Thrillers that sit with discomfort leave us with unresolved moral and ethical questions. They make us think about what we might do if we were in similar situations, or about how a societal standard does not provide one size fits all solutions.
Reading a thriller that has a neatly tied up ending certainly has its place. We get our suspense fix, it is clear what the hero has to do, and after finishing the book, we move on to the ambiguities in our lives without the book muddying any waters. That thriller made us feel good. It reinforced our foundations. It didn’t stress us.
When writing my novel John B. Peoples, I was confronted with the question of how far my protagonist would go to right a wrong. I found it challenging to look at my character’s dilemmas from the moral, ethical and practical perspectives. That challenge pushed me beyond easy answers and changed how I thought about justice. I hope that tension comes through on the page.
The six novels below left me with that same productive discomfort.
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Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire Of The Vanities
Tom Wolfe has set up so many unsettling situations in his brilliant bestseller that it is hard to pick just a few. For example, picture yourself driving in the middle of the night through a semi-deserted dangerous neighborhood and you hit someone by accident. Would you stop or would you run? Would you call 911 to report the accident?
In Bonfire of the Vanities, the questions are complicated by the fact that Sherman McCoy, the owner of the car, was not driving. Sherman’s lover Maria was driving and he does not want his wife to know about her.
Then there is the judge who does not allow into evidence a recording in which Maria admits she was the driver. Tom Wolfe in effect asks us to think about the appropriateness of the societal ethic of “tainted evidence” not being admissible even though it proves someone’s innocence. Is there a better alternative to the ethic or rule of law of excluding improperly obtained evidence?
In the end, Sherman McCoy is a broken man, as much for his own errors as for the realities of the law and the machinations of others. We might even feel sorry for him. And what does Tom Wolfe do? He ends the book with Sherman waiting to go on trial for vehicular manslaughter. We don’t get to see whether Sherman is found guilty or not and whether the legal system will give forth the right decision or not. Tom Wolfe leaves us sitting with our discomfort.
Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent
Talk about corruption in the legal system! This blockbuster is replete with conflicts of interest and outright corruption. A prosecutor, Rusty Sabich, despite a clear conflict of interest, takes charge of the investigation into the murder of Carolyn Polhemus, someone he had an affair with. Eventually, Rusty is charged with the murder, and it turns out just about everyone has had an affair with Carolyn, including the judge who is also involved in a bribery scheme for letting defendants off.
When we are finished with Scott Turow’s book, our confidence in the legal system is shaken. We question whether anyone in that system—any prosecutor, attorney judge—is not corrupt. What is their background, what are their prejudices, how could that affect me the reader some day?
Turow also leaves us with the moral ambiguity of Rusty not turning in his wife after he finds out she was the one who had killed Carolyn. His reason was that he did not want to deprive his son of a mother. Really? A killer as a good mother? That certainly sits with some discomfort for me.
Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
There is a lot to devour in this book. (Sorry, but I couldn’t help myself.)
As in the movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1992, Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic serial killer, escapes and remains at large at the end of the book. That’s enough discomfort for me in and of itself.
The fact that someone as depraved as the forensic psychiatrist Lecter could also be highly educated and refined adds to the discomfort. Whom can we trust?
Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder
So many of these books that evoke discomfort focus on the legal system. Anatomy of a Murder is a classic, well known for its faithful portrayal of legal rules and procedures.
The defendant is accused of murdering a man who allegedly raped the defendant’s wife. A main focus of the novel, which is based on a real case where the author represented the defendant, is on the defense of temporary insanity. When the defendant is found not guilty by reason of insanity, we ask how it is possible to prove insanity beyond a reasonable doubt.
Did the defendant fake it? Can others fake it? And even if the defendant did not have an “irresistible impulse” that qualified him for the temporary insanity defense, was it justifiable for a man to kill someone who had raped the man’s wife?
Our belief that guilt is always clear, morally and legally, is shaken.
John Grisham, A Time To Kill
This novel is next on my list because, as in Anatomy Of A Murder, it includes a temporary insanity defense. To be clear, I am not saying that John Grisham was thinking about or even borrowing from Anatomy of a Murder when he wrote A Time To Kill. Even if he was, there is no copyright on a novel including a temporary insanity defense. A Time To Kill might even be in part an homage to the earlier novel. After all, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
A Time To Kill has a “happy ending” in the sense that the black man who killed the two white men who had raped his ten-year-old daughter is eventually exonerated by the white jury. However, after reading the book, one is left horrified by the level of racial hate and violence that is portrayed in the book and that persists to this day.
Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men
“No attempted good deed is successful or goes unpunished” would describe this novel. Llewelyn Moss stumbles on a drug deal that has gone bad, with a number of dead and a sole survivor who begs for water. Moss departs with a satchel containing over two million dollars in it, but he tries to return with water to help the injured man. When Moes does return, he is spotted and becomes the subject of a hunt by a killer named Chigurh and a bounty hunter named Wells.
Wells tries to make a deal with Moss, but Chigurh kills Wells. Moss is then killed by Mexican gangsters before Chigurh arrives to do the job. Chigurh retrieves the money but kills Wells’ wife after she loses a coin flip. All of that happens despite a sheriff’s attempt to protect Wells and his wife.
There is a whole lot of discomfort engendered by the unpredictable violence and “evil wins” world constructed in this book.
What would you have done? It’s the question each of these novels leaves hanging in the air. No clean answers here, only the uneasy recognition that moral certainty is rarer than we’d like to believe.
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