Gosh, I am so tickled. I finally get a mention by Sarah Weinman, this is a breakthrough boys and girls, and you can read it right here. And because she mentions that I will be posting my last, never-to-be printed column in this now-to-be widely read bloggy, I'm posting  "part one" and it's pasted in right here:

My list is better than your list!

    At once infuriating and compulsively readable, Washington Post “thriller” critic Patrick Anderson’s study, “The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction” (Random House) is an earnest, if utterly flawed attempt to quantify a sub-genre of crime fiction. (With a title like that, one hopes for a Leni Riefenstahl cover photo, but, but alas, that’s not the case.) Problem is, Anderson can’t define “thriller” in a simple sound bite, so his survey ends up being all over the mystery fiction map. The best I can figure is that Anderson sees that during crime fiction’s rise to the top of the bestseller list of in the 1970s (and thus entering the “new mainstream of American popular fiction)  “the crime novel began to mutate into something that was bigger, darker, more imaginative and more violent: the modern thriller.”
    The book is structured around sections including past crime stories and the birth of the genre, the advent of the “modern thriller”, modern masters, and a group of novelists Anderson is especially fond of. Within these subheadings, he discusses plot, gives a biography of the author and then throws in his admittedly subjective opinions. Sometimes this works well; his look at the racism and misogyny so prevalent in, for example. Raymond Chandler’s work is appalling by current cultural standards. “He could write gorgeous prose, but he could also write like a sick, sadistic son of a bitch.”
    In fact, quotable sentences abound: regarding Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Anderson loves the quality of writing, but “In story after story the solution is childlike in its simplicity.” But the coverage, despite Anderson’s reasonably careful overview, is spotty at best. He dismisses literary genre writers such as Ross MacDonald perfunctorily (…Lew Archer is a colossal pain in the ass” ) and Patricia Highsmith garners a sliver of the coverage a lightweight like Sue Grafton receives.
    At the same time, it’s refreshing to read Anderson’s scathing dismissal of James Patterson (“..the lowest common denominator of cynical, skuzzy, assembly-liner writing”) and fellow mega-seller Tom Clancy’s politics and literary crimes (“..he clearly does not have anyone to edit out the inane dialogue, endless repetitions and right-wing stereotypes that blight his novels.”)
    In the end – and of course, Anderson is more than entitled to all of his own biases and dislikes (he’s a successful novelist as well) his pedantic and often condescending prose wears thin. And in the final section of the book, he reprints  several of his crime reviews from the Post to show examples of book he strongly despises; here the depth of his vanity is exposed, because he has the audacity to include a negative review of a Nicholas Sparks novel, a writer who is as far from the crime scene as his beloved Michael Connelly is close to it. To be fair, then, Anderson’s premise is of great interest, but his execution falters, as would that of virtually anyone else tackling such an unwieldy landscape teeming with passionately held sentiment. To learn more about “thrillers” visit www.thrillerwriters.org.