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A thriller has one job. To make the reader pray, at the end of every chapter, that there will be ten more pages.
That is not a glib answer. It is the answer I would give to a young writer trying to build their first thriller. My problem with structure is that I begin every novel not entirely sure where I am going. Off I set, praying each night that the good Lord will return tomorrow morning and give me permission to go on for another ten pages. So I am not the writer who can hand you an outlining template. What I can hand you is what every successful thriller has in common.
First — the problem of the protagonist must escalate. My advice – when you have a problem on the page, make it more difficult. Then the reader will wonder even more — how on earth do you get out of that? On page one, William Warwick is a constable on the beat. By the end of the eighth book, in Endgame, he is in charge of the security of the London Olympics. The stakes do not stay where they begin. They climb.
Second — the protagonist must want something specific. Not “save the world.” That is not a thriller engine. “Find my daughter.” “Get the money back.” “Stop the man who killed her.” The reader will follow a specific want for hundreds of pages. They will switch off after fifteen pages of generic peril.
Third — the antagonist must be worthy. A weak villain produces a weak thriller. The reader has to believe that the antagonist is smart enough, charming enough, dangerous enough that the protagonist might lose. You can write the cleverest hero in the world, but if the villain is a fool, the book is a children’s book. Give your villain a competence your hero lacks.
Fourth — every chapter must end on a moment that makes the reader unable to put the book down. Cliffhanger is an old word for a true thing. Eighty-one chapters in Cain and Abel, and every one of them is designed to give the reader no honest way of stopping. That is the rhythm.
Fifth — clues must be hidden. Corlies Smith again: if you are going to drop a hint, hide it in the next sentence. You write — “and he had dark hair, dark eyes, and a broken nose.” Clue, clue, clue. Then you write — “and he fell off the stool and died.” The reader remembers the falling-off-the-stool. The clue is there. They have walked past it. Two hundred pages later, when they look back, the clue was there all along. That is the trick of the thriller writer.
Sixth — the ending must make them gulp. A thriller without a gulp at the end is a chase that did not deliver. The reader has to read the last line and feel they cannot breathe.
If you do all of that, the reader gets to the end of chapter forty, prays for the next ten pages, and thanks the Lord that there are six hundred more.
That is the framework. That is what I have been doing for fifty years. The rest is sitting at the desk every morning at six o’clock and turning the hourglass until the sand has run out.
