Great works of literature often peel away the mask of our piety to expose the raw life underneath. So it is with Beowulf, a brooding, blood-soaked celebration of warrior manhood.

  We in the modern West have been so powerful, so dominant, so safe in our homes for so long that we slip too easily into the illusion that we live at peace. We are never at peace, not really. When we go to the ballet or walk in the park or stop to smell a rose or read a book, we only do so by the good graces of the fighters who stand ready to kill and die to defend us. Soldiers on our borders, police officers on our streets—only the threat of their physical force keeps those who would murder, rob, or enslave us at bay. Every moment of tranquility and freedom implies the warrior who protects it. The world of Beowulf is the real world.

  And what a wonderful poem it is, a tale and a tone of such ferocious, melancholy virility that it shocks the sometimes overdelicate modern mind. It’s the story of the Scandinavian hero Beowulf and his battles with monsters. It begins when Beowulf travels from Geatland in what is now Sweden to Denmark to come to the aid of King Hrothgar in his towering mead hall Herot. The Danes are being plagued by the swamp monster Grendel, “that shadow of death,” who hunts their warriors in darkness, “lying in waiting, hidden in mist, invisibly following them from the edge of the marsh, always there, unseen.” Beowulf is such a tough Geat, so bent on winning fame for his courage and prowess, that he disdains to use a sword to kill the beast and wrestles him bare-handed, ripping his arm off by main strength. Grendel slouches home to his swamp to die, thus sparking the rage of his mother, who comes for her revenge.

  There’s plenty more—including digressive tales of war, betrayal, and tragedy—all set on misty fens and under murky waters and in broken, crumbling towers and halls that seem the earliest inspiration for the setting of many of today’s video games. Which is fitting, because really you have to turn to those games to find anything in modern art that so boldly elevates and celebrates the warrior and his drive to “win glory and a hero’s fame” in battle.

  If you want to see how completely more “sophisticated” modern artists have lost the ability to understand those virtues and their ever-present necessity, take a look at the 2007 CGI film Beowulf by director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. Note how entirely it subverts and corrupts the vision of the original. In the film, the warriors are drunken thugs and Grendel is King Hrothgar’s bastard child. This implies not only a measure of responsibility on the part of the Danes for their own slaughter, but also a tiresome Freudian psychomachy underlying the action. In the poem, conversely, Grendel is the child of “those monsters born of Cain, murderous creatures banished by God.” He is roused from his slumber by the music and rejoicing in Herot, especially a poet’s song of the world’s genesis. The implication in the poem is far more insightful and unflinching than that in the film. The poem’s Grendel is a primal force of evil spawned by sinful human nature itself and now perennially at war with the creation. The guilt is not sexual and personal but general in terms of mankind’s instinct toward fraternal violence.

  That general guilt gives Beowulf’s heroism its context. It tells us that evil is woven into human nature, but that individual men may choose to stand against it. The film Beowulf descends into moral equivalence and relativism as Beowulf, in his turn, is seduced by Grendel’s mother, a slinky CGI version of the likewise slinky Angelina Jolie. “I know that, underneath your glamour, you’re as much a monster as my son, Grendel,” she tells him. Which is blithering nonsense. In the poem,she’s the monster and he’s the guy who’s got to kill her so that men may live in peace. That may not be nuanced or urbane or pseudo-deep, but it’s actually more honest, more like life as it is lived. The evils of this sad world are not always susceptible to analysis or negotiation. Some monsters are really monsters and just have to be taken down. That’s why poets write—or used to write— epics honoring the warriors who do the job.

  And that’s why it’s fair to trace the thriller novel’s pedigree back to Beowulf and to include the epic in a list of thriller must-reads. It may not be a thriller in the modern sense of the word, but it holds the kernel of the idea that gives our genre one of its key reasons for being. In modern fiction, only genre novels—crime, horror, fantasy, sci-?—regularly dramatize the existence of evil, the need for courage, and the glamour of physical strength and fighting skill. It’s an essential and too often neglected role of the arts to portray these things. If they don’t, it becomes too easy for us to forget them, too easy for us to be self-satisfied with our lives of compassion and peaceful loving kindness without paying tribute to the warriors who make those lives possible.

  Andrew Klavan has been nominated for the Mystery Writer of America’s Edgar Award five times and has won twice. He is the author of such internationally bestselling thrillers as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say a Word, adapted into a film starring Michael Douglas. His novel,Empire of Lies, was number one on the Amazon thriller list. He has written many screenplays, including the adaptation of Simon Brett’s novel,A Shock to the System, which starred Michael Caine. He is a contributing editor to City Journal, the magazine of the Manhattan Institute. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journa l, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Along with new novels for adults, he is currently working on a series of thrillers for teens.

  4.

