Waiting for a Pioneer

The Development of the Dutch Thriller

By Gijs Korevaar

A writer’s success can, to a certain degree, be determined by his sales figures. By this token, Saskia Noort stands head and shoulders above the rest. Of her three books that have been published so far, more than 750,000 have been sold, which means that there is a Saskia Noort book in almost one in every ten houses in The Netherlands. It is the tip of the iceberg. Behind her, authors are lined up: old hands, beginners, young women, middle-aged men. Together they produce about fifty thrillers a year, all with one thing in common: they are sparsely translated and therefore unknown abroad, unknown and therefore unpopular.

When it comes to The Netherlands foreigners know all about coffee shops, windmills, and dikes, but that’s it. ‘The Dutch have heard of New York and Washington. They see them on television, they read about them in the newspaper. But Americans know nothing about Holland. And even if they have heard about Amsterdam, then they still never see anything of it on television. That is why the Dutch are behind in America and why we are ahead in Europe,’ concluded the American bestselling author James Patterson when he visited The Netherlands.

But the Dutch thriller is versatile and has everything it takes to make an international breakthrough. The genre has grown tremendously over the past decades, and goes beyond mere sales figures. Since 1986 there has been an award for the best Dutch thriller of the year: the ‘Gouden Strop’, or Golden Noose.

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