Thriller Instinct

David Baldacci needed to figure out a way to kill the head of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. In the past, he'd turned to MP5 submachine guns, knives, pistols, lethal injections and a custom-built semiautomatic SR75 rifle. But inside the vaults of the Library of Congress, guns and daggers were hard to come by, and so Baldacci had to be creative. Baldacci is a novelist, and so his license is great, but he likes to do things right. He followed Mark Dimunation, the library's head of rare books, past a collection of early American medical texts and up to the mezzanine, where children's books are housed. At the top of the stairs Baldacci patted the head of a small marble bust and then walked into the middle of the narrow room, unsure, exactly, of what he was looking for. Suddenly he spotted a gas nozzle on the wall between the tall, tightly packed shelves. "What's that?" he asked.

The nozzle did its dastardly deed on page 38 of "The Collectors," one of Baldacci's immensely successful political thrillers. Jonathan DeHaven, the fictional head of the Rare Book collection, dies of carbon-dioxide poisoning after the killer swaps a canister of Halon 1301—the gas used at the time as the fire suppressant inside the vaults—with the deadly CO2. (The murder originally took place even earlier in the story, but Baldacci decided to grant Dimunation's alter ego a few more pages "for being such a nice guy.") Baldacci tells this story, three years later, with a boyish delight. He's back at the Library of Congress, visiting a curator who helped him understand the inner workings of the library—and, as always, he's on the lookout for plot devices for the novels he cranks out about twice a year.

"Who would have thought of setting a spy operation at the Library of Congress?" Baldacci asks, bouncing his leg as he speaks. Actually, a number of authors: think of "The Da Vinci Code," "The Rule of Four" or "The Secret History." But it does take some swagger to write about a team of misfits—an obsessive-compulsive technological genius, an ex–Defense Intelligence Agency employee who's a recovering addict, a mousy Library of Congress curator and a rogue government "eliminator"—cracking conspiracy after conspiracy. "The Collectors," the second book in Baldacci's Camel Club series, was a bestseller. This, for Baldacci, is not unusual. All 16 of his novels (including two nonthrillers) have been New York Times bestsellers. His latest, "Divine Justice," debuted at No. 1, six months after "The Whole Truth" did, too. It's probably safe to look for his next, "First Family," on the list when it hits stores in late April.

Critics rarely take Baldacci's novels seriously. The reviews of his books (when they're reviewed at all) can be nasty: "The Winner," "full of mixed metaphors and malapropisms, often reads like an exercise by someone trying out a language he is not entirely at home with," wrote a New York Times reviewer. Many people (especially New York Times readers) don't take Baldacci seriously, either. David Baldacci: isn't he the guy in the airport bookstall displays? For the most part, mass-market thrillers are treated like fast food: tasty, perhaps, but banal and bad for the heart. This is the kind of thought that exasperates Baldacci. "If I spent 10 years on a book, could I be as good as x? I don't know," he says. "The only thing I regret is that people set this up into warring camps." In a country where an estimated one third of the population reads at a basic or below-basic level, he says, maybe the ability to put books in the hands of so many is a kind of public service. "Most people associate reading with laying on the beach," he says. "They don't see that it's crucial for a democracy!" (He puts his money where his mouth is: Baldacci has a literacy foundation, and on the last page of some editions of his paperbacks there is an ad for a help line "if you or someone you know wants to improve their reading skills.")

The suggestion that reading a thriller is a kind of civic obligation is questionable, to say the least, and there are plenty of people who dispute that reading potboilers encourages an engagement with more-demanding texts. But Baldacci has a point: there is something thrilling about the hunger for what lies on the next page, and it seems more absurd to suggest that enjoying a thriller harms a person than it does to suggest that it helps him. In these stressful times, Baldacci offers a break—and people who care about books should care about him. Whether or not thrillers are crucial for democracy, they are certainly crucial for publishers. Where a more literary book might be considered a success if it sells 50,000 in hardcover, a novel by a writer like Baldacci can sell more than a million. In any given week, about a third of the top-selling books are thrillers. The king of the bestseller lists is James Patterson, who has had 19 consecutive books hit No. 1 in The New York Times in hardcover; he publishes so frequently that he relies on a team of collaborators. "I do think that the most successful publishing programs are those that have authors—often authors whom they've built over the year—who publish consistently and sell hundreds of thousands of copies," says Jamie Raab, the publisher of Grand Central Publishing, the imprint of Hachette Book Group that publishes Baldacci's books. "If you have that as the foundation of your publishing house, you have the freedom to experiment in other areas." Hachette—which publishes several megaselling writers, including Patterson and the "Twilight" juggernaut—has been particularly good at this, and as a result was able to give every employee a year-end bonus in 2008 while other houses were reorganizing and firing.

What makes a thriller work is a million-dollar question, but why they matter is more than an economic concern. Baldacci's prose might be clumsy (a typical Baldacci line: "As with scissors, one should avoid running with a loaded gun while the safety was off"), but if anyone could do it, more people would. On the most basic level, a thriller works if it can persuade the reader to turn the pages as fast as possible. The easiest way to get someone to keep reading is to withhold information expertly, but a blockbuster has to offer more than just suspense. Like other thriller writers, Baldacci depends on a mixture of inventive plotting, appealing characters, luck and consistency. Unlike others, his books rely more on characters' relationships than whiz-bang technology or procedural twists. Baldacci is more likely to set a scene in the Washington suburbs than a submarine (though any thriller worth its name has a decent armory), and the courtroom is rarely the site for drama (though, as a former lawyer, Baldacci usually includes a little law and order). What he offers is in some ways more unusual.

To be sure, his books feature presidents and spin and spies and secrets, and his Washington is a place where an unmarked van is always down the block and an assassin usually lurks nearby. But his heroes are often accidental. Rarely rich, brilliant or handsome, they're no James Bond. They're awkward in love, paranoid and they have imperfect pasts. Some of them would rather be watching "Monday Night Football" than saving the leader of the free world, but such is their plight. In Baldacci's Washington, outsiders are forever coming to the rescue—which may explain why Washington insiders, as well as those beyond the Beltway, read Baldacci's books. Nobody wants to be from Washington, but everybody wants to be a hero. With 75 million copies in print worldwide since he began publishing in 1996, it's clear that Baldacci appeals to a common denominator with a common touch.

"You came at an interesting time. I'm in the last lap of a new book," Baldacci says, sitting in his office suite's library in Reston, Va., on a drizzling December morning. Interesting, perhaps, but not at all unusual. Baldacci writes a book every seven months or so. It's a punishing pace for someone who does his own research and writing. (Baldacci has three full-time employees—an assistant, an office manager and the head of the literacy foundation. Family chips in, too; that morning, his father-in-law sat at a massive wooden table in the conference room addressing envelopes for an online book-signing session.) His working style is intense. "I had this mentor, a trial lawyer—he was the best on his feet I'd ever seen," Baldacci says. "He was a chain smoker, all that, and incredibly anxious. Before every trial, he'd go into the bathroom and throw up. But when the time came, he was so eloquent. And I would look at him, amazed, thinking, you were just puking. And for me, it's a similar thing. I'm scattered, and then that last hundred pages, bam, I'm a laser." And when one is done, it all begins again—so that when the reader turns that last page, there's another new first page waiting. "You've finished a book, and now he comes up with a new book, and boom," says his agent, Aaron Priest. "I think, where the hell did you come up with this?"