The tale was first published in Collier’s Weekly and received the prestigious O. Henry Memorial Award—Connell’s second such win in two years. While engaging as fiction, “The Most Dangerous Game” (aka “The Hounds of Zaroff”) was also a cynical commentary on big-game hunts that were fashionable during the 1920s among the wealthy. In fact, both the protagonist and antagonist participate in this sport with a disturbingly callous zest.

  Sanger Rainsford shows up first. He’s an arrogant New Yorker, renowned for his publications on big-game hunting. While traveling by ship to Brazil, he gets stranded on an isolated Caribbean island and soon meets its lone inhabitants: the Russian aristocrat, General Zaroff, and his deaf mute Cossack slave, Ivan. Zaroff is himself a big-game hunter, familiar with Rainsford’s publications. In fact, he’s delighted to have the company of a kindred soul. While they wine and dine, Zaroff freely admits what he’s doing, believing that only someone like Rainsford could fully appreciate it.

  Zaroff describes his boredom with even the most ferocious animal and how this pushed him toward hunting much more interesting prey—an animal that can think. Toward this end, he lures ships to his island, making them crash and forcing surviving crew members to play a “game”— as game. To earn their freedom, they must survive on his island for three days while he hunts them. Of course, Zaroff has all the advantage, including a pack of vicious hunting dogs.

  Rainsford realizes that Zaroff will now seek to hone his skill against a master hunter—him. He knows that any moral objections will fail, since he himself has openly affirmed Zaroff’s attitude about the hunter’s superiority over the hunted. Thus, Rainsford has no choice but to “play,” and win or lose, he will have to ponder this savage reflection of his own arrogance.

  Connell’s story, a typical mirror-image tale meant to turn a protagonist on his head, has been widely anthologized and adapted for film, although the notion of a mad human-savage on an island was not new. For example, H. G. Wells had portrayed this in 1896 in The Island of Dr. Moreau. But Connell was also illustrating the moral quicksand of arrogance.

  Hollywood made its most famous rendition in 1932, utilizing sets from the Skull Island scenes in King Kong. (Fay Wray acted in both films, although no female character appears in Connell’s story.) While there were other films over the years, the basic plot also emerged in countless television series, from Star Trek to Criminal Minds. More disturbing, its central tenet—hunting humans—inspired real-life psychopaths who fancy themselves “above the herd.”

  The infamous “Zodiac” seems to have read the story or seen a film of it. With at least seven victims in the San Francisco area during the late 1960s, he sought public notoriety. As he claimed responsibility for a double homicide and threatened more, he divided a code among three local newspapers and demanded that the entire cryptogram be published. The papers complied, and a reader deciphered it. Part of the message echoed Zaroff: “i like killing people because it is so much fun it is more fun that killing wild game in the forrest because man is the most dangerous anamal of all to kill [original spelling retained].” In addition, in one film version, Zaroff dresses in black, wears a knife in a sheath on his left side, and keeps a rifle in his right hand. A surviving witness of a Zodiac assault described the hooded figure that approached him in similar terms.

  Investigators searched for men who viewed themselves as hunters, and a strong suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen, who admitted familiarity with Connell’s story. Acquaintances of his said he often spoke of the “most dangerous game” and “man as true game.” However, after Allen died, a DNA analysis exonerated him.

  Serial killer Robert Hansen also seemed to replicate Zaroff’s agenda. In 1980, he flew prostitutes into wilderness areas in Alaska to turn them loose without resources and hunt them with a high-powered rifle. The FBI finally brought him to ground, persuading him to confess to the torture murder of seventeen young women. (This resembles the 1972 film,Woman Hunt, considered a “remake” of The Most Dangerous Game.)

  It’s disturbing that humans can become so callous and cruel as to treat their own kind as prey, yet such dehumanization clearly works as entertainment. This theme is likely to show up again and again—in fiction and otherwise—as an archetypal truth about human nature.

