KEEP 'EM IN SUSPENSE

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

that he was telling it to a man who had to catch a train in 20 minutes. The man was, of course, preoccupied with train-catching, impatient at being buttonholed and very suspicious of his narrator—in fact, almost certain that there would be no point to Tarkington's story... You see the precautions [Tarkington] took against lapsing even for a paragraph into any dependence on the reader's good will.” (Quoted by Gorham Munson in The Written Word, 1949, p. 20)

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)

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* “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).

PATTON'S REINCARNATION POEM

In the previous post I excerpted two quatrains from a ballad by George Patton, "Through a Glass, Darkly," lines that reflected the general's lifelong conviction that his military career actually had spanned many lifetimes.

But the selected excerpt was flawed, metrically and otherwise. To set the record straight, here's the martial ballad in its entirety, taken from the "Official Website of General George S. Patton":

"Through a Glass, Darkly"

by Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.

So as through a glass, and darkly

The age long strife I see

Where I fought in many guises,

Many names, but always me.

And I see not in my blindness

What the objects were I wrought,

But as God rules o'er our bickerings

It was through His will I fought.

So forever in the future,

Shall I battle as of yore,

Dying to be born a fighter,

But to die again, once more.

In the dimness of the shadows

Where we hairy heathens warred,

I can taste in thought the lifeblood;

We used teeth before the sword.

 

While in later clearer vision

I can sense the coppery sweat,

Feel the pikes grow wet and slippery

When our Phalanx, Cyrus met.

Hear the rattle of the harness

Where the Persian darts bounced clear,

See their chariots wheel in panic

From the Hoplite's leveled spear.

See the goal grow monthly longer,

Reaching for the walls of Tyre.

Hear the crash of tons of granite,

Smell the quenchless eastern fire.

Still more clearly as a Roman,

Can I see the Legion close,

As our third rank moved in forward

And the short sword found our foes.

Once again I feel the anguish

Of that blistering treeless plain

When the Parthian showered death bolts,

And our discipline was in vain.

I remember all the suffering

Of those arrows in my neck.

Yet, I stabbed a grinning savage

As I died upon my back.

Once again I smell the heat sparks

When my Flemish plate gave way

And the lance ripped through my entrails

As on Crecy's field I lay.

In the windless, blinding stillness

Of the glittering tropic sea

I can see the bubbles rising

Where we set the captives free.

Midst the spume of half a tempest

I have heard the bulwarks go

When the crashing, point blank round shot

Sent destruction to our foe.

I have fought with gun and cutlass

On the red and slippery deck

With all Hell aflame within me

And a rope around my neck.

And still later as a General

Have I galloped with Murat

When we laughed at death and numbers

Trusting in the Emperor's Star.

Till at last our star faded,

And we shouted to our doom

Where the sunken road of Ohein

Closed us in its quivering gloom.

So but now with Tanks a'clatter

Have I waddled on the foe

Belching death at twenty paces,

By the star shell's ghastly glow.

So as through a glass, and darkly

The age long strife I see

Where I fought in many guises,

Many names, but always me.

And I see not in my blindness

What the objects were I wrought,

But as God rules o'er our bickerings

It was through His will I fought.

 So forever in the future,

Shall I battle as of yore,

Dying to be born a fighter,

But to die again, once more.
*

THE WAY WE WERE

This post spins off the previous one, Genius on Bended Knee, which discussed a few of the innumerable artists (composers, painters, writers) who have acknowledged that their best ideas have come to them from beyond.

By which most have meant a source divinely inspired, one which both elevated and humbled them.

Admittedly, there have also been artists inclined to strike a Faustian deal with any entity, divine or diabolical, who promises to deliver the inspirational goods.

This is the temptation inherent in plagiarism, a well-documented literary sin which seems to be on steroids in the Age of Google. You can relish plagiarism writ large in the recent film, The Words, and in Ira Levin’s earlier play and film, Deathtrap.

But here’s my sidebar on literary outsourcing: I can think of at least two best-selling historical novelists, both of an earlier generation, who asserted that their recreations of times past were born not of imagination or historical research, but were recollections of their own previous lives.

According to Wikipedia, the American writer Taylor Caldwell (1900-1985) began cranking out novels at the age of twelve, and sold 30 million copies over her lifetime. Though her interest and belief in reincarnation began relatively late in her long writing career, she became convinced that it had influenced her earlier historical fiction as well.

The title of hers I remember best growing up was Dear and Glorious Physician, subtitled “A Novel About St. Luke.”

I confess that I’ve never read Ms. Caldwell, or her equally celebrated contemporary, the English historical novelist, Joan Grant (1907-1989), who called her work the “Far Memory series.”

She became something of a literary sensation in 1937 upon the publication of her first and

most famous novel, Winged Pharaoh. Twenty years passed before the author announced that she had not invented, but “recalled” the events in the novel while in a hypnotic or trance state.

Ms. Grant later described this creative process in a memoir, Many Lifetimes.

My third example, more famous than either of these, is General George Patton. "Old Blood 'n Guts" wrote and spoke often of his own recollections of past lives, most notably in a poem recited (by George C. Scott) in the film, Patton, at the Roman ruins of Volubulis in Morocco:

        “Through the travail of ages,

        midst the pomp and toils of war,

        have I fought and strove and perished,

        countless times among the stars.

        As if through a glass and darkly,

        the age old strife I see,

        when I fought in many guises and many names,

        but always me.”

Having said all that, let me say this... I'm not particularly interested in reincarnation.

Whatever the historical method used by our contemporary bards to conjure up the past matters little to me. What I love is to be whisked away on a magic carpet of words to another time.

Among literary conjurers, Robert Louis Stevenson takes pride of place for me, speaking directly to my boyish spirit. Homer, Conan Doyle, James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, many other spellbinders, all had their way with me.

Recently I was delighted to discover another kindred spirit with the gift of transporting me--convincingly and authoritatively--to another age (in this case all the way back to 184 B.C.). The author is G. J. Berger, and the book—the first  in a saga—is South of Burnt Rocks: West of the Moon.

I invite any readers of adventurous inclination to join me in this first tale of a young Iberian-Celtic “she-warrior” as she makes her stand against an invading Roman army.

You will be retro-incarnated for the duration, of that I am confident.