By Peter Blauner

A writer's always hustling somebody. I was teaching a workshop last year at a program for people just out of prison. Not for entirely altruistic reasons, of course‹ I was doing research for a novel. It seemed like a fair deal, though. They were getting the benefit of whatever paltry wisdom I'd collected in publishing five suspense novels, and I was getting the benefit of whatever they knew about breaking the law.

Things started off promisingly. The student body included crack dealers, stickup kids, car thieves, beat-down experts, and I think a murderer or two (it was considered GAUCHE to inquire too specifically after someone's conviction). In any event, they were all there as volunteers and presumably all had some serious interest in learning how to write.

Just their casual conversation before class was a crime writer's treasure trove of street slang and incidental detail. Marijuana was "trees" (as in "we moved some trees off that corner"), police officers were "Jake," guns were "gats" (a touch of forties nostalgia perhaps). But as soon as they put pen to paper, all the accidental poetry and excitement of thug life died away.

There was no mystery or atmosphere, no grip and release of tension. Largely because I'd forgotten to say two words before I gave the assignment to describe what they'd done the night before.

NO RAP.

Now don't get me wrong. I like a lot of hip-hop. I like the hardness, I like the rhythm, I like the fact that each word has the weight of a brick about to be tossed through a window, that people like Eminem or Nas can slip three jokes into one line, that the sonic vocabulary of the music is wide open to everything from cell phone rings to snatches from the original Broadway cast album of ANNIE.

But one after another, the eight men and two women in the group took what should have been heart-stopping narratives of frightening authentic experience and crushed the life out of them with the most egregious clichés of the genre. Instead of the emotion and close observation I'd been hearing a few minutes before, there were lame rhyming insults and boasts about "nines" and "bitches" and "you'll be bowing down when you see me playing the Garden."

"Can I ask you something?" I tried to be tactful. "You guys are writing about all this gunplay, and violence and sexual betrayal..."

"You got a problem with that?" said a bright kid near me named James, with hair bellowing from the sides of his backwards baseball cap like steam and jeans slung so low that the ass pockets were on the backs of his knees

"I don't have a problem with any of that. I'm not your parent or parole officer. The problem I have is that the way you did it is kind of, uh ... BORING."

"Whaddaya mean?"

I tried going back to the old Alfred Hitchcock distinction between surprise and suspense, pretty much the Pledge of Allegiance for most old-school thriller writers. Namely, surprise is an uneventful ten-minute conversation between two men about baseball that ends with a bomb going off. Suspense, however, is the exact same conversation intercut with an awareness of a bomb ticking underneath one man's seat.

James listened carefully, thought about it for a while, and then somberly declared. "I would GLADLY put up with ten minutes of excruciating boredom if the explosion was big enough."

Well, he had me there. It felt like I'd just had a cue ball shoved down my throat. Twenty-five years of painstaking attention to the mechanics of building tension, to the intricacies of character, to the subtlety of language, to gradually stoking and superheating the engine of story-telling all blown to smithereens in a half-second.

"But these raps don't go anywhere as pieces of writing," I tried to argue. "It's just like playing the dozens."

"Exactly!!" He slapped the table in triumph. "Every line is a punch line."

"But then it doesn't add up."

"Are you kidding?" He smirked at the rest of the group, incredulous. "Have you ever actually listened to Jay-Z's lyrics? His shit is totally whack. And he sold like three million records last year."

OH SNAP! In my face. He went and played the money card. Now what was I going to do?

I should've been ready for it, of course. It's not like I'd never encountered the great hungry beast of Instant Gratification. But I just hadn't realized how quick the trigger had gotten. Cell phones, e-mail, fast food and contemporary film and TV editing all militate in favor of giving the people what they want almost before they know they want it. And many thriller writers, including this one on occasion, have tried to keep up. Terse descriptions have gotten terser, chapters shorter, characters' backgrounds simplified,

Probably none of it hurts sales --- as I write, ten of the sixteen books on THE NEW YORK TIMES best-seller list for hardcover fiction are either thrillers or mysteries. But maybe something gets lost in the process. A certain slow patient accretion of nuance and detail to create an atmosphere of true dread. In a way, it's a little bit like what's happened to sex in American movies. There's the occasional fleeting glimpse of nudity and patches of "graphic" dialogue (read: jokes that wouldn't make it on Howard Stern), but it's hard to think of the last genuinely erotic major American film.

When I asked a Hollywood director why that was, he gave me a one word answer. "TIME."

What he meant was that back in those days the sexiest movies were the ones that knew how to stretch out and wait. Scenes were given a chance to breathe and smolder. But all this rushing to "deliver" spoils the mood, though, in thrillers as much as in love stories.

In SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, for one well-known example, the memorable element wasn't that cartoon character Buffalo Bill skinning young women, it was the whisper of intimacy in the long drawn-out dialogue scenes between Clarice and Lecter. And, of course, in the work of the real masters like Graham Greene and John le Carre, it's all about flickering uncertainties and the play of shadow and light.

Unfortunately, my friend with the steam heat hair and the waistband down around his thighs didn't stand a chance of hearing or seeing any of that with all those Jerry Bruckheimer explosions going off. So I tried to coax him into slowing down a little, lowering his pulse rate, checking out the scenery, making like Wordsworth and recollecting in tranquility.

Grudgingly, sullenly, maybe even a bit resentfully, he put his head down and started to write, a look of serene concentration gradually forming on his face as if he'd suddenly turned into an earnest young Julliard student practicing the cello.

Fifteen minutes later, he showed me a draft of a story. A touching little narrative about bitch-slapping his girlfriend's father --- I never said I was there to do social work. The images were starting to come together: He had the pot of rice boiling over on the stove, the long jagged crack in the glass coffee table, the radiator knocking in the corner.

It wasn't perfect, but it had menace, a bit of texture, a hint of individual character, and yes, maybe even some suspense. It was a good start.

I sat back, satisfied, thinking I'd finally gotten traction and diverted him from the habit of going for the quick payoff. A real GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS moment, with class C and D felons. Nothing to it; all in a day's work.

"Maybe you could even think about expanding this into a longer piece," I said.

"Actually," he curled his lip. "I was wondering if you could hook me up with a West Coast agent."

2005 Peter Blauner

Peter Blauner is the author of six novels, including THE INTRUDER, which was a NEW YORK TIMES best-seller, and SLOW MOTION RIOT, which won the 1992 Edgar award for best first novel. His new book, SLIPPING INTO DARKNESS, will be published in January by Little, Brown and Company.