Richard Mabry | I LOVE A MYSTERY…OR IS IT A THRILLER OR SUSPENSE?

For most of my adult life I was physician, but I never thought of myself as a
writer. Even though I had a number of professional papers published and turned
out a number of textbooks, I had no desire to do non-medical writing—never even
considered it. But, that changed.

After the death of my first wife I set about trying to learn enough about the writing profession to put together the non-fiction book that eventually became THE TENDER SCAR. It was during this time that I received a challenge casually issued by a couple of published authors at a writer’s conference I attended: “You should try your hand at fiction.” Although my primary aim remained writing a non-fiction book to help others go through what I’d experienced, I decided to take up the gauntlet they threw down. After all, how hard could it be?

Well, I learned that it’s really hard. But after four years of study, writing,
revising, and suffering rejections, I got my first offer. Along the line I
needed to come up with a catch phrase, something to put on my cards, words that
characterized what my fiction was about. An acquaintance shared this: “Medical
suspense with heart.” I thought it sounded nice, so I adopted it, and never
looked back.

After producing ten published novels and three novellas I discovered that what I
was writing wasn’t always medical suspense. Sometimes it produced a rapid pulse
and cold sweats in the reader, like a thriller. At other times my plot was like
a mystery, and had readers scratching their collective heads wondering, “Who
done it?” So I decided to take a second look at the distinction among thrillers,
suspense, and mystery.

In a mystery, the protagonist or hero is trying to solve a riddle: who is the bad guy, what did they do, where is the hiding place? In suspense, something bad is going to happen, but the hero (and sometimes the reader) doesn’t know exactly what and/or when. And thrillers are novels that place the main character in jeopardy from early in the story, inciting various emotional responses from the reader. To put it another way, as has been said elsewhere, “It isn’t a story until something goes wrong.” And that’s what I try to do in my novels and novellas.

So what do I write? The definitions are fairly self-evident, but the genres may
intersect, overlap, or all be present in the same book. And so what’s the
answer? I guess I write medical mystery/suspense/thriller novels. But whatever
you call them, I suppose it works because people like to read them. And that, in
the end, is the goal of all novelists.

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