This is the first part of a two-part interview.

Patrick Anderson of The Washington Post has my dream job. As I mention to him in the interview, he gets to do what I would love to do: Get paid to read mysteries and thrillers and then write what I think.

But I figure if I can’t have his job the next best step is to read his book, Triumph of the Thriller, and interview him about the book and his job. His book is an exploration of my favorite genre, mysteries, and he dishes the dirt on who is really bad along with who is really good. He also tackles an issue that has always fascinated me: Why the literary establishment fails to consider the mystery as “real” literature.

Anderson's reviews run on Mondays in The Washington Post. More often than not he and I are reviewing some of the same books. We share opinions on some of the writers he cites as great and those who are underwhelming.

He has been gracious enough to wait to do this interview until I finished some personal work first.

Scott: What is it about the mystery and crime novels that so fascinates readers?

Patrick: It’s a combination of things. People have always loved suspense, going back to the Holmes stories and Agatha Christie and many others. In the last half century, as a lot of “literary” fiction has become increasingly murky, people have turned to crime fiction and thrillers because they stress plot and storytelling. And in the last twenty years or so, as thrillers have become more popular, more and more of the best young writers have been drawn to them, because that’s where the action is and the big paydays. Dennis Lehane is one example among many. So the quality of the writing is far superior today to what it was in the past.

Scott: What was your intent with this book?

Patrick: Five years ago The Washington Post asked me to review crime fiction and thrillers each Monday. Over the years, I’d read a lot in the genre for pleasure – John D. MacDonald, Michael Connelly, Lawrence Sanders, Elmore Leonard and various others – but as I went deeper into current thrillers, two things became clear to me. First, that they’d become the mainstream of American popular fiction. This wasn’t always the case. Go back to the Fifties or the Sixties and it was James Michener, Jackie Susann, Herman Wouk and the like.

But look at the bestseller lists today any Sunday and crime fiction and thrillers dominate the list. Some are good, some are terrible, but that’s what people are reading. And I didn’t think enough attention had been paid to that fact and why it had come about. The second thing I noticed was that there was some tremendous talent at work in thrillers and I didn’t think enough attention had been paid to them, either.

So I wrote The Triumph of the Thriller to discuss the genre in general and some of its outstanding practitioners.