  Dr. Katherine Ramsland holds graduate degrees in philosophy and psychology. She has published sixteen short stories, more than eight hundred articles, and thirty-four books, including The Devil’s Dozen: How Cutting Edge Forensics Took Down Twelve Notorious Serial Killers, True Stories of CSI, Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, The Human Predator, and The Criminal Mind: A Writers’ Guide to Forensic Psychology. With former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary, she coauthored The Unknown Darkness, and with forensic science professor James E. Starrs,A Voice for the Dead. She has been translated into ten languages, and has written biographies of both Anne Rice and Dean Koontz. In addition, she pens a regular feature on historical forensics for The Forensic Examiner and teaches forensic psychology and criminal justice at DeSales University in Pennsylvania. Appearing on numerous news programs and documentaries, she is considered an international expert on serial murder.

  28

  W. Somerset Maugham’s

  ASHENDEN or THE BRITISH AGENT (1928)

  Melodie Johnson Howe

  W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was a prolific and successful English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was also one of the most significant travel writers between the two world wars. His first major novel, Of Human Bondage (1915), was decried by the critics, but saved from obscurity by Theodore Dreiser who thought it a work of genius and compared it to a Beethoven symphony. The book has never been out of print.The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and The Razor’s Edge (1944) are among his best known books. His short story, “The Letter,” was turned into a brilliant noir film starring Bette Davis. Numerous other stories, novels, and plays were adapted into movies, such as Rain staring Joan Crawford. Many of his works, including Liza of Lambeth and Cakes and Ale, featured female characters who were ruthless in serving their sexual needs while not thinking of the cost to others. Critics often condemned Maugham for letting his villains off too easily. “It must be a fault of mine that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me,” he responded. During the latter part of his career, he fell from favor, thinking of himself as the “very first row of the second raters.” He died while reading a mystery.

  W. Somerset Maugham was a great short story writer. He was also a spy in World War I. Blending his talent and personal experience, he wrote Ashen-den or the British Agent (1928). The book is a group of sixteen short stories connected by the character Ashenden, a writer/spy, and R., a British colonel, Ashenden’s recruiter and handler.

  Maugham writes in the preface to a later edition, “The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it coherent, dramatic, and probable. That is what I have tried to do in this particular series.”

  Each story contains an order from R. that Ashenden must fulfill. Sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes his goal is lost in a maze of emotion created by the unpredictability of human beings. Maugham’s sharply observed characters, wit, and stiff English compassion bring these stories to life. Here, Maugham gives us a sense of Ashenden and R., the old soldier:

  . . . so long as the fine weather lasted he was prepared to enjoy himself. He did not see why he should not at least try to combine pleasure to himself with profit to his country. He was traveling with a brand-new passport in his pocket, under a borrowed name, and this gave him an agreeable sense of owning a new personality. He was often slightly tired of himself and it diverted him for awhile to be merely a creature of R.’s facile invention . . . R. it is true had not seen the fun of it: what humor R. possessed was of a sardonic turn and he had no facility for taking in good part a joke at his own expense. To do that you must be able to look at yourself from the outside and be at the same time spectator and actor in the pleasant comedy of life. R. was a soldier and regarded introspection as unhealthy, unEnglish, and unpatriotic.

  The reader never sees the effects of the war in these stories, except in eerily empty European cities where spies maneuver, scheme, and contrive against each other in the name of their country. This is Lucerne as seen through Ashenden’s eyes:

  Most of the hotels were closed. The streets were empty, the rowing boats for hire rocked idly at the water’s edge and there was none to take them, and in the avenues by the lake the only persons to be seen were the serious Swiss taking their neutrality, like a dachshund, for a walk with them.

  Maugham is brilliant at going from the languid overview, then moving swiftly in for the kill with a sharp devastating observation.

