A compulsive need to examine broken behaviour patterns and take an adrenaline ride through the twists and turns of crime fiction fascinates us all with the genre!

Psychological thrillers and crime fiction have become the world’s leading choice in genre for books as well as movies. The NYT Bestsellers list typically has a high percentage of thrillers, while a big chunk of TV and Movie programmes on Netflix and Amazon is also in the crime and thriller genre.

For some of us, nothing can beat the excitement of having a good psychological thriller to look forward to reading or watching. What accounts for our obsession with thrillers? Why do we have this unsatiated thirst to be acquainted with cold-blooded murderers — mothers who kill babies, men who lead duplicitous lives, children who are abused and grow up to be emotionless serial killers?

I have observed a wariness in people admitting to being fans of the crime genre. Their obsession with the genre scares them; they wonder if there is something wrong with them. However that is not so. Psychiatrists opine that far from being criminally inclined, those who read about crime are generally people with a high empathetic factor.

Humans have always had a morbid fascination for and curiosity about violence and calamity. We are all used to certain patterns of life and human behaviour and get upset when there is a disturbance in that pattern. It is this that fires our need to understand what lies behind broken minds and morally ambiguous humans who think nothing of crossing the lines we set ourselves.

While reading or watching crime fiction, we automatically and invariably align oursleves on one side or the other. We relate either to the victim or the detective, and in many cases with the criminal as well. It all depends on how the author chooses to narrate the story. If it is a story told from the viewpoint of the criminal, wherein we can understand and empathise with the factors and tragedies in the person’s life that have led to the crimes, we may find ourselves sympathising with him/her too as a victim of circumstance. Such a viewing opens up new perspectives in the field of human study and can be endlessly fascinating.

Thrillers engage the intellect too. Authors set the ground for the crime, introduce the characters and build the story up to a crescendo. Then they start plotting clues which we pick up as we move along the story. We all love to play detectives and as the story moves along, we play a guessing game picking up on clues and feel a sense of achievement if we happen to deduce right.

The twists and turns of the thriller keep our adrenaline flowing and activate a part of our brains that is normally not stimulated. This sets off chemicals that have us feeling euphoric, and the feeling can be very addictive. The exposure to dangerous situations, the twists and turns of the story, the edge-of-seat drama give a real life experience to readers and viewers in a controlled environment – almost like the thrill you feel on a rollercoater ride. So, without any danger to self, you can enjoy all the adrenaline flow and excitement of a real life drama in a vicarious manner.

Going inside the heads of characters who are downright evil, or at best morally ambiguous, is a thrilling adventure in itself. We discover angularities and depths to human character that we would never, or seldom, be exposed to in real life. We are made aware of situations and the vagaries of the human mind and the dark alleys it can traverse in a manner that takes us through the wide expanse of human emotions.

After much anxiety, fear, anger and confusion and a lot of edge-of-seat excitement, we come across a shocking twist – sometimes several – and then the tension is released in a feeling of exhilaration, leaving us on a moral highground with justice well served. In fact so intense are the emotions during the reading or watching of such a story that the ending leaves one emotionally vacant and unable to read or watch anything else for a while.

So, in all, the fascination for crime thrillers stems from the thrill of the vicarious entertainment and the intellectual rush of participating in a mystery that you almost feel you have helped unravel, apart from a deeper understanding of what makes the human mind function, soar, click or break.