lynds.jpgNoted book reviewer and critic Tom Nolan quietly broke a story in May 2004 in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL in which he described two important publishing trends in espionage thrillers that have escaped the notice of some literary pundits: The form is thriving, and female authors bought new trenchcoats, belted them on, and infiltrated.



Take it from me, both pieces of information are subversive.



Once the globe's top reading choice, with tens of millions of copies sold annually, this male-dominated, reliable genre collapsed with the end of the Cold War. As NEW YORK TIMES critic Walter Goodman announced funereally in November 1989, the same month the Berlin Wall crumbled: "The future looks dismal for the trenchcoat set."



In the short term, he was prophetic. Sales of bestselling thriller authors plummeted, while new authors seldom found publishing homes. (This was when my first one was released. More about that shortly.) By 1998, two thriller icons, Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré, had declared it was time to accept reality: The black business of espionage no longer interested readers. Both men fled to fresh literary turf.



The gloomy forecasts in the TIMES have continued unabated for some fifteen years, right up to as recently as February 2004, when Charles ("Chip") McGrath worried: "What's odd is that most of our thriller writers - the people who in the past have taught us most of what we know about intelligence gathering and intelligence failure ' don't seem to be interested in the post-9/11 landscape.... [T]hey're writing instead about corporate espionage and theological cover-ups in the Middle Ages. To understand what's going on in the world, ... we readers now have to turn to nonfiction...."



Ouch. Still, with some 160,000 books published annually, it's perhaps forgivable that even the august TIMES occasionally misses a trend here or there. However, other news media have not.



The capitalist truth is that the spy form is thriving. In fact, according to PW NEWSLINE, the "espionage/thriller" category jumped a whopping 34 percent in sales in 2003.



There's a lesson to be learned from a closely aligned genre, the mystery: Let's take a quick trip down mystery'''s memory lane to 1977, when Marcia Muller's first book, EDWIN OF THE IRON SHOES, was published to resounding silence. It was a tiny printing by a soon-to-be defunct publisher, who was nevertheless willing to take a risk on a woman who had written a serious detective novel about a smart, strong, realistic female private investigator (P.I.), Sharon McCone.



No one noticed, including Ms. Muller, that the book was not only ground-breaking, it dealt a roundhouse blow to the old boys' stranglehold on P.I. fiction. (Note: The thirtieth in the Sharon McCone series, THE DANGEROUS HOUR, was published in July 2004 by Mysterious Press.)



For five long years after her debut, Ms. Muller could find no new publisher, but then neither could any other woman. In fact, the entire genre was foundering --- much as spy thrillers later would do in the 1990s. The problem: Mysteries had fallen victim to too much of the same for nearly a half century.



Finally, in 1982, within months of one another, the fresh voices of Sara Paretsky (INDEMNITY ONLY) and Sue Grafton (A IS FOR ALIBI) burst onto the publishing scene, soon followed by Ms. Muller's return plus a flood of other female authors. Because a majority of the newcomers were fine writers creating interesting, relevant books, they reinvigorated the P.I. form, and the doors swung open wider, welcoming new male authors.

Readers and booksellers and publishers were happy. Cash registers sang.



Since I am concerned about the continuing invisibility attached by some to the future of new writers --- both male and female --- welcomed into the spy thriller field at last, and since I am weary of these endless death notices for our reinvigorated form because they insult not only us but readers, I am now going to serve myself up as evidence.



Consider me the sacrificial literary goat.



As Mr. Nolan documents in his WALL STREET JOURNAL piece, I finished my first spy thriller, my debut, MASQUERADE, in 1994. My agent sent it to the president of one of the top New York houses. She told my agent, "I love this book. I want to buy it. But no woman could’ve written it, so I’m not going to make an offer."



Blatant sexism, it appears, although maybe not so. It was also a low period in the thriller market.



Steve Rubin of Doubleday, who is rightly considered a visionary publisher, saw it differently. Doubleday published MASQUERADE in hardcover in 1996, and Berkley sold so many copies in paperback in 1997 that it hit THE NEW YORK TIMES extended list. Some 20 countries also published MASQUERADE, while PEOPLE magazine named it "Page-turner of the Week."



Although MASQUERADE sold well and received many glowing reviews, there was a taint to it, an odor of "she doesn’t belong; she's writing the wrong thing." In fact, the nadir for me was when the male reviewer of a large metropolitan newspaper stopped me in the bar at a writers’ conference and asked why I wanted to cut off the private parts of male authors and readers, because that’s what I was doing by working in the genre.



Another version was delivered in print by the reviewer of a publishing industry magazine, who complimented me for so admirably "aping" my male betters.



