"Wait, I Wrote a Thriller?" by Alan Drew
Alan Drew isn't your typical thriller writer. He directs the creative writing program at Villanova, and his previous novel
was described by the author Leila Aboulela as a book that “balances the
sweetness of youth and the brooding anxieties of parenthood with a
robust understanding of the Muslim-Westerner encounter.” Nonetheless,
his new book is a thriller. It's about a serial killer in a small
southern California town, and Lee Child has declared it "a home run." We asked Alan Drew to describe how he wound up writing a thriller. Here's what he had to say:
I never intended to write a thriller. I really didn’t. The serial killer in my novel, Shadow Man, was supposed to be on the periphery of the book, a fearful metaphorical pressure that would serve the greater concerns of character. I was trained at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, after all, where character is king. You don’t write thrillers at The Workshop. It’s written in the Constitution.
But here’s the thing—a very basic thing I should have known—you can’t put a serial killer in a book and not have your small town detective hunt after him. It’s Chekov’s deal: if there’s a gun, it must be fired; or to be even more formulaic: if there’s a time bomb it must be diffused—or explode. 1+1=2. But I was never very good at math.
I’m the very grateful beneficiary of book blurbs by two prominent thriller/mystery writers: Lee Child and William Landay. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, lest I burn bridges, but I do not—or have not in the past—read these kinds of books. My father reads these kinds of books, my father-in-law, my neighbor across the street who takes long business flights. I’m a professor of creative writing, I run the Villanova Literary Festival, so, as these things go, I tend to read “literary” fiction, whatever that means these days—the kind of fiction, I guess, that academics read and deem worthy of teaching. These books tend to focus on heavy social concerns, often have richly layered language, and eschew plot for the concerns of complex characters.
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