The detective thriller offers the satisfactions of what was once called the venatic art, that is to say the world of the hunt. Identifying spoors, following tracks, connecting up phenomena to origin. And all of this without leaving the easy chair. It also allows at least for the detection and elimination of evil, in a world where evil itself so often baffles, or merely smirks triumphantly as it strolls out of court with a suspended sentence. Like the cinematic cartoon, that great invention of modernity at its best, the thriller presents us with a world we know to be untrue, since it makes all atrocity soluble, and yet it still permits the telling of types of truth within its conventions. Vivid social detail is one such: it might be there in Ian Rankin but it was there too in Conan Doyle. The London portrayed in the Sherlock Holmes stories is anarchic, exotically sinister, often far beyond the reach of social control. Crimes in the riverside wharves were as ubiquitous as rats. If this was a city of dreams, a fair number had started smokily in opium dens, and often turned out nightmarish. Only the unrelenting extremity of the detective’s intelligence, his commitment to a world of material cause and effect, could penetrate to the heart of this darkness. Such a seeker is always Theseus in the labyrinth, and his Ariadne’s thread is the line of his own evidential reasoning.

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