Looking
back, I can see a certain predestination in my becoming a thriller writer. I’ve
always loved the genre, for one. And my dad, the late Louis Pollock, was a
skillful practitioner thereof. With two stubby fingers on his big black typewriter he hammered out several “ticking-clock”
half-hour scripts for the old CBS Suspense radio show*—one of which Alfred
Hitchcock selected and directed on his half-hour TV series, Alfred Hitchcock
Presents.**
But
I took the long way around to Thrillerville. En route I tried my hand at all
sorts of categorical fiction, from sword and sorcery (influenced by Robert “Conan”
Howard), sci-fi (by Heinlein, Van Vogt, Sturgeon, among others), detectives and
mysteries (from Sherlock to L.A. Noir), even an overwrought Harlequin romance (Riviera
Concerto, unfinished, unfinishable). Somehow I missed YA.
False
starts and dead-ends, all. True, I didn’t know how to plot, but that’s another issue.
None of these genres was a good fit for me. I could write passable short verse,
but my ambitions remained novelistic.
My
breakthrough, as I’ve mentioned before, was in confession stories, one of the remaining
magazine short story markets back in the '70s. It was all about the trials and
tribulations of young women—older teens, young marrieds, girls “in trouble.” I
was ill suited for this niche, too, but succeeded, I suspect, because my submissions
were actually suspense stories in drag.
Examples:
“Can’t Anyone Hear Me Crying?” (True Story); “We Drove Into Disaster” (True
Confessions).
Eventually and by default, I arrived at the pigeonhole where I felt most at
home—suspense/thrillers. My struggles continued; the apprenticeship was long
and bumpy, still is. But I like the terrain.
And
suspense is not really a sub-category of fiction. It is primal and primary, embodying
the essence of all good storytelling. I say “storytelling” because the oral tradition
precedes the written. The tribal bard, way back into prehistory, earned his keep by
capturing and holding an audience against stiff competition—an audience usually
exhausted by the day’s labor.
An
effective occupational imperative. Talk about "publish or perish." Spellbind your audience
or quit the campfire for the cold.
Scheherezade
had to keep the Sultan desperate to hear the next installment in order to
prolong her life one more night.
I’m
reminded of the Jma ’el Fna, a huge square of beaten earth in the center of
Marrakesh. It’s a meeting of ancient caravan routes, a legendary Arab-Berber
swap-meet, little changed over the centuries. You can still wander the stalls,
feasting on roasted mutton, and find snake charmers, sword-swallowers,
letter-writers and teeth-pullers along with sellers of T-shirts and pirated jeans
and DVDs, all competing for your coin.
Imagine,
if you will, a tale-teller among them, practicing his craft in the age-old way.
Enticing an audience, launching his tale, getting them “hooked,” stopping at a
cliff-hanger, then making his circuit, hat in hand. If he’s good, the listeners
will pay to hear the rest of the story. If they wander off to see the
fire-eater, he'd better brush up on his technique.
Dickens
had his readers so well and truly hooked that they crowded the New York City
docks to meet the ship from London with the next magazine installment of Copperfield
or Old Curiosity Shop. Of course, it was not just Dickens’ plot predicaments
that had them hanging. His characters were magically alive in his readers, in
suspended animation, waiting to get their next lines.
And
Dickens possessed another commodity rare in thrillerdom, and in modern fiction—narrative
charm. Which goes back to storytelling ability. Scheherezade obviously had it.
It’s a quality on display in every paragraph of Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Arthur Conan Doyle and many other beloved storytellers.
“I
feel that storytelling is the highest ambition of fiction,” thriller novelist AndrewKlavan said once in an interview with Publishers
Weekly (6/12/95). “Authors are storytellers first and foremost.”
“It
is just this power of holding the attention which forms the art of
story-telling,” wrote Conan Doyle, “an art which may be developed and improved
but cannot be imitated. It is the power of sympathy, the sense of the dramatic.
There is no more capricious and indefinable quality. The professor in his study
may have no trace of it, while the Irish nurse in the attic can draw out the
very souls of his children with her words. It is imagination—and it is the power
of conveying imagination.”
“Booth
Tarkington (1869-1946) told a reporter that when he worked on a story, he
imagined
If
readers were distracted in Tarkington's era, think how much more addlepated
they are today. ADHD may be reaching epidemic proportions as our collective attentions
are assaulted by digitized stimuli inbound on radio, TV, iPhone and computer
screens, billboards and earbuds.
 |
| Charles "Chuck" Braverman |
The
besieged modern audience is attuned not to gradual narrative unfolding, but to instant
visual and auditory overload. I trace the acute phase of this back to the ‘70s and
Chuck Braverman’s “American Time Capsule.” This was supposedly a short “film,” but
actually a linear mosaic of graphic images projected at epilepsy-inducing, stroboscopic
speed, compressing two hundred years of American history into two and a half
minutes.
No
wonder many of us like to escape with a good book, or e-book, or audiobook (ah, the oral tradition!). Despite all the environmental
static, the storyteller's task has not really changed from the day of the minstrel.
 |
| Jim Patterson |
And
commercial thriller writing is storytelling at its most elemental. In the words
of a modern best-selling minstrel, James Patterson: “What I want to do right
now is write books that are satisfying to people who want to turn the pages.”
“Why
do we love suspense?" asked another such, John D. MacDonald. “The reader always
wants to know what happens next, whether he's reading The Brothers Karamazov,
David Copperfield or Hemingway.” (JDM, interview, Family Weekly, 5/5/85)
_______________________________________________________________
* “The Clock
and the Rope” starring Jackie Cooper (12.5.47); “A Ring for Marya” starring
Cornell Wilde (12.28.50); “Breakdown” (10.24.50)
** “Breakdown”
starring Joseph Cotton (11/13/1955).
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