Wolf Goes Live

Back before the Earth cooled, I mentioned on this blog that I had a pen name I was planning to use, Dean Breckenridge. My idea was to use that name to do shorter, punchier, much more hard-boiledier (yes, I made that up) stories than I'm doing under my own name, and crank them out on a regular basis. The first two, THE KILL FEVER and THE DARK, are available, with Episode #3 on the way. Please take a look.

They've been a lot of fun to write. Just plain story. No fancy themes or sentimental slop, just rock 'em, sock 'em, shoot 'em, kick 'em action. Basically, it's "Have Gun, Will Travel" set in the inner city, featuring a vigilante hero named Wolf, and they're short, not more than 100 pages in manuscript form. Read 'em on the bus, the train, on the deck, at the beach, wherever--it won't take you long, and I promise a terrific ride.

In THE KILLER FEVER, Wolf must stop a gang war from exploding, the roots of which grow from one man's desire for revenge.

In THE DARK, Wolf takes on kidnappers who aren't the usual suspects, and he has to turn up the heat in order to shake 'em from hiding.

Thanks for looking!

Surviving the Deadline

My silence on this blog lately has not been due to laziness, but racing to meet a deadline. Earlier this year mystery author Paul Bishop asked me to contribute a volume to his Fight Card series, which I thought would be a terrific opportunity to do a story that didn't feature blondes, bombs, and quasi-Bonds for a change. However, I was not at all prepared for the genuine challenge such a story posed. Paul's instructions to me was that the story could be about anything, but boxing had to be at the center of the conflict, and he gave me a December deadline. OK. I did a bunch of research, watched fights, developed what I thought was a pretty good story, and started to write. And then it all screeched to a halt.

When I say halt, I mean almost that....it eeeked along on dry bearings. The writing was hard, the characters wouldn't talk, nothing seemed to make sense, and I swore I would never take another assignment ever again, ever, ever, never. I work from detailed outlines, and I kept going back to the outline, scratching my head, wondering why what seemed to work in that form did not at all work on the actual page.

Did I mention I started this project 30 days before the deadline?

I'm a masochist, you see. But I also wanted to prove that if a writer puts his butt in a chair and produces pages, he can meet a deadline in a short period of time. Maybe even beat it.

The outline assured me I had a good story. I decided to put my faith in my outline and forged ahead. But, wow, what a slog. I would up, at some points during the project, doing as little as one page a day. It was that hard to put together. I have never worked this hard on a book before, nor wanted to quit so many times in the middle.

In the end, I think my Fight Card book will be a worthy entry. It's funny that by the time I reached the end, it all seemed to magically come together. Reading it through for fine-tuning, I can't find that parts that I thought needed fixing, and it all seems to flow along. I think part of the problem was a hectic work schedule that, basically, had me working 30 days in a row at the same time, without any time off, so, luckily, I had my outline to guide me instead of having to sit at the computer each day and figure out what happens next.

I beat the deadline by four days, by the way.

So let that be a lesson to you. Writing + butt in chair = produced pages = 100 page manuscript in less than 30 days = a happy Paul Bishop because I don't have to tell him he has a blank spot in his 2014 schedule.

You're welcome.

Now my Fight Card book, still untitled, gets edited by Paul and his people and then by me again and, anyway, I think it will be out late in 2014.

What I hope I take from this experience and bring to my independent work is the same sense of discipline, the "write every day" approach. I am sooooo guilty of not doing that, and taking a year to do a 200 page manuscript which, according to this project, I could have turned out in two months.

Marvel's Agents of S.U.C.K.

I'm trying really hard to like Marvel's Agents of SHIELD but the show isn't helping. Aside from Clark Gregg, the cast is populated with white-bread soap-opera rejects (the Asian master ninja / expert pilot / constant brooder notwithstanding) who have all the believably of a unicorn. I'm supposed to accept that Agent Ward, a Ken Doll who looks younger than ME, is supposed to be a super-secret-agent-master-assassin? When he talks about The Job, his totally-cereal dialogue is a recycled riff from a Z-grade commando movie. How he delivers the lines with a straight face I do not understand. Don't get me started on the hottie "hacktivist" with her smart cracks who seems to only be a place-holder or the teenyboppers playing the scientists who are referred to as one person, which is appropriate, because I can't tell which one is which and I've watched three goddamn episodes already.

While the characters are faceless ciphers, the show has a bigger problem. The show's problem is Joss Whedon (everybody get out your guns and point them at me; I'm about to kill a sacred cow). I know Whedon isn't writing every single episode, but his mark is on each script. Whedon seems to revel in writing smart cracks that subvert genre dialogue cliches and that's okay....when it works. Those imitating his style are only creating cliches of their own, and they aren't funny, and they don't work. I'm not even sure when Whedon does it that it's funny or in any way interesting anymore (though The Avengers had some smart cracks), because it's been imitated to death

So I'm watching basically the show because Tosh.0 hasn't rolled out any new episodes yet and I can't spend all day drinking. Plus the hacktivist looked great coming out of the pool in Ep. 3 with her dress clinging to her curves. Yum. Give her boobs an Emmy.

