Conrad uses understatement to describe violence, a technique that influenced subsequent British thriller writers, notably Geoffrey Household who acknowledged his debt to Conrad in his autobiography,Against the Wind. The basic plot of Heart of Darkness —a remote outpost, interrupted dispatches from its charismatic leader, an expedition to learn what has happened—was borrowed in numerous later novels and films. Movies based on Conrad’s work have been influential also, particularly Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 adaptation of The Secret Agent, retitled Sabotage. In 1979, John Milius’s screenplay of Heart of Darkness was famously directed by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now. There, “The horror! The horror!” became the Vietnam War.

  H. Terrell Griffin has spent his adult life soldiering, studying, lawyering, and writing, in that order. Upon graduating from high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, and after three years of active duty, he began his history and law studies, eventually becoming a board certified civil trial lawyer in Orlando, Florida, for many years. He is the author of the thrillers Murder Key, Longboat Blues, Blood Island, and Wyatt’s Revenge featuring trial lawyer turned beach bum, Matt Royal, whom one reviewer described as “Travis McGee with a law degree.” Griffin is a lifetime member of the 14th Cavalry Association and holds a U.S. Coast Guard 100 Ton Master’s License. He and his wife, Jean, reside in Longboat Key and Maitland, Florida.

  20

  Erskine Childers’s

  THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS (1903)

  Christine Kling

  Erskine Childers (1870–1922) wrote only one novel,The Riddle of the Sands, a sea-going spy thriller that has never gone out of print. Born in England, but raised in Ireland, Childers’s own story of his conversion from steadfast supporter of the British Empire to radical Irish Nationalist is as fascinating as his fiction. He studied classics and then law at Trinity College, Cambridge, and began his career as a committee clerk at the House of Commons. An avid yachtsman, he bought his first boat at age twenty-three and frequently sailed the waters of the North Sea and the Baltic, often in the company of his brother, Henry, and later with his wife, Molly. He fought for England in both the Boer War and World War I, but it was his growing support for Irish Home Rule that led him to sail his yacht, the fifty-one-foot Colin Archer design, the Asgard, into a full gale to smuggle guns into Ireland in 1914. Childers was sentenced to death by the Irish Free State and executed by firing squad during the Irish Civil War in 1922.

  Erskine Childers chafed at calling The Riddle of the Sands a novel, claiming instead “it was a story with a purpose.” In the preface, Childers wrote that it was a factual tale told to him by his friend Carruthers, and originally the book carried the subtitle “A Record of Secret Service, edited by Erskine Childers.” Having stumbled into the world of publishing several years earlier when his sister arranged for the publication of a nonfiction book based on his letters describing the Boer War in Africa, Childers believed the most important aspect of his writing was his call for the modernization of the British military. With his story about two English chaps sailing off the Frisian Islands, he sought to alert England to the potential dangers of a German invasion. While his novel did have a profound impact on politics, and Winston Churchill credited it for Britain’s establishing several naval bases on the North Sea, today the book endures as a pioneer of the British spy novel.

  The Riddle of the Sands is a great sailing adventure story told from the point of view of Carruthers, a clerk in the Foreign Office martyred to his work when all of his friends have abandoned the city for parties on country estates. When he receives a wire from an acquaintance inviting him to join a yacht in the Baltic, Carruthers packs his jaunty white flannels and boards a steamer for Hamburg. There, he meets up with Davies and discovers that the Dulcibella is not the fine yacht he imagined. The hilarious transformation of Carruthers from effete London club man to accomplished sailor is one of the great charms of the book.

  Initially, readers are mystified along with Carruthers as to the purpose of Davies’s invitation. As the young sailors leave the Baltic and begin their cruise among the Frisian Islands, the taciturn Davies reveals that he was nearly shipwrecked and killed by a duplicitous Englishman. He wants Carruthers to help him solve the riddle of what the traitor and his German navy friends are about. Thus begins their turn as spies listening at windows, donning disguises, and mapping out railway lines, and above all, using Davies’s knowledge of the channels and their shifting sands.

  Through a combination of Davies’s brilliant seamanship and Carruthers’s knowledge of human character, these two talented amateurs are able to outwit their enemies and discover Germany’s foul plans. In the process, Childers establishes two character types who would later populate the pages of the many spy/adventure novels. First, in Carruthers, one finds the inept and bumbling civil servant who, in the face of danger, is able to rise to heights of ingenuity and self-reliance. This sort of “ordinary man” character was very popular up until the Second World War and the Cold War when the professionals took over. However, in John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, one sees that the type has not lost popularity.

  The second character, Davies, is a man of stout heart, a patriotic loner and adventurer, a naïve sleuth but brilliant yachtsman who is endearing as he bumbles through the book’s romantic sub plot. This archetype of the amateur adventure hero appears in later novels by the likes of John Buchan, Eric Ambler, and Hammond Innes.

  It was not only through characters that A Riddle in the Sands influenced the next generation of adventure/spy thrillers. Childers’s accurate and detailed descriptions of sailing and of Germany’s Frisian Islands gave the tale a realism not seen in the romantic tales of the previous century. In the novel, Childers borrowed verbatim from his logbooks of cruises in the North Sea, to the extent that some say the novel can be used as a sailing guidebook.