  William Shakespeare’s

  MACBETH (1605–1606)

  A. J. Hartley

  Despite whisperings to the contrary by assorted conspiracy theorists, William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died in 1616, after retiring from the stage a very wealthy man. His income was made primarily as a shareholder in the London theatre company called The Chamberlain’s Men and renamed The King’s Men on the accession of King James in 1603, and although he acted in the company, his primary responsibility was as a playwright. Between the late 1580s and his retirement in 1613, he wrote almost forty plays in various genres—an average of about two per year—an extraordinary output that has forever stamped literary culture. The plays—and his sonnets and long poems—are noticeable for their linguistic invention, their depth of character, their radical and ambiguous treatment of sociopolitical ideas, and their meticulous structure. They continue to be read, studied, and performed more than the work of any other writer. From the grotesque horror of Titus Andronicus, to political and military works such as Julius Caesar, and from domestic intrigues like Othello to Hamlet’s realm of court intrigue, ghosts, and revenge, few writers loom so clearly over the history of the thriller.

  Composed around 1605–1606, probably only months after Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder plotters tried to blow up King James,Macbeth taps right into the contemporary anxiety about regicide and its consequences, political, spiritual, and psychological. Though king of England, James was a Scot whose mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been executed for treason by Queen Elizabeth, and who traced his descent from Banquo. James had also published important treatises on the powers of the monarch (which said, among other things, that no one had the authority to remove a king but God, regardless of his tyrannical misdeeds) and on witchcraft, which he associated with civil as well as spiritual subversion. Shakespeare’s play was thus topical—perhaps dangerously so since it walks a typically Shakespearean line, never coming down clearly on one side or the other of key issues—and some scholars think its unusual brevity (by comparison to his other tragedies) shows signs of heavy state censorship. What is clear is that few writers before or since have managed to so shrewdly sketch the mind of someone drawn by ambition and paranoia into acts so terrible that they tear him and his relationships apart long before his head is severed from his body.

  Shakespeare had explored assassins before, particularly Brutus in Julius Caesar (c. 1599), but never before had he given such weight and attention to a killer who knew the moral enormity of his act before he did it, nor had he given the killer so distinctive and chilling a spouse. Lady Macbeth looms over the first half of the play like the ravens on her battlements, though to blame her for what happens is to deny Macbeth what Shakespeare is so careful to give him: the power of choice. All the same the scenes in which she spurs him to act, using all her powers of persuasion anchored in their intimately personal history, and those after the deed itself in which they grope bloody handed for each other in the darkness, are as riveting today as when they were first written.

  Lady Macbeth’s subsequent collapse, overwhelmed by the guilt she bears, is marked not just in those memorable and uncanny sleepwalking scenes when she fruitlessly washes and rewashes her bloody hands, but in her steady separation from her husband, who deals with his past by stifling all capacity to feel. At the end of the play, having performed or authorized the slaughter of countless men, women, and children, he cannot even respond to his wife’s death, seeing it only as the end of something meaningless: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Whatever its value as a protoexistential statement on the futility of life by a particular character in particular circumstances, the speech has become iconic, an emblem of the play’s durability and relevance.

  Macbeth is perhaps Shakespeare’s most atmospheric drama. From the weird sisters emerging out of the fog on the blasted heath, to the strange sounds carried on the air before Duncan’s murder, the play is stiff with dread and the scent of blood. Even when there are no sounds, the killers think they hear them, the terrible knowledge of what they have done turning to panic and apprehension:

  Macbeth: I have done the deed. Did’st thou not hear a noise?

  Lady Macbeth: I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did not you speak?

  Macbeth: When?

  Lady Macbeth: Now?

  Macbeth: As I descended?

  Lady Macbeth: Ay.

  Macbeth: Hark! Who lies in the second chamber?

  Imagined sounds give way to real ones, the pounding at the castle door that the porter imagines to be the gates of hell itself. Part of what Shakespeare does so well, of course, is the marrying of great, even mythic events, with something recognizably human, familiar, even domestic. Ordinary things—as all good thriller writers know—become crucial and telling. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking and the things she says while doing so (“Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him,” “The thane of Fife had a wife. Where is she now?”) stand out, but just as important is Macbeth’s inability to sleep at all. The act that can barely be uttered causes a breach in nature, and the world is turned upside down: hospitality becomes deadly, night that should bring rest bears only horror, and the nation itself is torn apart. Even at the end, with the tyrant dead, it is far from clear that all will be well. The crown of Scotland has passed to Malcom, about whom the play has shown us little, much of it conflicted, and the promised line of kings descended from Banquo is no nearer.

  Part of the play’s heart is the struggle to balance free will and a sense of destiny or cosmic purpose. For Shakespeare’s original audience, this might have been particularly stamped by ideas of rigid social stratification or a Calvinist sense of predestination, but there was also a powerful current in the period—the beginning of what we might call capitalist individual-ism—to take charge of one’s life decisively. So Macbeth’s decision to kill for the crown is a seizing of what the witches suggest will come to pass anyway, leaving us with the problem most thriller heroes—and ordinary people—wrestle with: when and how to act decisively, when to let things happen, and when to walk away.

  Macbeth is not a novel, of course, but a play, and as such is a must watch as well as a must read. On stage, a production invariably finds the tension, suspense, and horror, which the reader’s eye—enmeshed by tricky Jacobean diction and thick metaphor—can sometimes miss. However we experience the play, it’s clear that little in literature can match its study of political murder, its consequences, and the impulse to confront a world that seems to be conspiring against our future.

