Styling the Thriller

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

 Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night

In his “Introduction” to the 2006 Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, James Patterson, playing the role of editor, reminds readers that the varieties of thrillers is deep and wide, including “the legal thriller, spy thriller, action-adventure thriller, medical thriller, police thriller, romantic thriller, historical thriller, political thriller, religious thriller, high-tech thriller, and military thriller, but they have “common ground” in “the intensity of emotions they create, particularly those of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and breathlessness.” In short, a thriller must thrill (iii).

James Patterson

Thrillers are also fast-paced, Patterson says, and their protagonists achieve “an objective . . . at some heroic cost. The main character's “goal can be personal (trying to save a spouse or a long-lost relative) or global (trying to avert a world war) but often it's both.” There may be a ticking clock (iii). A thriller, he maintains, may “build rhythmically to rousing climaxes that peak with a cathartic, explosive ending,” or a thriller may “start at top speed and never let off” (iii). Thrillers tend to be well-researched and to use “accurate details.” At the end, readers “should feel emotionally satisfied and better informed” (iii).

The collection includes thirty short stories by thirty-three well-known writers, among them Lee Child, James Rollins, David Morrell, John Lescroart, Eric Van Lustbader, F. Paul Wilson, Brad Thor, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. In many of the tales, well-known protagonists make another appearance: Jack Reacher (“James Penney's New Identity”), Joe Kowalski (“Kowalski's in Love”), Repairman Jack (“Interlude at Duane's”), Nick Neumann (“Assassins”), NYPD's Detective Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta (“The Fisherman”).

Often, the situations on which a thriller is built is as at least as interesting as the story's protagonist and villain, and those in Thriller are, generally, intriguing, even if they are familiar, in large part because of the way their authors handle them. The stories are based on such situations as “an explosion at the U. S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay” (34), street gangs (53), an unexpected storm (68), an empath (89), the setting of a trap for a dangerous former FBI profiler (178), prison life (259), Balkans intrigue (292), a road trip (342), and the theft of an Inca sacrificial knife (542). Most are close to twenty pages in length.

“James Penney's New Identity”

In Lee Child's story, “James Penney's New Identity,” the divorced protagonist is fired from the factory job at which he's worked for seventeen years, because of downsizing. Unable to pay for his new Firebird, Penney burns down his house. The fire also destroys the homes of two of his neighbors. With six weeks' pay in his pocket, from his last check, Penney leaves town. After spending the night in a cheap hotel, he wakes to find that his Firebird has been stolen. He goes to the local police station to report the theft, but sees a wanted poster with his photograph on it; he's wanted for arson and criminal damage. He flees, and, wen a driver offers him a ride, he accepts.

The driver, Jack Reacher, is a military police officer who has false identification documents, which he seized from Edward Hendricks, an Army liaison officer he'd arrested. He lets Penney have a set of the documents, handcuffs him, and, Penney posing as his prisoner, are passed through a police roadblock after the authorities check their identification and record their names.

The men separate, and Reacher disposes of the corpse in the trunk of his car. Lee leaves it to his readers to make the connections between the story's rather over-the-top set of coincidences and figure out their collective significance.

“Gone Fishing”

We don't learn the first names of the on-the-lam duo of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's “Gone Fishing.” They've stolen an Inca sacrificial knife from New York City's Natural History Museum. They'd made a deal to sell the stolen artifact to Lipski, a psychopathic criminal fence, who'd planned, in return, to sell it to a wealthy collector. After stealing the knife, though, Woffler and Perotta decide to cut out Lipski, the “middleman,” and fence the item themselves; failing to find a buyer, they'll melt the knife down for its rubies and gold.

First, however, they plan to lie low and have rented a mountain cabin surrounded by woods near Passumkeag Lake, New Hampshire. On their way to their destination, Perotta annoys Woffler by needlessly drawing attention to them by speeding, sending his hamburger back twice at a restaurant, staring at a tough ex-con in the restaurant and spewing rocks and dust over him as he peels out of the parking lot, and honking at a psychedelic VW bus bearing “Honk if You Support Pro-Choice” bumper stickers.

