His style and technique have been compared to literary predecessors from Gothic Victorianism (Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein [1818]), detective fiction (the popular narrative style of Edgar Allan Poe in "The Purloined Letter" [1845] and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" [1841] and Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes series), adventure fiction (H. Rider Haggard's
King Solomon's Mines [1886]), and science fiction (Jules Verne's
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [1869]). Crichton acknowledged to Andrea Chambers for a 1981 article, "All the books I've written play with preexisting literary forms."
Critics generally agree on three aspects of Crichton's work: their realism comes from great attention to detail; the creation of suspense relies on short, episodic plot structures and overlapping story lines that draw readers into the conflicts; and finally, their weak character development leads to the common observation that his fiction gives more life to the story and to the technical details than to humans. As Elizabeth A. Trembley notes about Crichton's science fiction, "readers remember the diseases, the computer implants, and the horrifying monsters in detail.
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