  One of my favorite stories is “Giulia Lazzari.” It is a love story turned into ugly betrayal by the war. A dancer has captured the heart of an East Indian terrorist who spies for the Germans. Ashenden must get this un-educated creature to write letters to her lover, enticing him to come from neutral Switzerland to France, so he can be captured. The main part of the story takes place in a hotel room where Ashenden cajoles this volatile, angry, sobbing woman into betraying her lover. When writing the letter, she asks him:

  “How do I spell absolutely ?”

  “As you like.”

  How succinct. How perfectly put for a spy who wants to give nothing away to the love-obsessed terrorist. When the Indian learns that he has been deceived, he swallows poison in a train station in front of his captors. In the hotel room, Ashenden tells the lady what has happened and that she is free to go. She cries and wails and then suddenly clearheaded asks:

  “What are they going to do with his things?” “I don’t know. Why?” “He had a wristwatch I gave him for Christmas. It cost twelve pounds. Could I have it back?”

  And that is the end of love. Maugham captures not only the everydayness of being a spy, but the deadening loss for all those involved.

  As with many of his stories, this one is based on an actual event. There was a British agent sent to assassinate the real Indian terrorist and German spy, Chattopadhaya. How deeply was Maugham involved? We don’t know. But Winston Churchill reportedly told Maugham to burn fourteen of his short stories because they gave too much information away.

  Another story, “The Hairless Mexican,” is about a hit man so overly confident in his murderous skills and sexual prowess that he fails miserably at his mission. Maugham uses irony in place of a gun every time

  In creating the Eton-educated Ashenden, Maugham paved the way for Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and many more. I even see Ashenden in P. D. James’s Inspector Dalgliesh. Also, R. is in all likelihood the prototype for M. in the James Bond novels. Alfred Hitchcock used elements from Ashenden in his 1936 film,Secret Agent.

  This group of stories was written in a long-ago era. The element of the ticking time bomb so popular in thriller writing today does not exist in them. But the human element does. And its accuracy—on a special tour of the CIA in Langley, I learned that they have a best spy novel list. It’s very short.Ashenden or the British Agent is on it.

  After a career in acting, Melodie Johnson Howe turned to writing. Her first novel, The Mother Shadow, was nominated for Edgar, Anthony, and Agatha Awards. Howe’s second novel,Beauty Dies, soon followed. Her numerous Diana Poole short stories about a middle-aged actress in Hollywood have been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Best Short Fiction of the Year, and other anthologies. Her short story, “Facing Up,” was nominated for the Barry Award. She is also the author of The Diana Poole Stories. Janet Hutchings, editor of EQMM, says “the critical acceptance her work has received is well deserved . . . Howe is one of the genre’s best short story writers and novelists.” As Howe says, “I write about what I know. Hollywood, women, men, love, betrayal, and then I throw in a murder or two.” She taught at the UCLA Writers Program and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. She blogs on www.criminalbrief.com.

  29.

  P. G. Wodehouse’s

  SUMMER LIGHTNING (1929)

  R.L. Stine

  P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse (1881–1975) had a literary career that spanned more than seventy years. He lived to be ninety-three and published ninety-three books of humor and brilliant farce. He was also a playwright and lyricist for more than thirty Broadway musicals. He wrote with such composers as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Jerome Kern. His most popular novels and stories feature the foppish, upper-class twit, Bertie Wooster, and his indomitable and wise butler, Jeeves. He also wrote many Blandings Castle novels and stories, featuring the eccentric, almost dim-witted Lord Emsworth and the Empress, his treasured fat pig. Wodehouse was a golf enthusiast and wrote many of the funniest stories about golf ever written. British born, he spent much of his later life on Long Island and became a U.S. citizen in 1955. In 1975, he was knighted by the queen of England and died a few months later with an unfinished Blandings Castle novel in his typewriter.

  What ugly secrets does the old mansion hold?

  Why is more than one visitor willing to pay big money to have the teller of these secrets silenced?

  Can it be that several guests are not who they claim to be? Why do they sneak off in the dark of night to meet in secret?

