There ain't no second chance against the thing with forty eyes

The prototypical Indiana Jones story sits comfortably towards the Thriller end of the Action-Adventure form. Raiders is almost top-to-bottom a hunt for and a chase after the biblical McGuffin. The tension is there from the beginning.

I should note I'm using "Thriller" here as a term for a certain story structure. As a genre, it ranges from intimate and claustrophobic portraits of psychological disintegration to explosive non-stop action. So leave aside the implications of creeping horror, gothic decay, festering family secrets and bad endings. Or terse conversations in techno-babble as submarines clash under the Arctic ice, for that matter.

Anyhow.

You can construct that same kind of Raiders plot around a stash of gold, or anything else worth killing over. But the size of the stakes are in inverse proportion to how close you adhere to reality; the really world-shattering stakes are easier when the thing has magical properties.

Clarke's Third Law-compliant, or not.

Not to say it can't be done. A surprising choice in the "third" Tomb Raider movie (the one based on the 2013 reboot) is that the world-threatening thing in Queen Himiko's tomb is the still-viable pathogen in her corpse.

Another one that doesn't -- quite -- reach for magic is Greg Benford's Artifact, with the globe-level threat something the physicist-author describes as "quarks on the human scale." However, even though this is found on an archaeological dig in the tomb of King Theseus and gave rise to the Minotaur myth, the puzzle-solving part is done in a high-energy physics laboratory.

Which leads to a basic observation; it is better to think of these not as archaeological adventures, but as the adventures of an archaeologist. We're back in Dick Francis territory. And where it may be reasonable for a jockey to get involved in a murder mystery happening at the horse races, having the final chase just happen to be on horseback puts us on the slippery slope towards Gymkata.

But I need to make a distinction between "Archaeologist" (a real-world job description) and "Archaeologist-Adventurer"; a character archetype that appears in certain works.

An archaeologist is a Dick Francis character. It is Christmas Jones or Gordon Freeman; it is an everyman hero who has that branch of anthropology in their CV. 

However, the skillset of an Adventure Archaeologist are those of an Adventurer. Flying planes and fisticuffs; all the stuff that will be the actual bulk of the story, and the stuff that for all practical purposes is what really progresses the plot. Both Everyman and Adventurer go through the same events but the flavor is different.

And that might be as useful a distinction as that between Mystery and Thriller. I'm going to call these the Adventure and the Thriller poles. The Adventure protagonist is trained for the job and plunges in, with some degree of confidence. The Thriller protagonist is pushed by the plot. They may squeak through, they may rise to the occasion. They usually take a few lumps and they may even fail.

Both have their moments of power fantasy. The Adventurer is a fantasy of being powerful (and usually fighting threats that are scaled appropriately). The Everyman is a fantasy that you, too, might do as well in the situations those protagonists face. It is considered a character easier for the audience to inhabit.

And that's why it felt so off for Penny to be collecting those skills for herself. It is always a little awkward, trying to level up the hero a bit, or even let them glow up, like Chuck finally becoming a trained spy able to hold his own with Sarah and Adam.

I got myself into a weird corner where I wanted to go more real but couldn't justify Penny surviving. 

Not with the situations she would be "realistically" running into. Doing a mostly off-screen Training Montage and making her now able to hold her own in a fist fight felt...wrong. 

I compromised by throwing her in the driver's seat of as many hot vehicles as I could come up with, plus giving her a handful of ninja throwing stars, lock picks, anything I could let her train up on. In short, justifying every one of these skills and showing the work she put in, so she never looked like some kind of Mary-Rey-Palpatine-Sue. 

But the emotional truth of a Thriller plot is that the hero survives regardless of their level of skill. Often the thriller will lampshade this. In the sequel to Preston and Child's Relic, the protagonist gets told to step aside for a much more competent squad of Navy SEALS. Who promptly get killed, leaving him alone to save the day anyhow. In Die Hard II, the professionals who take over the airport terrorism problem are, actually, part of that same problem -- and now McClane has to fight them, too.

Same principle as what TVTropes calls "Conservation of Ninjitsu." Or, as the unusually astute castle guards note in Guards! Guards! the fact that there's many of you and one of him means it might be a good idea for you to think twice. (They were wrong in this instance, but right in general principle. The Discworld runs on narrativium.)

So there's a reason I kept trying to push her emotions, thinking I was putting tension back in. Why I worked to back her down from where her climbing skills progressed to where she could be properly terrified climbing Notre-Dame de Paris, not traipsing along the parapet like she was Simon Nogueira.