Soon after their arrival at the cabin, they hear a knock at their front door, but no one is there. They imagine they've heard the sound—then, there's a second knock. Investigating, Woffler sees footprints at the edge of the woods, leading into the forest. At Perotta's insistence, Woffler follows the footprints into the woods. Both men wonder whether his partner plans to double-cross him and abscond with the stolen relic. Perotta also wonders whether their mysterious stalker is the ex-con. Although Perotta also suspects Lipski, he thinks the fence an unlikely suspect. He also dismisses Lipski's potential buyer, who wouldn't know of the theft yet.

Thirty minutes pass. Woffler has not returned to the cabin. Perotta hears what might have been a scream and, arming himself with a flashlight, sets out on his partner's trail. Along the way, he sees what he thinks is a mushroom, then a shell; the object, he realizes to his horror, is, in fact, a severed human ear.

Fleeing, he becomes lost. He suspects the stalker is Lipski, after all; suspicious of Woffler and Perotta, Lipski has followed them. A bloody hand seizes Perotta, but he shakes it off and hastens from the area, still lost. His flashlight illuminates a severed foot, then a decapitated head. A voice threatens to do to Perotta hat was done to other victims.

Natural History Museum, New York City

The story skips forward. Lt. Vincent D'Agosta, NYPD, is on the scene as local investigators bag the body parts. Police have determined that the victims are Woffler and Perotta, employees of New York's natural History Museum. Local police have found the men's wallets and Ids and the stolen knife and called the NYPD, having heard of the heist. D'Agosta warns a local police officer that there will be more victims and that the murders of Woffler and Perotta ave nothing to do with the sacrificial knife they stole, but the officer does not believe D'Agosta.

The story skips ahead again, as the serial killer, The Fisherman, sits inside his psychedelic VW bus, parked by the side of the road leading out of town. A passing car, noting the bumper stickers on his bus, honks. Thankful to God that He has given him another opportunity to “serve” Him by killing and dismembering “another killer of the unborn,” the murderer drives onto the road and follows the carload of his next victims.

Techniques

Child and the writing team of Douglas and Preston use their own techniques to craft their stories, techniques that help them to build their thrillers.

Detective Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragmet

Child uses a straightforward approach, in which he straightforwardly moves from one incident to the next, using a journalistic style in which, despite his stories' intense emotions, seems to present “just the facts,” as Dragnet's Sergeant Friday was fond of saying to witnesses recounting their stories. This happened, and then this, followed by this next thing. His technique lulls the reader into accepting the events, even when they would become hard to believe otherwise. Just what are the chances that a wanted arsonist would encounter a murderer disguised as a police officer—and a military police officer, at that? Whatever they are, the odds become even less likely when the killer just happens to have a few sets of fake Ids in the trunk of his car, the one inside which he's hauling his victim's dead body. However, thanks to Child's disarmingly straightforward, matter-of-fact style, readers are likely to pass over so,me of these “details” or at least pretend to turn a blind eye to them. Child's style, in short, helps readers to maintain a Coleridge an “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Preston and Child pile up details—a lot of them—while tossing half a dozen suspects at readers. The story's incidents snowball, but, at the same time, have a relationship with the other incidents of the story, incidents bound to other incidents and to characters, and characters tied to other characters and to incidents. What is a simple story, when everything is unraveled at the end, seems complex and mysterious in the telling. Who's out there, in the woods (and the swamp), stalking the pair of robbers? The ex-con? Lipski, the fence? Lipski's prospective customer? One or the other of the two robbers himself, intending to double cross his partner in crime? The vengeful spirit associated with the stolen Inca knife of sacrifice? These suspects are linked through the crime Woffler and Perotta have committed; through their road trip; through Perotta's making “scenes” along the way, by speeding, harassing a waitress, eyeballing and dissing an ex-con, and honking at a VW bus parked alongside the highway, during the robbers' drive from New York to New Hampshire; and by the remote cabin they rent in the deep woods. Everything is related, but only one set of relationships, in the end, counts. Preston and Child keep their readers guessing by a style that draws relationships everywhere, at all times.

