Place and Pace in Thriller Novels

During a 1943 parliamentary session on the rebuilding of Britain’s Commons Chamber, destroyed by a German airstrike two years earlier, Winston Churchill famously declared, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” 

(8 Tips for Creating Believable Fictional Towns.)

More than 80 years later, psychologists and neuroscientists back Churchill’s claim. We know, for instance, that the places we inhabit impact how we feel through their size, scale, form, texture, color, light, and other features, and that certain cells in the brain’s hippocampus are attuned to the arrangement and geometry of space.

As an architectural historian turned thriller writer, I’m fascinated by the varied ways authors use place and space in their stories. Settings can include geo-political entities, such as countries, states, and regions; geographic features, including mountains, jungles, and deserts; and the built environment, from modest shacks to sprawling cities. At their simplest, settings serve as the backdrop for action, the frames in which characters act and interact. 

But settings are rarely neutral places. In fact, writers across genres approach settings as highly charged spaces that inflect the mood, meaning, and symbolism of their stories, in addition to fueling tension and suspense. Often overlooked, however, is the interrelation of setting and pacing, namely, the role setting can play in driving and slowing action.

Place and pace are inextricably linked in my debut thriller, Blood Rubies, a heist gone wrong entwined with a missing person story. Set in New York and Bangkok—two of my favorite cities—the book follows Rune Sarasin, a half-American, half-Thai jewel thief thrust into the unwanted role of savior after her latest job goes sideways and her boyfriend’s sister vanishes from a dangerous slum. The book unfolds over the course of a week, a compressed timeline that contributes to the urgency of the story. It opens on Day 7 with Rune in mortal danger somewhere in Upper Manhattan before backtracking to Day 1, to the Bangkok heist that sets the plot in motion. These opening scenes not only anchor readers in time and space, but also introduce setting as a key element that moves the story forward. 

At the start of Day 1, for example, Rune dodges her mark, a gemstone trafficker hellbent on recovering his stolen rubies, and escapes the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on the back of a vintage Ducati motorbike. The ensuing chase launches readers through the Bangkok night, providing flashes of the city’s famous landmarks—the historic Charoen Krung Road, the Golden Buddha Temple, and the ornate gate marking the entrance to Chinatown. Rune’s high-speed getaway ends when she loses her pursuers on the Chao Phraya River, but the pace picks up again as the story shifts from place to place within and between Bangkok and New York, the two cities Rune calls home. 

Peers and trade reviewers have consistently remarked on the dynamism of Blood Rubies, calling the book “rocket-paced” (Lisa Unger), “incredibly fast” (Thomas Perry), “page-turning” (Alafair Burke), “propulsive” (Joanna Margaret), and “a crisp caper” (Booklist), qualities intimately linked to the way that the settings and movement between them sustain the novel’s pace.

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Rapid action sequences are most impactful when they’re set against quiet moments. Indeed, modulating pace is key to crafting any story, even action-forward thrillers. Slow sections serve as foils for fast-paced scenes, heightening their intensity through juxtaposition and contrast. Tension falls as the action slows, giving readers a chance to pause, to catch their breath, and to take in what happened before the cycle starts over again. Setting can play an important role in this process. 

One of the challenges of writing fast-paced passages is to include enough details about the setting to orient readers, but not so many as to weigh down the story. By contrast, using setting to slow the plot affords writers more leeway. Describing how a place looks, feels, sounds, and smells—and doing so lyrically—not only reins in the tempo, but also immerses readers in the spaces occupied by the characters, drawing them deeper into the narrative.

My background in architecture and urbanism makes me particularly attentive to how setting functions in fiction, both in my own work and that of others. Attending to setting was one of the best parts of writing Blood Rubies, both because of my ties to New York and Bangkok and because the cities are closely linked to Rune’s racial and cultural identity. 

Similarly, one of the joys of reading thrillers is seeing the deliberate ways that authors approach settings. Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon books are among my favorite spy thrillers because they transport me to gorgeous European locales, while also linking these locations to Gabriel’s work as an art restorer and Israeli intelligence officer. Beyond engaging plots and vicarious traveling, the appeal of the series lies in Silva’s adept treatment of settings, with plenty of quick location changes propelling the narrative. 

Setting plays an equally important role in the pacing of Elle Marr’s The Missing Sister, which moves from San Diego to Paris as the protagonist searches for her missing twin, possibly the victim of a serial killer. Marr brings Paris to life with evocative descriptions of its monuments, including the warren of catacombs beneath the city, but she also keeps the plot moving with rapid sketches of the streetscape. Such measured uses of setting abound in well-paced thrillers. 

Given the centrality of pace in the genre, this should not surprise us. More than just backdrops and atmosphere, settings can shape a story’s temporal structure and, in doing so, shape how we experience them.

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