The central conceit of the series is that Penny is an Everyman who keeps being thrown into situations that belong to an Adventurer. It it just a better story, I think, if she continues to muddle through. It was a mistake trying to train her up.

It also feels better to me, more in line with what appears to be the strengths of the concept, when Penny saves herself with a skill but it isn't the skill that you'd expect. Shooting back at the bad guys, not so good. Using a bronze-age sling to good effect, though... (She didn't do that one; Graham did. But point made.)

It should also be clear that "real" and "fiction" don't track in any way to the difference between the Joe Schlub and the ex Green Beret. Both are character archetypes that diverge from reality. 

That strong emphasis I was building in of "things don't work that way" (archaeology, history, but also fisticuffs) is there for the plot and for the joke. The world is conveniently real when it is inconvenient for the hero (and vice-versa). At most, you can say some things are more fictional than others. A famed globe-trotting adventurer who speaks seven languages is supposed to be recognized in-universe as a ludicrous fiction. A cold, scared, self-described "ex-dancer" who takes out a fully-grown yakuza in a fist fight is just...really lucky.

***

So what else does Thriller do that should work, and possibly has worked, for this series?

I've touched before on the aspect of control. The thriller is largely the villain (or events) in the driver's seat. The Action end of the pool has the hero making active choices; picking the fight, pushing after the villain.

I played with this in the Athens book. In Penny's mind, she is running scared and she only escapes several attempts on her life through sheer luck. But in the mind of Outis, she is the dogged pursuer, batting aside every attempt he makes to stop her and getting closer with every day. 

Mystery takes it one step further, where, aside from the bad guy escaping, the Detective is firmly in control through the whole thing.

You could also say that the Action hero wins and the Thriller protagonist survives. They scrape by, taking damage and sometimes even failing in the end. 

But this is old territory. What else does Thriller do?

Says one list; a clear thread, high stakes, twists (and also dynamic characters, memorable locations, and action).

I began this whole discussion with how Penny seems to have too little skin in the game (which isn't exactly what they are talking about with a clear thread, but I think it connects). I also mourn how many of the plots are slow starters, and how so many end up feeling unclear. The Mystery improves on that as well as there is a mystery that needs to be solved. It may open up the stakes into a larger mystery (often does) but there's something that is keeping the protagonist engaged from the start.

As several resources have pointed out, it has to matter. A rule sometimes broken; Holmes takes on cases for the intellectual challenge and would be depressed if he never found the solution. Travis, on the other hand, as much as he professes to be doing it to pay for his own peculiar retirement ("on the installation plan," he calls it) is almost always personally involved. Sometimes dangerously so.

The detective falls for the dame far too often. But even Sam Spade had a partner to avenge.

Perhaps, given the confusion between more action-based works where the heroes have to break into a heavily-guarded facility or stop a madman with a bomb, and the on-the-run style, where the hero has to not get caught and/or killed, it is best to think of there being a clear vector. Which way it points is unimportant.

Possibly the most dangerous thing to do is remove it. I did that in the Athens book; after the bombing, Penny thinks she is off the case. I repeated this almost exactly in the London book, and I actually gave a false ending in the Paris book where the treasure hunt appears to be over. (Not only that, she turned away from the treasure hunt a full third of the book before that.)

That vector doesn't need a face. It does make for a stronger thriller if there is an actual villain. The writer's resources don't talk pro or con on that, but they do have much to say about how soon you need your villain to show up.

Stakes comes with the territory of it being personal. I'm plotting the New Mexico book right now and I had Penny choosing to try to find out more about the body because, well, she'd personally dug it up. But her only skin in that game is the dig was shut down because of it and her former employers are not happy with her. It doesn't become truly personal for her until someone she knows is killed.

The London book squeaked by, I think, because of an alchemical connection* formed between Linnet (the diary-writer) and present-day Penny. She needs to find the end of Linnet's story because it in a way has become her story.

*(Borrowing the phrase from a review of Turandot.)

As I said above, this urgency, and this clear direction, can be there regardless of the outward form. They can both be there in a Romance (and the stakes as well, says he writing this draft on Valentine's Day).

I do find it interesting that deep and complex characters are getting mentioned as part of Thrillers. I suspect they are talking more about the psychological thrillers, because you don't need a complicated back story and deep hang-ups to flee from a crop-duster. Mystery and the kind of thriller where twelve people are trapped in a lonely mansion and start dropping one by one are ones where figuring out motives and navigating the tangled landscape of potential allies or betrayers can take up a big chunk of the story.

I find it troubling that location is also singled out. Perhaps Thriller isn't the safe-haven from the dreaded info-dump that I thought it was.