But I digress.

Oh, and ZombieCoulson? Gag me. Either he's dead or he's alive but don't give me any of this magical rejuvenation whatchamacallit that will probably not even be addressed in the series. They're going to save all of the big reveals for the Avengers movies, don't you worry. Only Tony Stark will get the full explanation of what happened, and RDJ is too good for television. Sure, Samuel L. Jackson made a cameo, but Jackson is the new Michael Caine: a good actor who will slum for a paycheck.

So long, Tom

Too bad about Tom Clancy, especially after we recently lost Elmore Leonard and Vince Flynn. I was never a huge Clancy fan. I thought his work was too long and too overblown with "gee whiz" description that could have been trimmed to tell a better story. I never liked how he presented himself during interviews. He gave off a "I'm better than you" vibe but I think he was more comfortable with gadgets than talking to people, or talking on television. In other words, he wasn't a favorite, but you cannot deny his contribution to the thriller genre.

I picked up The Hunt for Red October while on a trip to Disneyland back in 1986 or '87, and I remember enjoying it, but nothing about the book stands out for me today. He wrote so steadily that I would get the new Clancy every year for Christmas, because somebody in the family thought I was a huge fan; most of the books went unread or half read and ultimately turned into the used bookstore. Seriously, after The Cardinal of the Kremlin, I gave up. There was just too much story and too many details to keep track of. Heck, I was a teenager. Maybe if I read him now I'd appreciate his work more. Maybe I'll be struck with a fit of nostalgia and pick up Red October again sometime.

The Great Gatsby

I first read The Great Gatsby in high school, of course, and because it was forced on me I did not pay great attention to it. Only later in life when I started studying Hemingway did Fitzgerald's name come up again, and I decided to read the book all the way through. It was the only Fitzgerald novel I was familiar with, so I figured it was a safe bet. Low and behold the story, the characters, the cynicism and the sense of hopelessness that lives in the book swept me away. I wasn't reading about America in the '20s. I wasn't reading about the excess of the Jazz Age. I was reading about my time, my friends, and me. I'm Gatsby. I'm also Nick Carroway. Reading Gatsby is like looking into a mirror, or, as Hammett described in the Flitcraft parable, lifting the lid off of life and getting a look at the works.

It's hard not to identify with Nick Carroway, struggling to find a place in the world only to discover your plug may be in the wrong socket, and what do you do when you learn that? We like to say today that if you don't like something, change it. But bumper sticker slogans don't take genuine human behavior into account. It's hard to change once you've started on a path, invested years of effort, and thought you had made the right choice. It's hard to let go of a dream. It's tougher to find a new one, because they don't appear out of thin air. What about  the connections you've made? It's hard to walk out on people when you're not sure you'll find others to fill the space.

And then there's Jay Gatsby himself. There's a guy who couldn't find a new dream, who stayed attached to the old one, and spent his life trying to recapture something that was never his to begin with. His tragic ending robbed us of seeing his story through to the very end, a happy ending, perhaps. Instead of cynicism of the age--coming to terms with the shock of WWI, dealing with the excess that only caused more emptiness, the "what do we do with this thing called life"--fulfilled its role in the process, showing that what's left in the past truly belongs there and we have no chance of recapturing it. If you could see how that very story line is playing out in my life right now, in real time, the impact of that observation would carry even more weight. In other words, I lost my Daisy too. Like Gatsby, I live near her (a wild coincidence I didn't notice at first), separated by a range of hills, which may very well stand for the invisible walls that separate us now. If I may borrow from Dokken, in my dreams she's still here, and it's the same as it used to be. I understand Gatsby.

I'm more than ready to declare Fitzgerlad better than Hemingway, not because of his tight writing and minimalist style, one actually tighter than Hemingway and more coherent and to the point, but because nothing Ernest has written has had the impact of Gatsby. No other literary work has lived so long in my head after reading.

I will say the same of the 2013 film starring Leonardo DeCaprio as Gatsby. While the film is too busy and too colorful from the visual standpoint, the film captured
the heart of the story perfectly and I will say it is the best interpretation of the film ever done. I hated it during the first few minutes when they jettisoned the greatest opening lines of a story ever written, and instead substituted something with less impact, but they used, verbatim, the last monologue of the book to great effect. It was mesmerizing.

Fitzgerald and I were actually born in the same city, albeit many years apart, so in a way I feel a connection to him. We both did some drinking to cover up problems only to find they never went away but were, in fact, intensified, because you can't escape your subconscious. And while he said that there are no second acts in America, I can't help but argue with that. Dreams may not be easy to find, but they're out there, like a carrot on a stick, and if you run fast enough maybe you stand a chance of grabbing one.

John Gardner's FOR SPECIAL SERVICES

Eventually I always keep my promises. You may remember me saying in an earlier post that I would like to go through the James Bond books written by John Gardner once again. I read them all as they came out in the '80s and '90s but never held onto them. Now that we have access to wonderful reprints, I have started going through the books and I am very pleased indeed.