Was it really because I was a woman, or was it because the field was deemed dead, which meant that if I were actually rather good at what I did, and readers enjoyed it, I was a threat to the shared wisdom?



For perspective, let's fast-forward to today. I’m now at St. Martin’s Press with Keith Kahla, such a terrific editor he could make Maxwell Perkins snap to, and my first novel with St. Martin’s was released last April. Called THE COIL, it’s the sequel to MASQUERADE.



BOOKPAGE not only named THE COIL one of its notable new titles, it also called MASQUERADE, a "tour-de-force." Book critic Paul Goat Allen explained, "With the release of MASQUERADE in 1996, Gayle Lynds joined the deified ranks of spy thriller authors like Robert Ludlum and John le Carré."



Interestingly, Mr. Allen was not the first to heap glory on MASQUERADE. At publication some eight years before, a few reviewers had also called it a tour-de-force, but their voices never rose above the suffocating confines of the genre's mass entombment.



After that, Pocket Books brought out my next two spy thrillers, MOSAIC and MESMERIZED, again highly political and again dealing with the post–Cold War world.



Yes, Mr. McGrath, many of us continued to not only write but publish those books for which you yearned but somehow missed.



In his insistent TIMES essay, he also noted wistfully, "[Nonfiction books aren’t] as much fun as novels, though, and they also lack the sulfurous whiff of cynicism and conspiracy that makes good thrillers so satisfying."



The man was obviously fond of vintage spy stories. But then, many of us were and are while also liking our cynicism and conspiracy delivered in contemporary tales.



Another journalist who obviously enjoyed them, too --- renowned reviewer Dick Adler of THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE --- wrote two months later, "Where are the new Robert Ludlums and Tom Clancys coming from?" He so believed in the thriller's future that he answered his own question: "Here's one excellent candidate: the tough-minded and talented Gayle Lynds, who co-wrote several books with Ludlum and introduced us to Liz Sansborough – a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and an ex-CIA agent – in the gripping MASQUERADE."



Within days of those comments, book critic David Montgomery observed astutely In JANUARY magazine, "The thriller genre has been pronounced dead so many times that it would seemingly take a miracle even to get it on life-support." Mr. Montgomery also reviews for THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, USA TODAY, and THE BOSTON GLOBE. Thoroughly steeped in the field, he, too, disagrees with the TIMES's nay-saying Mr. McGrath: "[Y]ou can't believe everything you read these days, for not only is the thriller not dead, but it is alive and well and safe in the hands of outstanding authors such as Gayle Lynds."



As Mr. McGrath noted, 9/11 happened. His view is that it changed nothing.



Wrong. After those horrifying attacks, Americans abruptly shook off their post–Cold War exhaustion and resumed a vigorous interest in the world at large, searching for information and, ultimately, understanding of what had happened, why it had happened, and what to do about it. We are a nation of readers, so of course we turned to books, but not only to nonfiction, which Mr. McGrath claims.



One of our favored resources is through the lens of good political fiction, which is what the best spy novels are (and which helps account for the surge of sales in 2003.)



Which is also what I write about, passionately, stubbornly, cloaked in what I hope is rousing adventure, as do many other authors who entered print after the Iron Curtain crashed — Daniel Silva, Jenny Siler, Francine Mathews, Robert Cullen, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Brian Haig, Raelynn Hillhouse --- to name only a few.



It’s time for Mr. McGrath and other bespectacled dinosaurs to look realistically at espionage thrillers again. They’re not only alive, readers are excited about them. And as Mr. Nolan observes in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, an industry sea change is occurring just as it did in mysteries 20 years ago: Authors are infusing new life and much-needed sensibilities into a much-beloved form that had been not only at risk of becoming disconnected but of becoming a caricature of itself.



The best political fiction is so relevant that it’s predictive, a quality we can claim. Mr. McGrath’s insult that "most of our thriller writers don’t seem to be interested in the post-9/11 landscape" refers more to his narrow reading habits than it does to our work, nor does it apply to the recent books of Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré, who have rejoined us: They’re back in print with very contemporary spy tales.



But then, there’s so much to write about, proving again what J. Edgar Hoover said many years ago, "There’s something about a secret that’s addicting." When you read our books, you’ll know why.

© 2004 Gayle Lynds

Gayle Lynds is the NEW YORK TIMES best-selling author of THE COIL, MASQUERADE, MOSAIC, and MESMERIZED. With Robert Ludlum, she wrote THE HADES FACTOR, THE PARIS OPTION, and THE ALTMAN CODE. A former newspaper reporter and magazine editor, she was also an editor at a think tank where she had Top Secret security clearance.