While the Cold War provided the broad framework in which assassination fiction flourished, as exemplified by Solar Lottery and The Manchurian Candidate, it was a singular event, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, that had the most lasting impact on the genre. Novels such as Loren Singer’s The Parallax View from 1970 show how its parameters shifted noticeably in the enduring aftermath of that event, but they also show how a sufficient number of continuities remained to justify the idea of a coherent genre. Yet despite its immense importance, the JFK assassination cannot be constructed as a simple watershed moment that would split the generic tradition neatly into a before and after. Like the novels written before this event, the ones written after it use assassination to raise the question of how individual and society relate to each other in democracy, but the answers they give to this question are different.

Reductively breaking this difference down to a few major shifts within the continuity of the larger generic framework, I venture that the JFK assassination had these notable effects: First, it has provided a common reference point for any fictional representation of assassination, and it is either used explicitly as a plot element or implicitly to draw on the global cultural memory of the event as it has been constructed by its immense media presence. Second, it has made assassination fiction more popular, as the impact of the event has led to an international proliferation of the motif in various media, reaching sizable audiences. Third, it has highlighted the aspect of conspiracy and especially conspiracy theory even more than the novels published before 1963. Fourth, it has reformulated the tension between individual and society much more strongly as a tension between the individual and the state, either introducing a third actor to further complicate the established binary or replacing society with the state as conceptual synonyms that both represent ways of controlling the individual, for better or worse. These major shifts indicate not so much a break with earlier assassination fiction as an intensification of certain aspects that were present but comparatively marginal in earlier texts, and in turn a marginalization of other aspects that were more central in earlier texts.