Man of mystery: Harlan Coben
Culture | Man of mystery
Harlan Coben, Netflix’s new darling, has a mystery you can solve
Why are sometimes cheesy thrillers set in Britain so utterly gripping?
The first mystery—that of a missing daughter—appeared in 2018. The second—a vanished wife—in 2020. These two were followed by a mysteriously missing husband (2021), a mysteriously revived dead husband (2024) and another mysteriously missing daughter (2026). However, as so often, the deeper mystery was less the crimes than the mysterious figure spotted hanging around them.
He could be seen in the very first mystery which, viewers learned, was “Harlan Coben’s Safe”. He was spotted in the next one, titled—with equal mystery—“Harlan Coben’s The Stranger”. He was there in the next ones, too, which were variously titled “Harlan Coben’s Stay Close”, “Harlan Coben’s Fool Me Once” and “Harlan Coben’s Run Away”. These lead to the deepest mystery of all: who is Mr Coben, and why is Netflix so obsessed by him?
The question of his identity is perhaps the easiest. Mr Coben is an American thriller writer. His spread has been viral in extent (he has sold over 100m books) and in its style (like covid-19, most did not notice him spreading until it was too late). Since last year alone, he has been behind seven series and two novels. “Harlan Coben” thus became one of those baffling word combinations, like “vibe coding” or “tokenmaxxing”, that went from meaningless to ubiquitous seemingly overnight.
He may become more so. On June 18th Netflix is releasing a series about a man imprisoned for killing his son, titled “I Will Find You”, which feels less like a promise than a threat—or perhaps a prediction, for his series have been as successful as the books. Having signed an initial deal in 2018 to develop 14 titles, Netflix has expanded it to add 12 more; Amazon and CBS have now also made Harlan Coben series.
Mr Coben’s shows offer other mysteries, too, such as: why does his name have such prominent billing, when another author called Jane Austen often has a far smaller font? Why are such quintessential American thrillers being filmed, as these are, in places such as Manchester? And above all, how do characters who have such humdrum jobs afford such astonishingly swish kitchens?
His shows have also elicited some critical bafflement, too. Though some of them, including “Stay Close”, about a cold case that suddenly heats up, received decent reviews, others have been less lauded. His recent Amazon series received a 44% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, a review-aggregator site. They have been called “twisty” and “confusing”—not without cause. Their plots are what might politely be called “eventful” and less delicately be called soap operas.
Open the episode menu for Netflix’s 2021 series “The Innocent”, for example, and over the course of four swift episodes you find yourself offered: an accidental murder (episode one); an alleged suicide (episode two) and a “mysterious nun” (episode three) who is rapidly a mysteriously dead nun. This is followed by episode four in which, as the episode summary explains, “The nun’s body is squirrelled away by federal agents, which infuriates Lorena.” Nun-corpse theft can be so annoying.
Mr Coben’s plots, then, are not Pinteresque. Yet they are not meant to be. His books are archetypal thrillers. They have dark, ominous covers (fog is a feature) and ominous straplines in the “A MISSING GIRL. A DEADLY GAME” vein. Their characters have names that sound as though they might be medical procedures (“Griffin Scope”) or possibly Cockney rhyming slang (“Larry Gandle”). Either way, they sound bad.
But they really do thrill. Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, once said there is “only one recipe for a bestseller and it is a very simple one”: you have “to get the reader to turn over the page”. Mr Coben has that gift. He tells The Economist that he likes each first sentence “to almost be a short story in and of itself”—and his are zingers. “I Will Find You”, opens with the words “I am serving the fifth year of a life sentence for murdering my own child.”
That is why people watch them. Subscribers spent about 250m hours watching “Fool Me Once” in the week it was released. It became one of Netflix’s most-viewed shows in 2024. Which leads to another of the mysteries surrounding Mr Coben, namely: why do people find stories about family tragedy so jolly? Mr Coben’s books are rich in lines like “Her jaw had been ripped out of its hinges, snapping all the tendons.” Yet his stories are widely seen as not merely compelling but even comforting (in the way bingeing on biscuits often is).
Murder, he wrote
One answer is that murder can be scrumptious. In Agatha Christie’s “The ABC Murders” Hercule Poirot and a character wonder “If you could order a crime as one orders a dinner, what would you choose?” They toy with picking robbery or forgery from the menu, then discard the idea (“too vegetarian”) before concluding that it “must be murder—red-blooded murder—with trimmings, of course”.
Family tragedy is—as Sophocles could have told you—similarly compelling. Mr Coben, who has four children, thinks that what appeals is less the tragedy than the family. He sees his stories, despite the splatter, as being about “love and family and redemption”. “If I asked you, ‘Would you kill somebody?’ you would say ‘No’,” he says. “If I ask you: ‘Will you kill someone to save your child?’ well the answer is ‘Yes’.”
The setting matters, too. Just as Greek tragedy was removed from an alarming immediacy by being set in the similar-but-different Thebes, so Mr Coben’s tragedies are set in the similar-but-different world of murder-series chic: characters have luxurious coats, cars and, of course, kitchens. It is, he thinks, “part of the fun”. (The reason they are set in Britain is more complicated: partly, suggests one industry insider, it is cost, with lower wages and tax breaks making shoots there more economical. Mr Coben has also said he likes the British sensibility and the “Downton Abbey-ish” houses.)
And as for the mystery of his name it is, in his telling, not such an enigma. The title of an early show sounded too much like the name of another series so, to differentiate, “they put my name above the title,” he says. That was somewhat to the bafflement of audiences: at the time someone tweeted that “They keep talking about Harlan Coben, but I don’t know who the hell Harlan Coben is.” They probably do now. ■
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