The juxtaposition of a museum in a world-class city with the barbarism of The Fisherman is also a technique that increases the emotional thrill of the horror in the woods.

From Complacency to Narcissism

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

For a while, Hollywood milked extraterrestrial creatures as its “other” of the day. Their appearance alone suggested that these alien creatures were not like us. They were huge, gelatinous blobs. They were strange mermen from beyond the stars (or from the bottom of a black lagoon.) They were macrocephlic humanoids with green skin or gray-skinned humanoids with phallic heads. They were crawling eyes. They absorbed prey; devoured prey; and, if their quarry were women, mated with prey.

Something unexpected might bring these otherworldly monsters to their knees. The Blob couldn't stand cold temperatures. The green, big-headed saucer men couldn't bear the bright beams of automobile headlights. Bullets take out the creature from the black lagoon. If there's a theme here, it seems to be that, despite appearances, these otherworldly creatures aren't so tough after all; ordinary, everyday things—cold, headlights, bullets—are too much for them to handle. Sure, such threats may look dangerous, but appearances can be deceiving.

Horror horrifies, until it isn't so horrible, after all, and what makes it not so horrible after all is everydayness. The ordinary deflates, destroys, and dispatches the horrific. We weren't really in much danger, after all. The “otherness” of the other turns out to be not so much different from us, after all; indeed, if anything, we prove more adaptable, more innovative, more powerful—in a word, superior.

That, if anything, was the theme of the movies of the fifties.

What about the themes of the tens—the 2010s?

According to one interpretation, Pathos (2009), set in a dystopian future world in which thought is prohibited and people depend upon artificial intelligence and virtual reality for not only their pleasure, but also their own personal experiences and identities, is a satire concerning consumerism taken to extremes.

Although existentialism suggests that human nature does not exist, but is, instead, created by each individual according to his or her exercise of free will, Loophole (2109) takes something of a Cartesian point of view, suggesting that to be human is to be violent. Instead of Descartes's dictum, “I think; therefore, I am,” Loophole implies, “I am violent; therefore, I am.” According to a film review, these philosophical implications also have religious significance:

Suddenly, mass hysteria takes hold across the major cities of America as people are tested and marked with or without.  In a matter of days, the beginning of a New World Order takes the stage and, quite unexpectedly, we find ourselves in the middle of a Biblical battle that has long been dormant.

For some, the progress of the plot may seem to evangelistic; others are likely to enjoy the movie's religious dimensions.

Two films don't nearly constitute a representative sample, of course, but these movies, alt least, suggest that at least some of the films of the 2010s turn inward for their subject matter, focusing on the eternal questions related to being human: what is human nature and how do human beings fit into the larger scheme of things?

Older sci fi-horror movies were concerned with departures from the status quo: could such deviations endanger the community or even the world? If we lost our place in the grand scheme of things, what would become of us, as individuals? The comforting answer lay in the very everydayness that the extraterrestrial threats threatened. The threats to the existing order were no match for customary, the habitual, the traditional, the routine of people's routine, day-to-day lives.

More recent sci fi-horror films, in part, at least, return to a questioning of the age-old problems of philosophy and religion: human identity, human nature, the human condition, the relationship of the self and other. The eternal quest is undertaken yet again, with the protagonist and the viewer at the center of things; human existence, if not existence-itself, is egocentric. Everything revolves around us; it's all about us. We have gone from complacency to narcissism in only seven decades.

Ray Bradbury's Muralism

Copyright 2019 by Gary > Pullman

Another of the better stories in Ray Bradbury's collection The Cat's Pajamas is “Ole, Orozco! Siqueros, Si!”

