I used to think of mysteries and thrillers in binary terms.  Mysteries, the good ones, could be packed with details crucial to the plot, while thrillers were about action, and detail just slowed things down.  Mysteries would take time to develop complex characters with realistic psychologies and motivations, while thrillers featured one-dimensional secondary characters whose only purpose was to move the plot forward.  In short, mysteries were meant for books and thrillers were meant for movies.

I know, I know, I can hear the chorus of outrage. But some of my problems with the thriller genre in book form are inevitable. Thrillers have to, well, thrill.  And that can be a hard thing to do when your only tools are words.  Description slows down action, but without description action becomes incomprehensible. How many times have you read an action scene in any genre where you can say “wow. The hero did this amazing, complicated thing, and I can picture exactly how he did it, and the whole scene moved like a greased pig”?

You might not use the phrase “moved like a greased pig”, but you get my point.  The balancing act here is incredibly difficult.  And it applies to every pillar of your thriller—characterization, exposition, atmosphere— everything.  When a thriller is up on the silver screen there are so many tools available to the writer:  a setting is established in a few seconds, a character’s motivation is shown by a quick glance, the pace is quickened with music and editing.  Most of all, the action takes only as long as the action would take, not as long as it takes to read.  The writer doesn’t, as far as description is concerned, need to worry about the words-to-action ratio. This is one of the many reasons movies do thrillers so well. The medium was made for the message, and woe be to the author who tries to compete in the thriller marketplace using only words.

Which, at last, brings me to John Hart and his latest, Iron House.  Here is a thriller that gets the balance right, and what’s more, Hart does it seamlessly.  His previous works, The King of Lies, Down River, and The Last Child were taut mysteries, and with Iron House, Hart ramps up the action without losing any of his signature backwoods-Blue-Ridge-Mountains-spookiness.

The rundown: a young man in New York wants to quit his job because he’s in love for the first time in his life and he has a job that pretty much precludes settling down and raising a family. It’s also the kind of job that you’re not allowed to quit while you’re still breathing.  But Michael (our guy) and Elena (our gal) manage to get out of the city in one piece, which is more than can be said for the folks who stood in Michael’s way.  They head south to North Carolina where Michael has a history, a sad, fragile history that is now threatened by his former associates.

I really wish I could say more (and not just because a blog that is 90% recap is dead easy to write). But while Iron House is a big, muscular thriller, that’s only because Hart has raised it on a diet of steak and potatoes. Its DNA is pure mystery, and thus it would be downright unethical of me to give away any more of the plot. Of course, Hart’s lucky I’m ethical, because that will save him from my one substantial criticism, which is about a plot/character choice he makes toward the end of the book.  Hart throws in a twist that I thought was a little like a literary ‘get out of jail free’ card, but it might have only disappointed me because up to then he had me eating out of his hand.  Kind of like complaining that the Porsche you just won doesn’t have Bose Surround Sound, but still, I wish Hart could have gone another way here.

Quibbles aside, the rest of the story is gold, and Hart gets the most points for the way he tells it. Primarily, I think he’s solved the words:action problem I mentioned, and I have no idea how he does it. Very early there is a twelve page action sequence that just blows past, but somehow in those twelve pages we get massive amounts of action, exposition, and character development, all feeding off each other.  Michael blasts his way out of a house and I can picture every hallway, the face of every thug, the way Michael holds his gun, all with an economy of words that is just, well, exactly the balance an action scene needs.  I haven’t seen any reference to music in Hart’s background, but his action reads like he has a natural understanding of tempo, the beats and rests moving the reader along, pushing and pulling without exhausting.

Pacing does come in various scales, and Hart has figured out the macro as well as the micro. The revelations aren’t all piled up in the last thirty pages (if they were, the last thirty pages would be crammed.  There are a lot of character and plot threads in this book).  Hart doles them out, giving you payoffs throughout that let you have ‘aha’ moments without diffusing the tension.

And I haven’t even got to the characters yet.  Michael could have been a force-of-nature, terminator type, but instead we get a variation of the wounded hero, a Fisher King with a glock. This is the core theme of Iron House.  All the protagonists are profoundly damaged.  I’m not talking ‘couldn’t get a date for the prom’ damaged.  These people are all Two Hour Oprah Special Presentation material.  The word ‘raw’ is overused, but these folks are it, and they’re it without dragging the plot down into the maudlin or sentimental.  After all, this is a thriller about a mob hit man who goes on the run and finds himself in the middle of a high profile multiple mur... uh-oh, almost got unethical there.

If you’re looking for an author mash-up to describe Iron House, here goes:  Take the moody atmosphere of Giles Blunt, throw in the hard edges and complex characters of John LeCarre, and put them in a muscle car built by Lee Child.

Vroom vroom.

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Please check out the Indigo Fiction Blog tomorrow my interview with the author of Iron House, John Hart.