A good thriller is like a layer cake—stack upon stack of delicious goodness that infuses social meaning apart from the plot. I learned to write my debut thriller, MULTO, like a layer cake the hard way.

Novelists have always tackled social issues. Books such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) are called social novels. The former denounces Victorian London’s inhumane treatment of the poor, while the latter depicts Dust Bowl migrants facing unjust labor conditions in California.

Today social novels don’t necessarily carry the gravitas of Steinbeck or Dickens. Readers identify books such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears as genre fiction. Their primary function is to entertain, not to shape opinions despite the social issues they tackle.

Walter Mosley, one of my favorite authors, explained it best. At the 2023 ThrillerFest held in New York City, Mosley said he uses mystery “to explain what’s wrong with the world.” “A book worth its salt is something other than the story and plot,” he added.

Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress explores racism faced by African Americans and political corruption in Los Angeles after World War II. It’s a great example of how effective genre fiction is in presenting a social commentary.

Immigration Thriller

Devil in a Blue Dress and the other genre novels mentioned above are popular because they don’t preach. This little fact escaped me when I first wrote the manuscript that became my novel Multo, meaning ghost in Tagalog. The book follows a Filipino American bounty hunter looking for the only quarry that has ever eluded him, an undocumented, biracial Filipina who can disappear like a ghost.

As a recent immigrant, the subject of immigration is close to my heart. It’s only natural that my novel focuses on the struggles and aspirations of immigrants, legal and undocumented alike.

For years I toiled on my manuscript from the perspective of Monica, the undocumented Filipina who overstays in the United States in pursuit of her American Dream: her white father who doesn’t know she exists. The father, an Air Force general, wants no political scandal. He hires a bounty hunter named Domingo to apprehend Monica and take her to immigration authorities for deportation.

The manuscript was universally rejected by literary agents who deemed it “uncommercial.”

It took many years before I rewrote the story from the point of view of the bounty hunter. Changing my novel’s narrator organically revamped the tone and pace of the manuscript. Multo became a thriller.  It tells the same story but more effectively because it no longer preaches.

Read the full article I wrote in Publisher’s Weekly

Why Genre Fiction is So Effective in Tackling Social Issues

Read another article on writing:

Thinking of Writing in Multiple Genres? 3 Things to Remember