The narrator, an art gallery expert, is invited to a wake for Sebastian Rodriguez, “an unknown artist” who died while painting murals on a freeway. As Sam Walter explains, “He was hanging upside down over the edge of the freeway overhang, painting, a pal holding his legs, when the pal sneezed, God yes, sneezed and let go.”

His untimely demise cut short a promising career; Cardinal Carlos Jesus Montoya, who'd spied the genius in the graffiti Rodriguez had painted, saw his promise, as does the narrator, who suggests that Rodriguez's work is reminiscent of that of Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco.

To promote and to protect the late artist's reputation, Montoya arranged to exhibit photographs of Rodriguez's graffiti at a gallery; “then,” Sam explains to the narrator, “when it was too late” for people “to . . . change their minds and ask for their money back,” the cardinal would tell them about Rodriguez's freeway murals.

The artist's death, however, could have “endangered Rodriguez's reputation,” had a group of critics not conspired to hide the truth from the public. As a result of their efforts, Rodriguez's death was attributed not to his fall from the freeway overpass, but to “a bike accident, though no bike was found.” When the cardinal approved of Rodriguez's art, “prices . . . skyrocketed.”

Now, to prevent the public from discovering the fact that Rodriguez was a graffiti artist, the narrator holds Sam's legs while Sam paints over Rodriguez's freeway art.

Bradbury seems to satirize the commercial aspects of art that is created, exhibited, bought, and sold in a capitalistic economy. Rodriguez, although talented by all accounts, was “unknown.” The fact that he painted murals on freeway surfaces marked him as a graffiti artist, which would have besmirched his budding reputation as a legitimate artist, necessitating the conspiracy on the part of Cardinal Montoya, Sam, the narrator, and those who attended Rodriguez's wake, to suppress the truth concerning the origin of Rodriguez's art.

If the truth of the origins of the photographs in the gallery becomes known, the narrator suggests, Montoya will be left “with a gallery of useless photo art,” or, Sam counters, “a gallery full of priceless relics from an artful dodger's life, dead too soon.” If marketing doesn't make all the difference in the perception of the value of an artist's work, it certainly does count, Bradbury suggests.

David Alfaro Siqueiros: Self-Portrait (1945)

The irony is deepened by the narrator's comparing the late, unknown painter's style to that of the celebrated Mexican muralists Siqueiros and Orozco. Although Rodriguez's art resembles theirs, showing “genius” in its own right, his paintings, because they began as graffiti, would be scorned, were the truth known, whereas the murals of Siqueiros and Orozco are celebrated and cherished.

David Alfaro Siqueiros: The New Democracy (1944) 

Irony is also effected by Rodriguez's having spent “a few hours in jail,” presumably for defacing public property by painting his murals on the freeway, because Siqueiros was also incarcerated, but in a Mexican prison, rather than an American jail, for criticizing Mexican President Adolfo Lopez Mateos and leading protests on behalf of teachers and artists on strike. Although Bradbury doesn't describe Rodriguez's murals, it's possible that he painted murals as politically sensitive, in their own way, as those of Siqueiros, one of which, Burial of a Worker, showed a funeral procession in which workers bore an oversize casket “decorated with a hammer and a sickle.”

 

Jose Clemente Orozco: Man of Fire (1938)

Orozco painted satirical political murals, many of them critical of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). A supporter of Venustiano Carranza and General Álvaro Obregón and against Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, the conservative Orozco was more pessimistic about the effects of the revolution than some of his colleagues, including Diego Rivera.

José Clemente Orozco: Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1936)

In Rodriguez's art, the narrator sees something of the style, and perhaps the spirit, of both Siqueiros and Orozco. Perhaps Rodriguez's work suggested a middle political stance between the more extreme, polarized positions of these famous muralists. By not directly stating why the narrator views Rodriguez's work as promising and important, Bradbury leaves open this and other possibilities.

