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.