Dude of the day cooks up thriller of the day

"QUESTION: When you wipe a slate clean, what do you end up with? Answer: A blank slate. Alternative answer: Freedom. The burdenless life you've always craved. But when you're finally confronted with that freedom - that blank slate - you feel nothing but fear. Because freedom - of the absolute, no strings variety - is like staring into an uncharted void; a realm without structure."

The hero of The Big Picture has a distinct fondness for elaborately punctuated musings on the nature of identity and responsibility - as well he might, having just speared his wife's lover with a beer bottle, shoved him in a freezer and made off with his identity, his trust fund and his Nike runners.

Luckily for us readers, Ben Bradford, aka Gary Summers, doesn't have much time for musing. Before his moment of murderous epiphany he's far too busy being a happily married yuppie lawyer who commutes from his antique laden suburban house and insomniac baby to his dull city job; after it, he's too busy faking his own death in a sailing accident, tying up loose ends and creating a new life for himself as a professional photographer in Montana.

If it all seems like reasonably standard thriller fare, try this for thrilling: Douglas Kennedy (yes, the Douglas Kennedy who used to manage the Peacock Theatre who used, in fact, to write a column for The Irish Times) has sold the US rights to The Big Picture for $1.1 million, with the major motion picture to follow from Fox 2000 and a follow up blockbuster due to land with a satisfying thwack on his editor's desk in September. He is even being spoken of as the new John Grisham - a considerable compliment on a planet where more people buy books by John Grisham than by any other author.

Meanwhile, back at The Big Picture, the big question is: what has Kennedy done to achieve such fame, land fortune? It would be nice to report that he has broken new ground or invented a new genre or cooked up a new formula - but if he has, the recipe is far too subtle for this reviewer to figure out.

How to write a million buck book? Begin with a central character who happens to be a lawyer. This allows you to stir in all sorts of gloriously intimidating legal detail and also, of course, to savour the peppery existential dilemmas which result when a lawyer - of all people - gets on the wrong side of the law. If, like Kennedy's, your chap develops both a nice line in salty asides and a decidedly soft centred weepie streak, so much the better.

You need to be generous with the hiphop street speak, sprinkling on plenty of such mouth watering phrases as "boychik" and (I love this one) "dude du jour". And you need to be able to produce from your writer's store cupboard, at the drop of a hat, lists of the trendiest names imaginable in a variety of product areas from computers to Americana to photographic equipment. The occasional knowing reference to Bridges of Madison County doesn't seem to go amiss, either.

Of course it's not as simple as that, or we'd all be doing it. Kennedy has been brave enough to accept the somewhat sullen parameters of the Grisham-esque thriller and stick to them resolutely, even when they conflict with his own natural exuberance as a writer. Of Kennedy the author of three well received travel books, for example, there is little or no sign here - on the contrary, faced with the magnificence of Montana, he limits his descriptive passages to the sternly prosaic.

"Cold within, cold without. And on the horizon, the most glacial vista imaginable - the menacing, forbidding silhouettes of the Grand Tetons. Craggy summits scraping the sky at thirteen thousand feet, arrogant in their austerity. There was nothing inviting or user friendly about these peaks. They had an old Testament demeanour: solemn, fateful, unforgiving. They dwarfed you."

Nobody, of course, expects or wants thrillers to win literary prizes. The Big Picture does what most thrillers set out to do: produce enough twists and turns of plot and flashes of wry humour to provide an amiable reading experience. It does so, furthermore, without the use of extensive violence or mindless misogyny or perverted sex. Hats off to Douglas Kennedy, unquestionably the dude du jour.