The online article “Mexican muralists: the big three—Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros” provides information on the background of the Mexican Revolution; the rise of muralism as a means of communicating with citizens of “a mostly illiterate country,” a discipline that was dominated by Orozco, Siqueros, and Rivera; and the styles and themes of these three artists. Some of this material could enhance the reading of Bradbury's Story, but also important is an understanding of the community in which Rodriguez lived, the “Mexican-Hispanic-Jewish Boyle Heights” the narrator mentions as the setting for Rodriguez's wake.

Often, though, murals depict the personal concerns of their artists, which may or may not be political concerns as well, and the murals' themes are apt to change from one generation to the next. For example, “Many of the murals depicted the 1960s movement for Chicano equality.” However, a fifteen-year-old girl's mural, painted in 2017, illustrates her idea of “women of influence” and includes depictions of a U. S. Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor; a royal, Princess Diana; and a comedienne and talk show host, Ellen DeGeneres.

In his description of Montoya, the narrator of Bradbury's story suggests the types of themes that would be likely to attract the cardinal's interest; perhaps Montoya discovered these or similar interests in the images Rodriguez painted. The narrator sees Carlos Jesus Montoya as “priest, poet, adventurer in rain forests, love assassin of ten thousand women, headliner, mystic, and now critic for Art News Quarterly,” who surveys “the walls where Sebastian Rodriguez's lost dreams were suspended,” “lost dreams” which Montoya is keen to preserve.

By avoiding descriptions of Rodriguez's murals in any but the most general terms, Bradbury allows his readers to envision the artist's work however they please, in effect creating for themselves the very paintings they imagine the artist has painted and allowing them to become their own muralists, painting their own dreams, “lost” or present, a community of artists in which each reader paints an expanse of the same canvas to which everyone else also contributes, just as actual murals are sometimes painted.

The Incomplete Completist

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In The Cat Pajamas's “Introduction: Alive and Kicking and Writing,” Ray Bradbury offers a clue to the meaning of his short story “The Completist.”

First, he recounts the story's inspiration. He and his wife Maggie, he says, met a “book collector and library founder” during “a voyage across the Atlantic” (xv).

After listening for to him hours, the Bradburys learned of the shocking incident with which Bradbury concludes his story (xv). The story, he adds, wasn't written for twenty years, when Maggie's death prompted him to write it (xv).

The narrative is based upon his recognition that the gentleman he and Maggie had met on their voyage represents a metaphor of sorts (xv), and this connection between the metaphorical significance of a particular person offers us a clue as to how Bradbury, the writer, wrote, or sometimes wrote.

If something is a metaphor, it shares certain characteristics with something else, the tenor, that is not otherwise like it. In doing so, the metaphor conveys a likeness between certain aspects of the otherwise different things.

Although there is no equivalency between the metaphor and the tenor, it is sometimes helpful to pretend that there is, so that a metaphor-tenor relationship may be written, as Bette Midler declares in her song “The Rose”:

Love = river

Love = razor

Love = hunger

Love = flower

She also declares how the metaphor and the tenor are alike: as a “river,” love “drowns the tender reed”; as a “razor,” love “leaves your soul to bleed”; as “hunger,” love is “an endless aching need”; and, as a “flower,” love is the product of a unique seed—the “you,” or listener, to whom Midler sings.

For Bradbury, as a metaphor, the book collector and library founder, the “Completist,” seems to personify culture.

Concerning the traveler's fictional counterpart, the story's narrator informs the reader, “At no time did he allow us to speak.” The Completist tells the couple that he travels the world, “collecting books, building libraries, and entertaining his soul (221-222).” He is the very embodiment of art and culture, collecting and distributing it, even as he himself enjoys it (222). Funded by his law firm, he has just “spent time in Paris, Rome, London, and Moscow and had shipped home tens of thousands of rare volumes” (222). Moreover, the Completist has constructed a vast repository of medical texts, novels, and books devoted to art, history, philosophy, and world travel (222-223).

