When the thriller writer Robert Ludlum died in March 2001, several of his obituarists tellingly recalled the reaction of a Washington Post reviewer to one of the author's many, phenomenally popular novels: `It's a lousy book. So I stayed up until 3am to finish it.' This anecdotal, tongue-in-cheek confession neatly captures the ambivalence associated with a hugely successful mode of crime writing, a guilty sense that its lack of literary merit has always somehow been inseparable from the compulsiveness with which its narrative pleasures are greedily gobbled up, relegating the thriller to the most undeserving of genres. To describe a thriller as `deeply satisfying and sophisticated' (to pluck a blurb at random from the bookshelves) is already to beg the insidious question: how satisfying and sophisticated can it be?

It might be thought that this kind of skeptical response is likely to be encouraged by any type of popular literature that could be considered formulaic, or that relies upon stock characters or highly conventionalised narrative structures, or whose enjoyment comes from the repetition of certain well-worn themes or devices. But the thriller is unusual in its reliance upon, or subordination to, the single- minded drive to deliver a starkly intense literary effect. Thus, in the words of The New York Times Book Review's suitably lurid verdict on the novel that famously first unleashed Dr Hannibal Lecter upon an unsuspecting public, Thomas Hanis’s Red Dragon (1981) 'is an engine designed for one purpose – to make the pulse pound, the heart palpitate, the fear glands secrete'. Judgements like these, carefully filleted and recycled as paperback blurbs, make a virtual contract with potential purchasers, offering an irresistible reading experience that will stretch them to the limit. To be reckoned 'as good as the crime thriller gets', to quote from the cover of Lawrence Block's A Walk Among The Tombstones (1992), `the suspense' will be `relentless'; indeed it `will hold readers gaga with suspense'.

Of course, such overblown appeals to a hyperventilated state of pleasurably anxious unknowing can easily be dismissed as little more than a sign of the extent to which popular criticism has been debased by the inflated currency of contemporary marketing. But they do offer some important clues to the thriller's provenance and distinctiveness.