When the thriller writer Robert Ludlum died in March 2001, several of his obituarists tellingly recalled the reaction of a Washington Post reviewer to one of the author's many, phenomenally popular novels: 'It's a lousy book. So I stayed up until 3am to finish it.' This anecdotal, tongue-in-cheek confession neatly captures the ambivalence associated with a hugely successful mode of crime writing, a guilty sense that its lack of literary merit has always somehow been inseparable from the compulsiveness with which its narrative pleasures are greedily gobbled up, relegating the thriller to the most undeserving of genres. To describe a thriller as 'deeply satisfying and sophisticated' (to pluck a blurb at random from the bookshelves) is already to beg the insidious question: how satisfying and sophisticated can it be?