Thrillers " include every kind of adventure story, but for
mast people today they are divided into detective stories and undetective stories. Ars, as we have been told too often, est celare artem, which means that good craftsmanship should conceal artifice. This is true of all writing, but 'for the undetective. thriller I would add Res est celare rem, by which I mean that it is MT business of the writer to hide the fact that writing is his business. Readers are not interested in the mechanics of authorship. They do not attack their favourite stories with a better appetite by knowing how and why they were written ; any more than they increase the enjoyment of their \favourite food by the knowledge, now apparently inescapable, of its vitamin-content. A lagoon in the Pacific, however misconceived, can be pictured happily by a library- subscriber in Peckham ; but the picture loses both probability and charm if it comprehends an author on the foreshore looking up lagoons in his encyclopaedia.
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