Why Aren't There More Sports Thrillers?

by Matt Lynn

Emlyn's post about his plans for a Wimbledon thriller has prompted me to think about an interesting question. Why aren't there more sports thrillers?

Dick Francis, of course, made a great career of writing about horse racing. But there are very few thrillers about football, tennis, boxing, formula one, and so on. It is odd. Sport is full of drama and conflict and double-dealing, all the stuff of stories, and has a huge following.

Maybe no one has really tried. One of the projects in my drawer is a football thriller that Random House made a very low offer on at the same time as I started the Death Force series for Headline. So maybe it is just a matter of waiting for the right author to come along. But maybe its because it is impossible to write about sport in a way that doesn't seem flat compared to the real thing? The spectacle itself is so dramatic, it is hard for a writer to match the intensity of the contest.  If so, there never will be a really great sports thriller.

KEEPING UP WITH THE TIMES

by Matt Lynn

One of my favourite themes is how thriller writers aren’t keeping up with the times. Britain and the US have been involved in two major and very nasty wars in the last decade, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. But you wouldn’t guess it from reading the thrillers on the shelves at your local WH Smith. The y are all old-style Cold War spy thrillers, stuff about hidden scrolls, serial killers, or lawyers. There is almost nothing about the wars we are fighting now.

There is a fascinating piece related to that in the New York Times. It points out that the most vibrant story-telling about contemporary warfare is in the video game industry, not in the thriller industry. Games like Medal of Honour and Call of Duty are far more relevant to what is happening in the world today than just about any book.

I’m trying to address that with my ‘Death Force’ series, which are bang up to date. But not enough writers are taking up that challenge. I suspect that is partly the fault of the publishers, who should be looking for more contemporary material. But it also because writers have lost the desire to be relevant. The video game already poses a big challenge for writers. In many ways it is a more interesting narrative form. But surely it is silly to leave the field completely top gaming, rather than the novel

How to distinguish characters....

by Matt Lynn

I did an event up in Essex last night with two of my fellow Headline authors, Barbara Nadel and Michael Stanley. As is so often the case, I was really impressed by the quality of the questions people asked.

There was one that set me thinking a fair bit: How do you distinguish characters from one another.

I waffled away for a fair bit, but it was a good question, and one I probably haven’t thought about enough. I quite often read a book and find I get lost because the characters all blur into one. It’s particularly pressing in my case, because the ‘Death Force’ series features eight or nine main characters. And superficially at least they are quite similar: soldiers, blokes, etc.

It struck me later that in opera, each character has a theme, or maybe just a key, and that helps the listener tell them apart. And there is a clue in that for construction a novel. What I try and do is give each character a theme, or key: some fairly simple, but compelling, place they are trying to get to, or a demon they are trying to kill, or a journey they are trying to complete.

On top of that, you need to give them a voice. A way of speaking, and a way of fitting into the group. And you need to give them some really deep back story, so you know precisely where they are coming from.

But there is no doubt it is one of the hardest things a writer has to do.