The tragedy of the death is taken for granted, or ignored. The emotional impact on the people closest to the victim is only sketched in, or glossed over – after all, from the point of view of the plot the relatives are probably among the chief suspects.

In the more sophisticated thrillers of the modern age, the emphasis shifts and the background is ramped up. We learn of political shenanigans, of foreign powers, of secret police and secret societies, of traffickers, of rings of predatory sex perverts, of drug barons, of global corporations, of high and low life.

The psychological state of the criminal has become crucial: we become interested in the psychopathy of the serial killer, the weird obsessive life of the loner, the deadly methods of the professional assassin.

Where once the protagonist was a sleuth – a private eye, an amateur detective, a police officer working alone – now we are more likely to follow the enquiries of professionals who are to one side of the main action. The central character becomes a leading criminal lawyer, or a forensic pathologist, an academic criminologist, a journalist, a social worker.

But the existence of the dead victim, although often skilfully polished up and made subtle and unusual by the writer’s description, remains none the less a plot token. The killing provides the stimulus for the story, and the main story duly follows. The unique tragedy and dread of a sudden death is passed over quickly.

It is not the role of a thriller writer to lecture the reader on the awfulness of death. The reader anyway is not interested in that. Thrillers are written to divert, inform, create a sense of mystery or entertaining tension. People read books for pleasure, thrillers and crime novels no less.

Then there is the matter of the anticlimax.

Many thrillers or mysteries take the form of a puzzle. The inexplicable situation is the body that has been found, while the puzzle lies mainly in working out who was responsible for the killing. Suspects and motives abound. The sleuth slowly unpicks the facts. The solution is almost never obvious – the reader is snared by the idea of a puzzle, reads on, waiting for the moment of revelation.

Mystery writers are ingenious. Like the murderers they dream up, they weave a web of deception and misdirection, and also like the killers they drop occasional clues for the alert reader to seize upon – though rarely obvious enough for the reader to out-guess the author. It becomes something of a game, the writer and reader vying to come to the solution.

But isn’t the solution to a puzzle inherently unsatisfactory? A let-down, an anticlimax? The sleuth produces the astonishing truth, and we react to the cleverness or otherwise of the sleuth. We do not congratulate the murderer on his/her ingenuity, we do not pause to mourn the dead victim. We see the solution to a puzzle. We close the book.