  A. J. Hartley is the Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, the editor of the performance journal,Shakespeare Bulletin, and the author of The Shakespearean Dramaturg as well as numerous academic articles on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. He is also the USA Today and New York Times best-selling author of the archaeologically inflected thrillers,The Mask of Atreus and On the Fifth Day. His What Time Devours centers on the hunt for a copy of Shakespeare’s lost play,Love’s Labour’s Won. In addition, he is the author of a fantasy adventure series, the first of which is Act of Will.

  5.

  Daniel Defoe’s

  ROBINSON CRUSOE (1719–1722)

  David Liss

  Daniel Defoe (generally thought to have been born in 1659–1661 and to have died in 1731) was a hack writer. In the world of British publishing in the late seventeeth and early eighteenth centuries, there was an explosive growth both in literacy and the popular press. Writing for money was hack writing, and most authors did it proficiently and prolifically. Defoe earned his living by writing political pamphlets (sometimes on both sides of an issue), observations on culture, histories, books on “projects” (useful innovations), and, of course, celebrated works of fiction. These generally took the form of memoirs, for there was no strong market yet for prose fiction, and his works were often believed to be about actual people. In 1719, he published the first of these,The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, one of the most influential works of fiction ever written. Thereafter, he published numerous other pseudo-autobiographies, many of which are still read today, including Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Roxana (1724). In addition to writing at an astonishing pace, Defoe also involved himself in numerous, frequently unsuccessful, business projects, including a disastrous effort to extract perfume from civet cats. He spent time in the pillories for authoring a now-famous satire, “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.” A genius who was often his own worst enemy, Defoe died in debt while hiding from creditors.

  Anyone who is not a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature would likely be surprised to learn how much ink has been spilled over the question of which book can be called the first English-language novel. The major contenders are Aphra Behn’s 1688 romance Oroonoko, Samuel Richardson’s 1740 epistolary narrative,Pamela, and, of course, Daniel Defoe’s 1719 fictional memoir,Robinson Crusoe. While all three have strong claims, my informal survey (taken over many years) suggests that most eighteenth centuryists give Defoe the prize. I find it remarkable that the first English-language novel also contains so many of the structural elements of the thriller.

  To grasp fully why Robinson Crusoe is so important, it is necessary to spend at least a moment discussing the history of the novel. Fiction, as we understand it today, developed from the prose romance (not to be confused with the romance novel), which focused on action and on broadly drawn stock characters such as knights who rescue maidens from giants (Don Quixote parodies this type of fiction). Think of a fairy tale in which you have a clear sense of character, but there is no depth. By contrast, the novel, as it takes shape over the eighteenth century, injects psychological realism into fiction, producing characters who are broad and deep, well rounded, and emotionally complex. When Defoe set out to write his first work of fiction, he was not attempting to reinvent the romance, but rather he was writing a counterfeit version of another established literary genre, the Protestant spiritual autobiography.Robinson Crusoe pretended to be a real memoir, and many people, for a long time, believed it to be so.

  Few works of fiction can claim the enduring influence of Robinson Crusoe. It spawned two sequels—now read only by the most masochistic of Defoe scholars—and countless imitators. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan, Robinson Crusoe is a character so firmly embedded in popular culture that most people can tick off elements of the story even if they’ve never read it or seen an adaptation. Everyone knows that he is cast away on an uninhabited island for a long period of time (twenty-seven years, from 1659–1686), and is befriended by a native whom he names Friday. Readers who have absorbed the story only through cultural osmosis might be surprised that Crusoe has a fair number of adventures both before his shipwreck—when he is made a slave by Barbary pirates—and after—in an extended sequence of fighting wild animals while traveling through Europe. Much of the novel is taken up with Crusoe’s spiritual musings as he learns to thank God for what he has rather than curse fate for what he does not.

  In other words, by any contemporary novelistic standards,Robinson Crusoe is unfocused and disorganized. It is also repetitive and sloppy, and Defoe as often as not will correct things he’s already written about in the text rather than going back to rewrite points he wished he’d clarified earlier. He was a phenomenally fast writer. When I first read the book in graduate school, my professor said it would likely take me more time to read it than it took Defoe to write it. He was, of course, joking, but not by much.

  And yet for all its many structural faults, Crusoe endures and has cast an indelible mark on fiction in general, and the thriller in particular. There are two principal reasons for this. The first is that Robinson Crusoe often operates on the level of what we would call today a novel of “tradecraft,” like a spy novel that derives energy from revealing to the reader secrets of a hidden world. The bulk of the action is a surprisingly engaging account of how Crusoe cultivates livestock and crops, how he makes clothes and builds shelters, how he dries his grapes and stores his rice and learns to craft basic comforts with few tools. Only an Englishman would spend as much time as Crusoe does in figuring out how to make a pot so that he might enjoy his meat boiled. The account of Crusoe’s self-reliance is what made the book such a staple of boy’s literature for so many years. There is something almost addictive about watching this character discover how to function and thrive while so completely isolated.