No mystery about these authors' goals

By Jessica Brilliant Keener, Globe Correspondent  |  June 8, 2005

Christopher Keane, a Boston-based thriller writer who has 14 novels and writing guides to his name, has a complaint about his craft. ''It's a genre that for too long has been shunted aside or shrouded in mystery's clothes," he says. ''Not that the two genres, mystery and suspense, don't overlap, but ultimately, they're different animals."

The concern has been around as long as thrillers have, but Keane and his colleagues are finally doing something about it. Thriller writers across the country have formed a national organization to burnish their image, honor excellence in suspense writing, and create new ways for readers to discover their books.

More than 250 authors have joined the group, International Thriller Writers, Inc., founded last October, and there's no shortage of chills among them: Total worldwide book sales of ITW authors exceeds 1.5 billion books, and 80 percent of the members have had titles on The New York Times bestseller lists, according to ITW cofounder and co-president Gayle Lynds, whose fifth thriller, ''The Coil," has just come out in paperback. While the genre may be known for high sales, its titles constituted just 1,516 of the 25,184 works of fiction published last year (up from 1,030 five years earlier), according to R.R. Bowker's Books in Print database.

Authors, editors, and agents packed a suite of rooms at the Algonquin Hotel in New York last Saturday to celebrate the organization's launch. And the group isn't wasting time implementing its ideas. It has set up a website, at internationalthrillerwriters.com, and starting this summer a free monthly e-newsletter will include links to book reviews, author contests, interviews, and news. Coordinated and written by Bookreporter.com, the online missive will announce tour information and new ITW titles and offer author chats.

Also coming this summer, the Thriller Book Club, formed in conjunction with DearReader.com, will let readers sample, by e-mail, the opening chapters of ITW authors' books. Each weekday, club members will receive a quick read of the week's selection. By the end of the week, readers who are hooked can order the book online.

''It's interesting and strange that there hasn't been a professional group for thriller writers, because it's a separate category from mystery," says Joseph Finder, a Boston-based writer whose latest corporate intrigue, ''Company Man," hit The New York Times bestseller list in May. Finder is among 30 authors who've agreed to donate an unpublished short story to an anthology of ITW authors that will be published next year to raise money for the organization.

What distinguishes a thriller from a mystery? ''Mysteries focus on who done it. Thrillers focus on how done it," Finder says. ''In a thriller, it's the process and how it affects the characters that are emphasized." In ''Company Man," Finder departs from the usual fare of bad-guy CEO and makes his executive protagonist a sympathetic, decent man, the object of death threats, and the target of a conspiracy involving his colleagues.

The idea for the group had been simmering for years and finally erupted out of a conversation between Lynds and David Morrell, the other cofounder and co-president. ''The organization was designed to broaden appreciation of thrillers and deepen the quality of what thrillers can be," says Morrell, creator of Rambo and author of 28 books. His forthcoming ''Creepers" plunges into the underworld of urban explorers.

Gary Goshgarian, a Boston writer who uses the pseudonym Gary Braver, says he joined ITW because he felt that ''people who write thrillers were typically marginalized, off in small corners at conferences."

Thrillers are among the more lucrative genres and take up a large section of bestseller lists, Lynds says, but awards for such works have been seriously lacking. Horror, science fiction, mystery, romance, and literary novels all have established awards, but nothing like that has existed in the thriller category alone -- until this year.

The Barry Award for Best Thriller Novel of 2004, chosen by the editorial staff of Deadly Pleasures magazine, will be announced in September at the Bouchercon World Mystery & Suspense Conference in Chicago. Finder's novel ''Paranoia" has been nominated. Boston writer Chris Mooney's ''Remembering Sarah," a psychological thriller, has been nominated in a separate category, best novel.

''ITW is a big publicity vehicle to reach readers," Mooney says. ''There's a lot of top quality talent, and I feel fortunate to be a part of it."

In another first, ITW will honor thriller writers for lifetime achievement, best novel, best first novel, and best screenplay. The awards will be part of an inaugural International Festival of Thrillers next summer in Arizona.