Donald Hamilton, Death of a Citizen (London: Titan Books, 2013). 227 pages.Charles McCarry, The Shanghai Factor (New York: Mysterious Press, 2013). 292 pages.The thriller may be the only literary genre with its emotional effect in its na...
Donald Hamilton, Death of a Citizen (London: Titan Books, 2013). 227 pages.Charles McCarry, The Shanghai Factor (New York: Mysterious Press, 2013). 292 pages.The thriller may be the only literary genre with its emotional effect in its name. The pastoral, the satire, the epithalamion—they point to the contents. The big ones (comedy, tragedy) refer to their origins. Sonnets, elegies, epistolary novels testify to how they are to be written. The thriller alone makes no secret of its aim—“to thrill and shake,” as the Bastard says in King John, “Even at the crying of your nation’s crow.”Donald HamiltonThe name is relatively new, at least historiographically, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. In American criticism, it first began to show up in articles lamenting children’s (especially boys’) bad reading habits. The thriller’s climb to respectability began with progressive educators, the first shakers of the canon, who urged teachers to stop worrying, to lay off the moralistic preening over the classics, and to let schoolchildren follow their inclinations, no matter how disreputable: “For only books with ‘thrill’ are potent enough to develop the reading habit, to make pupils love books.”[1]By now, primarily through the efforts of Kingsley Amis, whose criticism was animated by the same spirit as Jim Dixon (viz.: to razz the donnish establishment, in this case out of its disdain for popular books and common readers), the thriller is taken wholly seriously by professional literary critics. John Fraser, a damn good one, has an entire section of his website devoted to thrillers. “What counts,” he says,is what happens next—and next—and next, and having numerous suspense points, large or small, at which one’s anxiety increases. Being able to step through a door into that kind of experience and lose yourself there for an hour or two can be a blessing.I don’t entirely believe him, and not only because I have argued that the relief of suspense-aroused anxiety is not a literary experience. A book’s capacity to make you “lose yourself . . . for an hour or two” sounds very much like what Longinus (or Pseudo-Longinus) called sublimis (when he was translated into Latin) or (misleadingly) “sublime” in English. I’ve always thought a better translation would be “transports.” A powerful work of fiction transports you into a different life, a different place and time, instilling in you the absolute conviction that what you are reading about, what you feel in the hairs on your skin, is real and is happening to real people.Why some transportation vehicles accept every passenger who boards, while others routinely break down or expel passengers in the middle of the journey, is a literary question that may never be solved. What is clear is that some must be learned to be ridden, like a horse; and that a one-for-all name for the riding experience (“escape”) is nowhere near adequate.Donald Hamilton was the creator of the American-born rival to James Bond, although he himself was Swedish-born. His series of Matt Helm novels reached a total of twenty-seven in all. They are not as well known as Ian Fleming’s novels, in part because the cinematic versions, with Dean Martin in the starring role in four movies from the ’sixties, were laughable self-parodies. Since Hamilton’s first Matt Helm title was published in 1960, though, the books have remained great favorites with an underground readership, and now Titan Books has begun reprinting them every other month or so, in order of publication.Death of a Citizen was the first, and it has all the nicks and scratches of having been written for a series—the background that must be pieced together, the loose ends to be tied up in a later book. Hamilton denied that he had conceived the book as the first of a series, but Gold Medal pitched the original 25-cent paperback as featuring “a new series character.” Matt Helm was an agent for a U.S. spy agency during the Second World War. He has retired to Santa Fe, New