  Which guest is responsible for the shocking theft of the owner’s most priceless possession?

  Yes, I’m describing a novel with lots of mystery, intrigue, twists, and surprises. This book is a great classic—but not a classic thriller. I’m talking about Summer Lightning, a comic masterpiece by P. G. Wodehouse, an author few would ever confuse with Ken Follett, Frederick Forsyth, or even Dorothy L. Sayers.

  When I was asked to nominate a book for this volume, I decided to give myself a challenge. Having written both humor and thrillers, I’ve chewed many an ear off with my theories about how the two are closely connected.

  P. G. Wodehouse is my favorite author. He wrote ninety-three novels, and I’ve read most of them with great pleasure. I admire them for their impossibly convoluted plots, and for the ease and splendor of Wodehouse’s language. His mastery of language has been compared to Shakespeare, and his brilliantly tangled story lines have been compared to Dickens.

  However, as big a fan as I am, even I know that Wodehouse’s novels cannot be considered thrillers. So, that’s the challenge I gave myself: to use Summer Lightning, one of his superb Blandings Castle novels, to prove my theory about the close relationship between comedy and thrillers.

  To begin, the story is driven by a heinous crime.

  Lord Emsworth, the dotty and absent-minded master of Blandings Castle, has one interest in life—his most prized possession, the Empress, an enormous pig, which he enters annually in the local Fat Pig Competition. Early in the book, the pig is stolen, throwing Emsworth and the castle into an uproar.

  Alfred Hitchcock described the object that sets the plot of a thriller in motion as the MacGuffin. It can be a suitcase holding a million dollars, an incriminating love letter—or, in this case, a fat pig. The stolen object begins a chase that can lead to thrills—or laughs.

  I hope this doesn’t spoil it for you—but the pig was stolen by Lord Emsworth’s nephew, Ronnie Fish. Ronnie doesn’t plan to keep it or sell it for bacon. His idea is to return it to his uncle in a few days in order to win Emsworth’s undying gratitude.

  This leads us to our second connection to thrillers—the cover-up. When Hugo Carmody, Emsworth’s secretary, comes to tell Ronnie the upsetting news, Ronnie realizes he must put on a good face to hide his connection to the crime. This funny dialogue ensues:

  Hugo: “You know that pig of your uncle’s?”

  Ronnie: “What about it?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Gone!” said Hugo, rolling the word round his tongue. “I met the old boy half a minute ago, and he told me. It seems he went down to the pigbin for a before-breakfast look at the animal, and it wasn’t there.”

  “Wasn’t there?”

  “Wasn’t there.”

  “How do you mean, wasn’t there?”

  “Well, it wasn’t. Wasn’t there at all. It had gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Gone! Its room was empty and its bed had not been slept in.”

  “Well, I’m dashed,” said Ronnie.

  He was feeling pleased with himself. He felt he had played his part well. Just the right incredulous amazement, changing just soon enough into stunned disbelief.

  “You don’t seem very surprised,” said Hugo.

  Ronnie was stung. The charge was monstrous.

  “Yes, I do,” he cried. “I seem frightfully surprised.”

  Other thriller techniques that can also be used for comic effect? How about misdirection. Most thriller writers misdirect their protagonists to create surprises and plot twists in their novels. And they misdirect the readers to keep them from guessing where the book is going.

  Wodehouse keeps everyone misdirected as often as possible! In fact, very few guests at Blandings are who they claim to be.

  The young woman who claims to be Myra Schoonmaker, an American heiress, is actually Sue Brown, a chorus girl. The detective Percy Pil-beam, who appears to be on the trail of the stolen pig, is actually after different game. He’s there to steal Galahad (Gally) Threepwood’s manuscript of his memoirs.

  Which brings us to the second MacGuffin. Wodehouse isn’t satisfied with only one. And as with many thrillers, this subplot bumps against the main story.