I've already mentioned License Renewed; now I'm reading Gardner's second Bond, For Special Services. This is the book which reintroduces SPECTRE as the villain of choice, with a new Blofeld taking the reins of the organization. It's a great set-up, and Gardner makes the connection to the Fleming novels by giving us a terrific background update which really makes the series feel like a whole story. I liked that bit of detail. Gardner was truly a student of Ian Fleming and it shows.

The scope of the story is also good, taking us from one location to another. Gardner had to write longer stories than Fleming, so we probably get a little padding and extra details that Fleming left out, but they are value-added details and one shouldn't quibble about them. What I like about the extra stuff is that it shows Bond as part of a larger organization. Fleming always sent Bond off alone and we never got the feeling that MI6 was the big organization that it is; Gardner changed that. His Bond feels more like a genuine working man who takes on extraordinary assignments.

Bond is teamed with Felix Leiter's daughter, Cedar, a decent bit of plotting, but one I would have avoided. Bond treats her like his own daughter so we get no raunchiness here. Cedar, of course, falls for Bond. Other than giving the book another link to the past, I'm not sure she does anything a different character could provide. It's neat to see Bond able to control his urges, though.

Without going too much into the story, I will say that Gardner provides a terrific outing for OO7, with a twist that thrilled me back in the day and one I'm sure will still deliver, even though I know the Big Reveal going in.

Gardner's writing is very business-like. Just the facts. He doesn't engage in a lot of hoopdedoodle. He puts you in the action. If he had quit after For Special Services or even after the third book, Icebreaker, his place in Bond history would be secure. I didn't care for where he took Bond in the later books. Before his tenure was done, Bond seemed tired, going through the motions, and maybe he had too many girlfriends get killed. We'll see if my opinion changes as I read the rest of the series.

Of course, I have to nit-pick Gardner's choice of weapons for OO7. Was the Walther PPK really so bad? In this book Bond is issued a Heckler & Koch VP70, certainly an interesting piece in the history of firearms, but not very cool. In Icebreaker Bond gets a deserving gun, the HK P7, and Gardner finally issued him a permanent piece in Role of Honor, but I wish he'd have stayed with the PPK. Or, at least, given Bond the P7 from the start, or, better, a Walther P5. Once again he isn't around to answer those questions. But he wrote some good books and we can be glad for that.

The Abominable Thirty-Nine Steps

You can't read or write thrillers without coming across a book entitled The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. You probably first encounter it because of the Hitchcock film, or maybe another author or reviewer mentions it. I think I first came across it as an OTR adaptation, and later Buchan's work was mentioned as a precursor to Ian Fleming's novels. The Thirty-Nine Steps is touted as the "original thriller" that sets the table for every thriller that followed. By that, the critics are correct, first is first; however, it's not a good book.

The hero, Richard Hannay, in one of the strangest introductions ever written, is told of a sinister plot. The teller of the tale is murdered, and poor Dick is on the run. He has to stop the dastardly villains before they strike, or all is lost. Instead of taking direct action, Hannay spends 99% of the book running through the Scottish countryside hiding in bushes. He's being hunted by the villains, but not terribly efficiently. Every person he comes across is able to somehow assist him, and the string of coincidences Buchan expects us to swallow along the way are too much. Compared to The Thirty-Nine Steps, the television series 24 is the epitome of logic. In one sequence, for example, Hannay is captured and put in a farm shed. A mining engineer by trade, Hannay quickly deduces that there is material in the shed with which he can make a jolly good bomb! Right-O, let's blast our way out so we can go back to running through the bushes! The book is loaded with such "it just so happened" events that strain your sense of disbelief. It becomes a joke.

At 118 pages (in my Collins Classic edition), the story is thin. It's generic by today's standards, but there's a reason for that. Buchan may have been a pioneer in what we call a thriller today, but, in this book, he did nothing but lay a foundation upon which the rest of us have built the house. Pioneers may set the stage, but it's those who carry on that really take the creation and do something with it. Pick any of the old masters, and their modern counterparts do it better. The Mike Hammer novels may have been huge in their day, but they lack the scope and creativity of the Nate Heller books. Max Allan Collins took what Spillane built and greatly improved the concept. When you read Spillane afterwards, you wonder why he kept repeating the same ideas. Count how many "best buddies" Mike Hammer has to avenge to see what I mean. If you only have Kiss Me, Deadly and One Lonely Night, you have the best examples of Spillane available. Meanwhile, Collins always does something fresh. Not one Heller book is the same as another.

If I may borrow Raymond Chandler's opinion regarding the mystery story, no thriller has yet been written that can be considered so perfect that it cannot be surpassed by another. This is why we continue to assault the citadel. For that, we can thank John Buchan. We like to read thrillers, and a lot of us like to write them. They're fun and exciting. There's nothing better than a good thriller, and nothing worse than a bad one. While I appreciate Buchan's effort, I'm afraid The Thirty-Nine Steps is simply a decent beach book, but hardly a classic.