Rereading thrillers that you enjoyed forty or more years ago can bring a surprise. You might remember them as fast-paced stories that kept you tightly gripped page after page. Yet read them again today, and they can seem slow; the start can feel as though it drags; the prose may seem languid. The same applies to older films, with each scene seeming very drawn-out. So, why the change in pacing, and is it true that all older thrillers are slower than today’s?
Readers’ Attention Spans Have Shrunk
It’s commonly said that twenty-first century adults have a much shorter attention span than their forebears. Studies performed over several decades on how long people dwell on one particular computer window before scrolling to something else seem to support this. They showed that our attention span has dropped from an average of around 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 1.2 minutes in 2012, and to 47 seconds in 2016. Figures differ between studies and the age of participants, but the figure for this decade is even lower.
This must have an impact on how long readers are prepared to spend “looking” at one particular scene in their head before wanting it to move on to the next one. Hence, books need to increase their pace to satisfy the reader.
Chapter Length Can Impact a Thriller’s Pace
Something else you may have noticed is shorter chapters. Occasionally, a reader may come across one that isn’t even a page long. That’s also a modern trend. Older books probably used longer chapters because of the way they were often serialised. Think, for example, of the Sherlock Holmes stories. They were serialised in The Strand magazine in the 1890s, so each episode had to be of a set length. Arthur Conan Doyle was therefore constrained by the format in which he was published. With such restrictions gone, the modern author is free to structure the book as (s)he wishes.
Shorter chapters increase the sense of pace. As we turn from one chapter to the next, it feels as though we are travelling quickly through the story, simply because our brain uses the chapter divisions to track our progress through the novel.
Style of Writing Affects a Novel’s Pace
Other changes in modern writing have also served to increase pace. Authors of yesteryear tended to use perfect grammar, and this undoubtedly affected pace. MS Word will accusingly put a squiggly green line beneath what it detects as a “sentence fragment”, yet modern authors know how and when to break such rules. And they do so with abandon. Shorter sentences carry more punch. They’re dramatic. They’re attention grabbing.
And as for starting with a conjunction such as “but” or “and”! This is now far more common than in days gone by, and the result is prose that feels faster. Over several sentences, it can build up a rhythm like a runaway train, which I suspect increases the reader’s excitement.
So, changes in style too, have impacted a thriller’s feeling of pace.
Modern Writing Omits the Obvious
Have you noticed the way people meet and separate from each other in older stories? I enjoy listening to the dramatisations of Francis Durbridge’s Paul Temple mysteries, where a meeting between characters normally starts with a round of “good mornings” and ends with an echo of “Goodbye”. Modern fiction tends to dispense with such niceties. The reader knows they are there, so nothing is missed by their omission. Chopping out those obvious pieces of interaction speeds up the scene, adding pace to the chapter.
Modern Thrillers Use Less Internal Dialogue
The use of internal dialogue seems to have changed over the years as well. Modern thrillers tend to have very little, with it restricted to a single exclamation or a very short sentence; older novels may well have included multiple paragraphs of internal dialogue. This is perhaps a hang-over from the days of Shakespeare’s plays, where lengthy soliloquies were necessary to explain what was happening.
The result? More rapid changes between scenes and therefore a sense of increased pace.
Some Exceptions
There are always some exceptions, of course, authors who led the way. Adam Hall is one novelist who comes to mind (well, actually, it’s Elleston Trevor*; Hall was his penname). He’s famous for his Quiller spy series, written from 1965 onwards. He was that period’s master of fast-paced action, an expert at cliffhangers, and an author who never wasted a word with such niceties as “good morning” or “goodbye.” He spearheaded an increase in pace, and his thrillers have lasted the test of time as a result. Give it another fifty years, though, and his, too, may start to feel sluggish if the current rate of change continues.
*to be totally accurate, Elleston Trevor was christened Trevor Smith but changed his name.
Ian Coates is the author of a thriller, Eavesdrop, first published by Bad Day Books, the suspense and thriller imprint of Assent Publishing. He worked in the high tech electronics industry for 30 years, where he specialised in the design of radio communication equipment. His intimate knowledge of that environment always triggered his imagination to think about the mysterious world of spies, and allowed him to bring a unique authenticity to his thriller. Ian is proud to support the British Science Association and donates a proportion of his book proceeds to that charity. He lives and writes in Worcestershire, England, and is a member of the Society of Authors and the International Thriller Writers Association.
His second thriller, Backlash, will be released later his year.
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George Segal starred in the Quiller Memorandum based on the spy thriller by Elleston Trevor (born Trevor Dudley-Smith aka Adam Hall). The name of the author of the Quiller Memorandum remains a tad mysterious but it is one of those under-rated thrilling espionage classics whether in writing or on the silver screen that deserve so much more adulation. If you liked Len Deighton’s masterpiece Funeral in Berlin or the Deightonesque Bill Fairclough’s epic unadulterated and noir spy novel Beyond Enkription in The Burlington Files series, you are going to love the Quiller Memorandum and vice versa. Why mention Deighton and Fairclough you may ask?
Critics have described Fairclough who was an MI6 agent codename JJ (and one of Pemberton’s People in MI6) in real life as a posh Harry Palmer and his parents worked for MI1 in Germany in the aftermath of World War II just as Quiller did. Both Elleston Trevor and Bill Fairclough (aka Edward Burlington) used many pseudonyms. Given Bill Fairclough was a spy that is not unexpected but why Elleston Trevor (born Trevor Dudley-Smith) published over one hundred books under about a dozen nom de plumes remains a conundrum.
The Quiller Memorandum, Funeral in Berlin and Beyond Enkription are “must reads” for espionage cognoscenti who should of course know how they are linked! John Barry (composer of the Bond, Palmer and Quiller theme tunes) and Bill Fairclough both went to St Peter’s School in York where Guy Fawkes and his co-traitors were educated which is why Fairclough’s MI6 codename was JJ. For more see an astonishing brief News Article dated 3 May 2024 at TheBurlingtonFiles website.