A crime without a detective
The recent success of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl brought to the public eye a fiction sub-genre that’s been growing in popularity for at least a decade: the literary thriller. Combining elements of the police procedural and suspense novel, the literary thriller distinguishes itself from more genrebound works by its moral ambiguity, rejection of genre conventions, psychological depth and a nuanced prose style.
Genre fans would argue — correctly in many cases — that traditional mystery and suspense authors bring the same writing chops to their work as their more literary comrades, as evidenced by the accomplished works of Ian Rankin, Mo Hayder or Ruth Rendell. There’s also no denying that “literary thriller” can often be code for a flabby, self-indulgent novel that lacks the narrative inventiveness and page-turning intensity of the best crime fiction, while exploiting genre conventions likely to bump up the author’s advance.
Tim Johnston’s Descent epitomizes much of what makes literary thrillers so compelling. As in most works of this kind, Descent drops readers into the horror and mechanics of a violent crime while denying the comforting presence and guidance of a seasoned detective, private eye or other law enforcement specialist.
The novel’s protagonists are the parents and younger brother of Caitlin Courtland, a bright, collegebound teenager who is abducted on the first day of the family’s trip to a Colorado resort town. Caitlin leaves the motel early in the morning to do some high-altitude training on the mountain roads, accompanied by her brother Sean on his bike.
Johnston infuses the teenage siblings’ ascent up the almost deserted mountain roads with both innocence and an eerie foreboding of danger that is realized when a car slams into Sean, badly breaking his leg and possibly injuring his spine. Out of cellphone range and fearing for her brother’s survival, Caitlin reluctantly accepts a lift to town from the vaguely menacing driver.
Hours later, the local sheriff calls Grant and Angela Courtland at the motel to inform them that their injured son is undergoing surgery on his leg at the local hospital. When Grant asks about Caitlin, the sheriff is perplexed. Sean was alone when he was brought in, he explains. Caitlin, it seems, never came down from the mountain. When Sean wakes up from surgery, he confirms his parents’ worst fears: Caitlin has been abducted by the driver of the car.
After these terse, evocative opening chapters, the novel lurches a year forward in time, rejoining Caitlin’s shattered family members as they struggle, unsuccessfully, to get on with their lives. Grant has stayed behind in Colorado to try to keep the police search active, while Angela slips in and out of crippling depression at their home in Wisconsin. Sean, marred by a permanent limp, joins his father in Colorado, eventually drifting into a nomadic life of manual labour and sleeping rough.
Johnston fills in the immediate events after Caitlin’s disappearance through skilful flashbacks that also allow him to delve into each character’s closed world of grief and complicity.
Johnston also weaves in a narrative that slowly unravels the mystery of Caitlin’s disappearance, slowly converging the parallel stories into a suspenseful climax. James Grainger’s debut novel, Harmless, will be published in May.