How Hardboiled Whodunits Have Given Way to the Psychological Thriller

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I grew up with Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, both on the page and the screen. Raymond Chandler had an early and enduring influence on my writing; my novel The Exiled, published with Mulholland Books in 2016 under the name Christopher Charles, was intended in part as an homage to the noir master. I was ecstatic to see it hit the shelves, especially under the aegis of a Little, Brown imprint, but my ecstasy was short lived. The novel didn’t sell a lick, and a TV deal that seemed an all-but-sure thing fell through. 

Literary post-mortem is an inexact science; there could, of course, have been any number of factors contributing to the book’s poor sales, but one of those factors was most definitely genre. By now, I have gathered enough empirical and anecdotal evidence to suggest that hardboiled detectives—private and salaried—are fading from the mainstream American literary scene. A quick glance at Amazon’s top-ten “hardboiled mystery” category, for example, reveals a list of self-published titles. Unless you are a long-established writer with a long-established series (Ian Rankin, for example), it is difficult to get a police procedural or gumshoe novel past editors at any of the major American publishing houses.

At the same time, the reading public’s appetite for mystery and crime fiction is as bottomless as ever. Switch over to the “thrillers” category on Amazon, and you’ll find that best-selling phenoms like Lisa Jewell, Alice Feeney, Riley Sager, and Alex Michaelides—just to name a few—are all published by Big-Five imprints. What’s striking to me is how structurally similar many of these authors’ books are to the work of Chandler and Hammett. The protagonists find themselves isolated and often ostracized in their quest for the truth. The difference is that, in the psychological thriller, the quest has become twofold: the ordinary citizen turned amateur sleuth (the 21st-century Marlowe) must solve both an actual mystery and a related personal trauma whose clues are buried in their unconscious. And the only way to unlock the unconscious is to revisit the past.

Missing persons and murder: these “thrillers” are, at their core, mysteries. They may not feature Phillip Marlowe wading through the moral muck of 1940s Los Angeles in order to purge the city of some larger evil—but they are whodunits. Instead of Marlowe or Spade, the detectives are versions of you and me, and the cases they’re solving are anchored in personal trauma. Often, the trauma itself is the real mystery, and the reward for solving it is healing, or at least closure.

While part of me mourns the demise of Marlowe and Spade, I’m also excited and energized by a genre that uses elements of the traditional detective story to explore more complex, psychological mysteries. Trauma-as-mystery is a crime fiction subcategory with boundless potential, and I hope to have done it justice in my forthcoming novel, Not by Blood. 

Without further ado, here are five titles—four recent, one already a classic—that I believe fit the trauma-mystery bill. Happy reading!

Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn

A journalist returns to her hometown to report on the murder of a young girl and ends up simultaneously investigating her own dark childhood. Published in 2006, Flynn’s “classic” is the likely progenitor for other titles on this list.

Reptile Memoirs, Silje Ulstein

In her debut thriller, Ulstein writes convincingly from multiple point of views: a young woman, a middle-aged woman, a sixty-year-old man, and, yes, a snake. This is Nordic Noir, but it’s also a psychological thriller with the emphasis on ‘psychological’: Ulstein has a lot to say about how her characters’ lives are shaped by trauma. Reptile Memoirs was, for me, a 2022 thriller-of-the-year contender.

What Have We Done, Alex Finlay

Five children from a group home grow up to be a rock star, a federal judge, a reality TV host, a billionaire business mogul, and a stay-at-home mom. They found themselves in the group home for different (traumatic) reasons, but, once there, formed a lifelong bond. A few decades later, someone is trying to kill them, one by one. The great themes of the psychological thriller—tragic pasts, double lives, secrets that refuse to stay buried—are all here, held together by a razor-sharp plot and breakneck pacing. 

Before She Finds Me, Heather Chavez

A public tragedy—a school shooting—turns out not to be as random as it first appeared. College professor Julia Bennett suspects that her daughter, who survived the shooting, was in fact the intended target. While hunting for the person or persons responsible, Bennett is forced to confront the traumatic event that defined her childhood.  

Black-Eyed Susans, Julia Heaberlin

How’s this for childhood trauma: Tessa, a sixteen-year-old girl, is found buried alive in a pit of human bones. The pit was dug in a field of black-eyed susans. Twenty years later, Tessa, now a grown-up single mother, finds a patch of black-eyed susans growing in her yard. The serial killer, it seems, has returned—which raises all sorts of questions given that someone has already been convicted for the murders. Someone Tessa testified against. Did she send the wrong person to prison? The answer is hidden deep in a past she’d rather not revisit.

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