A Thriller Editor Edits the NYT Best of the 21st Century Thriller List

Becoming a specialist editor— editing books in one genre or a small handful of related genres — never appealed to me, even though in the consolidated, financialized publishing industry that’s increasingly what editors are pushed to do (no different than in most white-collar professions, it’s worth noting). Modern management tends to prefer to have 10 distinct nodes and know exactly the one thing each of those nodes does, to manage diversification of the business themselves from 10,000 feet rather than entrust the workers to diversify their business at the ground level. But specialization is often less interesting as an individual. The joy of book publishing is the variety of topics and authors from different backgrounds you might work with. Learning new skills and applying them across genres to help, hopefully, create something entirely original. It’s by sheer happenstance than that I’ve become a bit of a thriller specialist while still publishing a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction.

The reason I’ve stumbled into editing so many thrillers is that of any major genre I find that thrillers have the most variation within a vast readership.1 A thriller can be psychological or domestic, involve detectives or no authorities at all, they can be based in the legal profession or the world of technology or set in space. But it is not just the variety of settings and scenarios. The nature of a thriller is to surprise the reader, and, unlike a mystery or romance or fantasy, readers expect to be kept on their toes rather than served a familiar story (discover the killer, fall in love, hero’s journey). Of my several thriller authors, none of them have clear overlap, their styles, the pacing, the body count, the social commentary, are all wildly different.

So, it’s with a bit of expertise that I look at the New York Times latest “best thrillers of the 21^st century” list a little side eyed. The last NYT 21^st century lists, the 100 best novels and films, were a fun mixed bag to break down. With thrillers it’s a little different. In fact, I’m here to make the argument that half of this list should be thrown out entirely. Let’s offer some scrutinous editorial feedback title-by-title:

If you’re going to make a genre-based list, you must be a bit more protective of the genre. The biggest trap voters fell into on this “best of” list is sneaking great literary novels with minor thriller elements onto the list.