
The Book of Air and Shadows (2007) by Michael Gruber is superior literary entertainment. To say it concerns the hunt for a lost manuscript is to say almost nothing about this erudite, witty book about secret codes, femme fatales, car chases and movie references — and all of it narrated in a stylish, nimble prose. The plot is a quest to find the hiding place of a previously undiscovered Shakespeare manuscript — in the Bard’s own handwriting. There are currently only six samples of Shakespeare’s handwriting — and only on legal documents. Naturally there are many — scholars, collectors and criminals — willing to kill for it. 
Literary thrillers have always been around, but their sudden bestselling prominence is due really to a runaway bestselling European novel that galvanised and expanded the boundaries of the genre: Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow Of The Wind. What Zafon’s book did for the genre was to offer a learned, challenging thriller that did not condescend to the reader. (His prequel to Shadow, titled The Angel’s Game, is to be published in the summer of 2009). 