  A few seconds more and we were whizzing through a slit between two wood jetties. Inside a small square harbor showed, but there was no room to round up properly and no time to lower sails. Davies just threw the kedge over, and it just got a grip in time to check our momentum and save our bowsprit from the quay-side.

  Though some critics have complained about the amount of nautical detail, the book set a standard for the fact-filled techno-thriller that educates as well as it entertains.

  Erskine Childers was the first in a long line of seafaring adventure writers whose lives blur the line between fact and fiction. Hammond Innes, an experienced yachtsman, sailed his own boat from the Baltic to the Bay of Biscay, while Sam Llewellyn, author of many wonderful sailing thrillers including The Shadow of the Sands, a sequel to Childers’s classic, is a master sailor who has cruised in gold-plated racers and simple open boats. And then there is Clive Cussler, whose books often feature duos who seem to be direct descendants from Davies and Carruthers. Cussler created his own NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency) and in over thirty years at the helm discovered more than sixty undersea wrecks.

  On the eve of his execution, Childers wrote in a letter to his wife, “I die loving England.” The enigmatic Anglo-Irishman gave up his life for his love of Ireland, but he left to us not only a new genre of spy thrillers, but also a damn good yarn.

  Christine Kling has spent over twenty years living in and around boats and cruising the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Pacific. She recently cruised the Bahamas singlehanded for six weeks. All her sailing experience led to her first suspense novel,Surface Tension (2002), which introduced Florida female tugboat captain, Seychelle Sullivan.Cross Current, Bitter End, and Wrecker’s Key followed. Christine completed her MFA in creative writing at Florida International University and is currently working on her first stand-alone sailing thriller. An English professor at Broward College, Christine lives aboard her thirty-three-foot sailboat Talespinner in Fort Lauderdale.

  21

  Jack London’s

  THE SEA WOLF (1904)

  Jim Fusilli

  Cannery worker, oyster pirate, seal hunter, tramp, and Klondike gold prospector—a well of experience from which he drew during his career as a writer—Jack London (1876–1916) was twenty-three years old in 1899 when he published his first short stories. In 1903, his powerful short novel The Call of the Wild (inspired by his prospecting ordeals) became his first best seller. A year later,The Sea Wolf was published; it too became a best seller and a critical success, securing his reputation. Ambrose Bierce praised London’s skill in creating its title character: “The great thing—and it is among the greatest of things—is that tremendous creation, Wolf Larsen,” Bierce wrote. “The setting up of such a figure is enough for a man to do in one lifetime.” London went on to write Martin Eden, an autobiographical novel, and John Barleycorn, a memoir in which he examined his battles with alcohol. The literary heir to James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane, he endures as a superb American author, one who influenced Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Jack Kerouac, among others. Before his death at age forty in 1916, possibly from uremia, London was quite likely the country’s most famous writer. One indication of the lasting merit of The Sea Wolf: no American novel has been filmed as often.

  The Sea Wolf is a remarkable work—a literary achievement in which London sets opposing philosophies in play in the form of his two main characters. When those philosophies are translated into action, the novel is a thriller so strong that it may very well serve as the model of the form. The writing is crisp, the vivid ocean setting chills the reader’s bones, and the exhilarating action is that rare thing—both incredible and believable.

  The glittering edge of The Sea Wolf rises from the psychological depth London gives to Wolf Larsen, the brutal but enigmatic captain of the Ghost, a schooner in search of seals in the waters off the coast of Japan, and Humphrey Van Weyden, a proper gentleman who is rescued by Larsen and pressed into hard labor after Van Weyden falls from a ferry into the Golden Gate Straits.

  London uses a device that permits a detailed, multilayered first-person narrative: Van Weyden is a writer of sorts and, as such, a keen observer who reports what he sees and experiences in detail. As the story begins, he filters everything through what he’s read; thus we know that he has no firsthand knowledge of a man like Larsen.

  In short time, we learn that Larsen is more than a scheming brute, though Van Weyden decides that Larsen possesses a physical “strength savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the essential of life in that it is the potency of motion . . . this strength pervaded every action of his.” But Larsen has his intellectual side. As the ship continues its journey, Van Weyden enters the captain’s stateroom and finds a rack filled with plays, novels, scientific works, and grammar books. When the two characters debate, calmly at first, Larsen reveals his philosophy:

  I believe life is a mess. It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all.

  London permits Van Weyden, the idealistic narrator, to define himself. “I had lived a placid, uneventful, sedentary existence all my days—the life of a scholar and a recluse on an assured and comfortable income,” Van Weyden says. “Violent life . . . had never appealed to me.”

  But Larsen’s assessment of Van Weyden is devastating: “You couldn’t walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly.” Van Weyden knows the captain is right. Whether he will adapt—because we are certain Larsen won’t bend—drives the story. Later, Larsen’s brother, Death Larsen, appears, as does Maud Brewster, an unexpected passenger who affects the captain and Van Weyden.

