A ThrillerFest panel last week tackled this question: “Can a thriller be both exciting and smart?” Participants included authors Linwood Barclay, Joseph Finder, Kathleen George, Andrew Gross, Andrew Pyper and Matt Richtel. David Liss moderated the panel.

During the discussion, the participants picked Dennis LeHane‘s Shutter Island, Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, and William Landay‘s upcoming Defending Jacob as their favorite smart thrillers.

Below, we’ve included five tips for writing smart thrillers from the discussion.

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Macmillan has created a new online community for crime fiction and nonfiction readers, CriminalElement.com.

Here’s more from the press release: “At launch there will be excerpts, original fiction and articles by authors Joseph Finder, Steve Hamilton, Rosemary Harris, Charles Ardai, Luis Alberto Urrea and more…CriminalElement.com is ‘publisher neutral,’ meaning that it will include author participation from all publishers and other content creators, and is not exclusive to Macmillan authors.”

Crime writers from any publisher can submit original short stories and pre-release excerpts to senior manager Liz Edelstein. This site will also have a Facebook page and Twitter page.

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With 6.5 million copies of Dan Brown‘s “The Lost Symbol” coming out on September 15, publishing folks are looking towards what some call “DBDay” with a mixture of anticipation and fear.

Former Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson interviewed a number of publishing types for The Daily Beast, giving an inside glimpse at expectations for the novel. Thriller author Joseph Finder worried that the book will influence his sales, and Nelson projected that other writers “prefer to scuttle like cockroaches” than face Brown’s book on the bestseller list.

Here’s an excerpt from the essay: “[I]f I were ‘Into the Wild’ author Jon Krakauer, whose long-awaited book about Pat Tillman, ‘Where Men Win Glory,’ is slated for the same pub date, I might be a little anxious about the fact that my publisher Doubleday has been so preoccupied with their ‘star project’ that at least one wag has already dubbed them DBDay. Still, publishers insist, there is plenty of in-house marketing muscle to go around.”

Of course, it’s debatable whether it ever really went away or if market forces dictated that it “disappear” and re-emerge a few years later, as many trends do. But the idea gives the WSJ’s Robert Hughes a peg to feature a couple of dozen thrillers (highlighting future releases by Daniel Silva, Barry Eisler, Martin Cruz Smith and Joseph Finder, among others) and explain why they are making a so-called comeback.

Behind the revival, Hughes writes, is the confluence of a world grown more scary and a sluggish, $24 billion publishing industry seeking a new formula for hits. There’s another factor: Hollywood’s movie machine is hungry for such books. “Thrillers will definitely be the next cycle” in Hollywood, says Howard Sanders, a partner in United Talent Agency in Beverly Hills, Calif. Whatever that means. Of course, here comes the obligatory nitpick: all the thrillers Hughes & co. write about and they couldn’t find a single woman? Granted, thrillers of a certain variety are male-dominated for the moment, but it would have been nice to garnish some attention on say, R.J. Hillhouse‘s OUTSOURCED, M.J. Rose‘s THE REINCARNATIONIST or the recently released THE ACCIDENTAL AMERICAN by Alex Carr, which fits this bill more tightly than any of the titles on offer, male or female.