John Burdett

Many trace the modern crime thriller back to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A still more venerable ancestor would be Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In both cases literary giants used acts of aggravated homicide to illustrate the most agonising dilemmas of their day. In both cases the moral crises were the product of profound revolutions of thought, which would soon lead to revolutions of blood. Less than thirty years after Crime and Punishment the Bolsheviks were slaughtering the Russian royal family and any aristocrat they could lay their hands on. Forty years after Macbeth Cromwell beheaded Charles I and Britain became a republic.

Looked at in this way, the modern thriller, whether in novel or movie form, looks like a trivialisation of the archetype, with its monotonous orgy of blood, rage and gore underpinned by nothing beyond the commercial need to extract one more cheap thrill from a tired genre. But need it be so? After all, has there ever been a more fragmented age than ours, or one where conventional morality has so broken down that no one is quite sure of what it consists, or if it exists at all outside of family entertainment? Raskolnikov would have understood perfectly the psychology of a suicide bomber. Macbeth’s ambition hardly differs in quality or type from that of Sadam Hussein or Pol Pot.

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