  The way the principal characters spar and debate is dazzling—to read aloud some of Larsen’s soliloquies is to feel the rhythm and power of language. But for all its psychological intrigue and impressive prose,The Sea Wolf is an exciting seafaring adventure. On the Ghost, Van Weyden struggles as the captain and the crew test him. Each day and night delivers moments of unbearable tension for the narrator and the more vulnerable members of the crew.

  Larsen is tested as well, not only by his ship’s quest and his steely fanaticism. Crewmembers engineer a mutiny, and the captain is tossed overboard “with his scalp laid open.” With Van Weyden in his wake, he makes his way back through darkness onto the ship and descends below deck to confront the mutineers Leach and Johnson. Van Weyden reports, “I heard a great infuriated bellow go up from Wolf Larsen, and from Leach a snarling that was desperate and bloodcurdling . . . By the sounds I knew that Leach and Johnson had been quickly reinforced by some of their mates . . . ‘Mash his brains out!’ was Johnson’s cry.” Through sheer force of animal will, Larsen triumphs, and what follows for the traitorous crew as the voyage continues illustrates what Van Weyden calls the captain’s mad genius.

  Later, when Larsen is weakened by what appears to be a series of strokes, Van Weyden and Maud Brewster manage to escape. They land on what they call Endeavor Island, which is uninhabited by humans, but populated by hundreds of seals. Freed from Larsen’s increasing mania, Van Weyden and Brewster, who have a reserved but tender relationship, cobble together a way to survive until rescue arrives. A ship appears and crashes on the island. It is the Ghost, and the only crewmember is a weakened Larsen. Van Weyden decides to kill him. But can he?

  Larsen says, “You little rag puppet, you little echoing mechanism, you are unable to kill me as you would a snake or a shark . . . Bah! I had hoped better things of you.” Clearly, both men cannot survive with each other on an island best fit for animals.

  London is renowned for his naturalistic style, a misleading term that doesn’t refer to the depth and tactile expression of his natural settings, but to his appreciation for the late nineteenth-century literary movement whose origins are attributed to Èmile Zola. According to Christopher McBride, whose excellent essay prefaces the edition that’s part of the Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading, Zola “viewed writers as observers of human nature describing the shaping forces from a scientific perspective.” Here, the science is provided by Social Darwinism—the survival of the fittest—and London’s story may be perceived as an exercise in defining that theory as something other than primal. Van Weyden believes that man is more than brute, more than yeast, and as he tells Maud Brewster, “We have not the strength with which to fight this man; we must dissimulate , and win, if win we can, by craft.” Whether Van Weyden can triumph is the crux of the brilliantly told tale.

  Jim Fusilli is the author of five novels and one nonfiction book, and is the rock and pop critic of The Wall Street Journal. He edited and contributed a chapter to ITW’s The Chopin Manuscript, Audible’s best-selling “serial thriller,” which was named the 2008 Audiobook of the Year by the Audio Publishers Association, and its sequel,The Copper Bracelet. His “Chellini’s Solution,” appeared in the 2007 edition of The Best American Mystery Stories, and his story “The Guardians” was selected for A Prisoner of Memory, a 2008 anthology of the year’s finest mystery short fiction. His short fiction also appeared in the anthology Boston Noir and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. In addition to working for the Journal, Jim has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

  22

  Baroness Emma Orczy’s

  THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL (1905)

  Lisa Black

  Emma Orczy (1865–1947) really was a baroness and knew whereof she wrote. Similar to the victims of the French Revolution, she and her family were forced from a privileged life in Hungary by the threat of a peasant revolt. Like her character Marguerite, Emma was spunky, intelligent, and passionately in love with her husband. They returned from their honeymoon to find a crowd around their door—Jack the Ripper had left his latest victim on their sidewalk. Perhaps this prompted Emma’s interest in mysteries, and she began to write a series of them after the birth of her first child, creating characters quite different from the premier fictional detective of the day, Sherlock Holmes. Later, a trip to Paris brought up thoughts of the French Revolution, and The Scarlet Pimpernel came to her. Publishers considered the story old-fashioned and wouldn’t touch it, so Emma turned it into a play. It captured the hearts of audiences everywhere. She went on to write sixteen additional tales about the Scarlet Pimpernel.

  In 2002, Donald Maass penned Writing the Breakout Novel, which sets out the rules every thriller writer needs to know. His firm lists regarding setting, plot, and character were one of several epiphanies on my road to publication, and so it amazes me that Baroness Emma Orczy managed to satisfy each one of these rules in The Scarlet Pimpernel ninety-nine years before Maass’s book graced my shelf.

  It is the time of the French Revolution, and the lower classes of France—rather understandably—have had enough. They are spouting ideals of liberté, egalité, and fraternité while lopping off heads right and left. The noblemen of England are doing what they can to help their titled friends while avoiding the politics of interfering in a civil war. So far the premise has Maass’ trifecta of plausibility —we all know this occurred and surely the doomed nobility called on their friends in other countries to help them out;inherent conflict of a very basic type, with one group trying to kill and the other trying to save; and the originality of looking at a historical event from a unique perspective.