In doing so, it seems that the lawyer seeks to reinvent the world as he would have it to be, a place of culture, education, and entertainment; he tells his listeners that Sir John Soane, “the great English architect” did something similar, reconstructing “all of London in his mind and in the drawings made according to his specifications” (222-223).

The Completist, having discovered some of Soane's “library dreams,” used them as the bases to build his own “university” on more than “a hundred acres” of his own property, where physicians, surgeons, and academics from around the world congregate every weekend.

His estate's “multitudinous centers of learning” allow its visitors to explore the cultural “treasures” of the world, as they stroll its meadows, amid “grand lanterns of education” and “read in an environment that [is] conducive to vast learning” (223-224).

As Bradbury warns in his book's introduction, the story ends with a shocking incident. The Completist, a man of culture, education, and refinement, a world traveler who has delved deeply into the world's cultural “treasures,” seeks to know “only one last thing”: “Why did my thirty-five-year-old son kill his wife, destroy his daughter, and hang himself?”

The couple (stand-ins, perhaps, for Bradbury's readers) is at a loss for words, not that it matters; the Completist does not wait for a response, nor does he appear to expect one. The horrific fates of his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter seem to represent the dilemma known to philosophers as the problem of evil, except, in Bradbury's story, it has more of a secular, than a religious, dimension. 
(In philosophy, the problem of evil is a counterargument to the assertion that the universe is ruled by a God who is both loving and just, and asks how the fact of the existence of evil be reconciled with belief in the existence of a God who is both loving and just.)

The Completist seems to seek his answer in culture and education, in medicine, literature, art, history, philosophy, and world travel, but despite his many superb and expensive “collections,” he still has no answer to the question of why his son killed his wife and destroyed his daughter before taking his own life. It is a mystery as unanswerable as it is consuming, and no amount of cultural “treasures” can compensate for these losses, both of family and of purpose.

Perhaps this is why he calls himself “The Completist.” The term refers to not to a connoisseur of art, but instead, to “an obsessive, typically indiscriminate, collector or fan of something.” Perhaps the story's Completist seeks to fill a void that cannot be filled. By filling himself and his estate and as many others as he can with culture and education, he may suggest that, if not now, if not today, then at some time in the future, the void within himself may be filled, that his thirst for knowledge in general and of one thing in particular may be quenched.

Or perhaps he collects the riches of culture simply to pass the time, merely to have something to do that others believe is significant, even if he himself does not. Until one's own demise, it is best to keep busy, he may think; it is best to pretend to believe that, despite unanswerable questions and horrific events, there is a reason to live and a purpose to perseverance.

It is also possible, of course, that the Completist actually does believe that, despite the absurdity of existence, there is, indeed, still a reason to live. Bradbury's statement, in his introduction, suggests that the story may be interpreted in this manner. Following Maggie's illness and death, he says, “for the first time in seventy years, my demon has lain quiet within me. My muse, my Maggie, was gone, and my demon did not know what to do.” As time went by, he started to question whether he'd “ever write again.” Then, he thought of “The Completist gentleman,” and he found himself eager to write the story of the metaphor with which, for two decades, he'd done “nothing.”

Like other writers, Bradbury writes about his own experiences, but he seems , frequently, to do so by introducing the intermediary of a metaphor. He says what he says by speaking about something else that is similar in some respects but different otherwise. The Completist is a metaphor for the absurdity of existence, it seems, but also a metaphor for the angst that Bradbury felt when the light of his life, his Maggie, was extinguished. For Bradbury, the “university” that the Completist built is the author's return to writing fiction, his stories the works of art and other cultural artifacts that make up the author's own collections, including the stories collected in The Cat's Pajamas.

Bradbury's writing fills, or attempts to fill, the great abyss within him that the death of his muse, his wife, his Maggie, created. Like the Completist, he offers it to the world, for the entertainment and edification of those who desire or need diversion and enlightenment.