In suspense novels, the action starts in a disturbing setting that gradually takes on more and more tension until the climax is reached. All is presented from a logical and rational point of view. Psychological tension builds and builds without losing sight of reality and culminating with the outcome of the drama. A character is threatened by mysterious forces and feels himself becoming caught up in trap of some sort -and the reader likewise- which slowly closes around him as he tries vainly to find a way out. The suspense novel can be regarded as a modem version of a genre whose principal characteristic is fear.

Nervous types look elsewhere
The genre is officially born with the publication in 1841 of Edgar Alan Poe' s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Poe discovered that the mystery should affect the sensitivity and reason of the reader, and the story is thus transformed into a horrible challenge that the reader cannot help himself from pressing on with. Arthur Conan Doyle was his heir in the crime novel, a narrative where reason creates fear which is then alleviated as the drama progresses. But the undisputed king of the genre is Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1906) a US writer who signed his books as either Cornell Woolrich or under the pseudonym William Irish (Rear Window, Fright, I Wouldn't be in Your Shoes, Phantom Lady). No-one matched the impact of rising anguish and tension that he managed to create. Suffice to say one of his greatest fans was Alfred Hitchcock.

High tension reads. . .
Other authors and essential stories are Ethel Lina White (Wax), Elizabeth S. Holding (The Blank Wall), Dino Buzzati, the Italian master of fear (The Desert of the Tartars), Robert Bloch, (Psycho), Dashiel Hammet (The Maltese Falcon), Raymond Chandler (The High Window and his unforgettable Marlowe), Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Blazing Sun), the romantic suspense of Mary Higgins Clark (You Belong to Me, The Cradle Will Fall), Patricia Cornwell (Post Mortem), Agatha Christie, the master of suspense (Murder on a Calais Coach), Georges Simenon (Les Fr�res Rico), G. K. Chesterton (The Man who was Thursday), Dashiel Hammet, Ellery Queen, among others.

A good initiation to the genre of suspense are the Alfred Hitchcock-selected anthologies Not for the Nervous and Stories my mother never told me. Among the authors selected by the master of film suspense are Dorothy L. Sayers, Ray Bradbury, Carter Dickson, Robert Arthur and Theodore Sturgeon. All these writers are experts in gradually building up anguish and unease in the reader, creating a tremor of fear and pleasure as the story progresses.