James Twining on Writing a Great Thriller

What have your book choices got in common?

These are all thrillers I wish I’d written and they’ve all had good film adaptations made. In these cases the book and the movie enhance each other. I think when you write thrillers you always think how good it would be to have the book made into a film.

So, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

You can’t think of Sam Spade without thinking of Humphrey Bogart. In this one you’ve got an interesting central character, Sam Spade, who’s bitter and sardonic and plays each side off against the other. In some ways he’s the archetypal flawed detective, later popularized by Raymond Chandler. I don’t know if Hammett did it first, but he did redefine a lot of the conventions of the hard-boiled genre. There is never a clear statement, for example, on Spade’s morality, on whether he’s good or bad. His partner dies and it turns out he’s having an affair with his wife. He sends a woman to jail when he could have saved her. The Maltese falcon itself is this artefact covered in jewels that has been painted black to disguise it, but it’s a complete McGuffin! It doesn’t actually matter at all, except to provide motivation for the characters. I’ve used this device in my new book about the illicit trade in antiquities – I’ve used an ivory mask that really was found in London and had been dug up in Italy.

So an inanimate object providing motivation for the human drama is handy in thriller writing?

Yes. I mean, think of Pulp Fiction. We never do find out what’s in the bloody briefcase. You could say it’s a cop-out, but it’s no more of a cop-out than your best friend dying and having to find out who the murderer is. You need something to get the story in motion. My artefact isn’t actually fictitious. I think if there is real life in the book you can in some ways educate the reader and get them thinking: ‘I never knew that!’ I think Dan Brown’s books are often like a lecture embedded in a chase story.

A classic next: From Russia With Love, Ian Fleming.

I think this is probably the best Bond book. It was one of Kennedy’s top ten reads. It’s different from the others in that the first third is about Smersh and Grant, who turns out to be an assassin. Also, it’s set in Istanbul which is my favourite city. I told my wife we should buy a place there but she’s not having any of it. Bond always takes us to places that, I suppose especially in the 60s, are so exotic. Fleming was actually in Istanbul in the 1950s and he uses an incident in this book, I think, where the Greek Commissioner was attacked by the Turks and the Turkish authorities just stood by.

What Fleming does is he has a central character who’s totally compelling – a fantasy figure who men want to be like and women want to sleep with. He’s sophisticated and charming with a slight brutality. It dates a bit now some of that, the language and the racial depictions perhaps don’t work so well. But you’d have to struggle to look at literary fiction over the past 50 years and come up with a character who has really inhabited the popular consciousness.

Also, Fleming’s a journalist and he writes in this muscular, punchy style. And, as you know, men are all slightly …

Autistic?

Yes. And he has three pages on how a gun works. That really appeals to the geek in all of us. It had a fantastic cover too.

Now The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth.

Again, this has a real historical character, De Gaulle, as well as the character of the Jackal himself, the assassin. It’s very well-written in a way that perhaps my next choices aren’t, and it depicts France in the 1960s in an incredibly convincing way. It’s an amazing trick really because we all know De Gaulle wasn’t assassinated, but the whole way along we’re thinking: ‘Shit! Is he going to die?’

How does Forsyth do that?

I think there’s an implicit contract between the reader and the author – we know he didn’t die but we want to know how close he came. It’s laid out in sections – Plot, Hunt, Kill – so you know someone’s going to die. I mean, all great thrillers make you want to turn the page. In a good heist movie, it’s more about the detail leading up to the heist than about the heist itself.

The other thing about The Day of the Jackal is that Forsyth in this book exposed the practice of applying for passports in the name of dead children. People would go to graveyards and look for the graves of children. The government actually had to change the law on the basis of his research.

Next, The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

This is not a brilliantly written book, but the movies are fantastic and quite different really from the book.