Thrillers

Exploring the intellectual depths of thrillers, this book delves into the minds of characters in high-stress scenarios, shedding light on their values. Fraser accompanies Jack Carter in his quest for justice in "Jack's Return Home," empathizes with Rae Ingram's ordeal in "Dead Calm," and observes Donald Hamilton's characters navigating complex relationships in works like "The Steel Mirror." Additionally, he challenges the divide between "art" and "entertainment," and reflects on his journey into the "Mushroom Jungle" of British pulp fiction. With enthusiasm and scholarly insight, he highlights the craft of storytelling, emphasizing a positive perspective.

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About

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About the Author: John Fraser
JOHN FRASER was born in North London, and has degrees from Oxford and the University of Minnesota, where he did a Philosophy minor and wrote the article on "American and British Poetics" for the first edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

From 1961 until his retirement as George Munro Professor of English, he taught at Dalhousie University. In 1990 he gave the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.

His three print books were published by Cambridge University Press. Articles of his appeared in Partisan Review, Southern Review, Yale Review, Cambridge Quarterly, Studio International, and other journals.

Reviewers found his widely noticed Violence in the Arts (1974) "both scholarly and extraordinarily interesting" (New Republic), "continuously stimulating" (Economist), "profoundly illuminating" (Psychology Today), the product of "an extremely agile and incessantly active mind which illuminates almost every subject it touches" (Spectator).

He was married to the artist Carol Hoorn Fraser (1930–1991), who is featured on his large website, www.jottings.ca

He is in Wikipedia as John Fraser (critic).
After years of intellectual nourishment from thrillers, along with the delights of suspense, Fraser explores the thought-processes of representative thriller characters coping with high-tension situations that require intelligent problem-solving and bring their values into a sharper focus.

With alert empathy, he follows Jack Carter as he hunts down his brother's killers in Ted Lewis's masterpiece Jack's Return Home ("a kind of dark English Gatsby") ; suffers along with violence-averse Rae Ingram coping alone on a small yacht with a dangerous paranoid in Dead Calm ("a philosophical thriller") by that fine Gold Medal novelist Charles Williams; and gives a lot of attention to Donald Hamilton's young professional men entangled with enigmatic young women in pre-Helm works like The Steel Mirror (1948) where he was learning his craft.

In a fourth chapter, he hacks at the wall between "art" and "entertainment" and loose talk about the "world" of the thriller. Lastly, he reminiscences about a fascinating safari that he made into the sex-'n-violence "Mushroom Jungle" (British pulp fiction ca.1946-54), and offers conclusions about violence and peace.

He avoids jargon, combines an aficionado's enthusiasm with a scholar's accuracy, quotes generously to convey the texture of a work, provides background information for readers new to the topic, and illuminates "craft" aspects of fiction in general. His emphasis throughout is positive.

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Available in the following formats: .epub, .pdf, .mobi

Price: $9.99 USD

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