How Michael Crichton struck fear into the bestseller list

Michael Crichton, who died yesterday, was a scientist, doctor, screenwriter; the co-creator of American television's blockbusting show ER, and a sometime film director (Coma and Westworld). Yet, it is his extraordinary popularity as a science fiction thriller writer that will ensure Crichton's name lives on in the public imagination.

Crichton wrote (initially under pseudonyms) from an early age, but it wasn't until he finally abandoned filmmaking to focus solely on novel writing in the late 1980s that he achieved extraordinary international success, most notably with the science fiction dinosaur novel, Jurassic Park, published in 1990, which later became a Steven Spielberg-directed blockbuster. This novel encapsulates everything that made Crichton one of the most distinctive genre writers of the last quarter of a century.
His own scientific background gave him an interest and, more importantly, a detailed knowledge of developments in science and technology (in Jurassic Park's case, genetics and cloning) that he could employ in what was essentially a pulp fiction framework.

Jurassic Park harks back to the fantasy adventure fiction of Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edgar Wallace, but with a contemporary spin, assisted by cutting-edge technology references made accessible for the general reader. Of course, this concoction would never have worked unless Crichton really understood the dynamics of storytelling and suspense. His books are written in a clean, elegant albeit largely anonymous prose style, of carefully constructed, pithy short chapters that he employed to beautifully modulate the pace of his tale.

After the huge success of Jurassic Park, he created a blueprint that allowed him to pick and choose from contemporary issues that interested him. Sometimes it appears that Crichton is concerned with social/cultural issues or notions of personal morality, perhaps most famously exemplified by 1994's Disclosure (one of many of his novels made into big budget Hollywood movies). Even so, the apparent topicality of exploring sexual harassment in the workplace is actually a Hitchcockian McGuffin (or, in literary terms, a red herring) to suck the reader in to what Crichton was really fascinated with. In fact, Disclosure is in reality a book about the control of cyberspace and industrial espionage between corporate business competitors. In the same way, 1992's Rising Sun was not really about culture clashes between Japan and America but vicious business deals.

Crichton took these complex and challenging ideas, made them intelligible to his increasingly gigantic, mass-market readership and kept them reading with pure fear, his leitmotif being that as technology goes out of control, violence and death are never far behind. He dispatched his characters with an aplomb that thrilled audiences who like to flirt with horror, without having to plunge headlong into its most vicious excesses. Crichton was never much interested in character - very rarely do his protagonists rise above their professions - so that the reader can be shocked and surprised by their humiliation, disgrace and demise, but is not upset for very long.

Saying so is not to denigrate Crichton - he was just interested in other things, something which became increasingly clear after his last great novel, 1999's Airframe. As he entered the 21st century he began to exhibit an increasing indifference to the mechanics of storytelling itself. Crichton dropped the pulp out of his fiction and began to focus entirely on the novels' technological underpinnings.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this would be State of Fear, which in dealing with the controversial topic of climate change was transparently a soap box for Crichton to articulate his own curmudgeonly nay-saying views on the subject. One of the few thriller novels ever to be stuffed with scientific footnotes, Crichton was at pains to list the learned articles in scientific journals he researched before putting pen to paper. The problem is, by the time you got to the bibliographical appendix, you didn't give a damn.
Looking back over his career, Crichton stands head and shoulders above the majority of his contemporaries. At his best, from 1969's The Andromeda Strain, up to and including Airframe, he managed to breathe new life into the science fiction thriller, while intelligently and articulately covering a whole slew of ideas and concepts that an ordinary bestseller-consumer would never otherwise come across. For the most part, he also did it with energy, a sly satiric humour and a command of his trade that made Crichton's work and the appearance of every new book both an event and a compulsive pleasure.