I eventually learned how much Household believed in his nongraphic approach to depicting violence. After I finished writing First Blood, my admiration for his work prompted me to send him a copy of the manuscript in the hope that my outdoor action scenes would motivate him to recognize a kinship and supply a publicity quote. It didn’t take long for him to reply. The author of a novel in which a rotting polecat is skinned, its guts used to build a catapult to drive a stake through someone’s forehead told me that he couldn’t possibly give me a quote. “Your novel is far too bloody.”

  David Morrell is the author of First Blood, the award-winning novel in which Rambo was created. He holds a Ph.D. in American literature from the Pennsylvania State University and taught in the English department at the University of Iowa until he gave up his tenure to write full time. “The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer described him, Morrell is the cofounder (with Gayle Lynds) of the International Thriller Writers organization . His numerous best-sellers include The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries),The Fraternity of the Stone, The League of Night and Fog, Creepers, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). He is also the author of The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing.

  37

  Helen MacInnes’s

  ABOVE SUSPICION (1941)

  Gayle Lynds

  Helen MacInnes (1907–1985) was known around the globe as the Queen of International Suspense, writing twenty-one spy novels over a remarkable forty-five-year career. A new MacInnes book was an event, eagerly awaited and loudly heralded. Of course, it would be a New York Times number one bestseller. Of course, it would be on the list for months. In her day, no other female author in the field achieved her popularity. She stood alone at the top of the literary espionage mountain, gazing down on the likes of le Carré, Fleming, and Ludlum—until their sales and reputations finally caught up with hers. MacInnes was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and in 1932 married the love of her life, Oxford classicist Gilbert Highet. They moved to New York in 1937 and became U.S. citizens in 1951. Four of her books were made into movies: Above Suspicion (published 1939, Britain; 1941, USA),Assignment in Brittany (1942),The Venetian Affair (1963), and The Salzburg Connection (1968). She was awarded the Columba Prize for Literature in 1966.

  Seldom does a novelist have a career as long and distinguished as Helen MacInnes’s. All of her books—from her first,Above Suspicion (1939, 1941), to her last,Ride a Pale Horse (1984)—hold up well to critical scrutiny and to the modern reader’s demand for a compelling tale. In the course of those forty-five years, MacInnes consistently excelled in several ways. She was a writer of great imagination yet firmly rooted in factual research. She reveled in politics and could explain the intricacies of global events in crisp dialogue. She had an acute sense of place, bringing foreign settings vibrantly to life. She knew how to string out suspense until not only her protagonists but also the reader broke into a sweat. She could make a sentence sing, a description ooze texture and scent, and a reader cry or laugh.

  Her first novel,Above Suspicion, was not only extraordinarily good, it changed the future of the spy genre. Here is the background: MacInnes earned an M.A. in French and German from the University of Glasgow in 1928, then a Diploma in Librarianship in 1931 from University College in London. She was a linguist and a librarian, working on translations with her husband, Oxford don Gilbert Highet. They traveled often to the Continent, where their ability with languages and their many return trips gave them intimate knowledge that he, and later she, used in their books.

  All of this came into play in 1937 when Highet joined the faculty at Columbia University and they moved to New York. There he read his wife’s journal in which she reflected on Nazi Germany’s violent activities and expansion. Because of her clear analyses, interesting ideas, common sense, and accurate forecasts, he encouraged her to write a novel. At the same time, it is also possible that by then he had been approached by British intelligence. We know only that he worked for them during and after World War II. “A peaceful country needs a good intelligence service,” MacInnes said in an interview years later. “Freedom will not survive unless we know the nature of the attack on it. That is what my books are all about.”

  Above Suspicion was a surprising sales and critical success. Set in 1939 white-knuckle Europe, it chronicles a young English couple—Oxford professor Richard Myles and his wife, Frances—who are asked to turn their summer vacation into a secret undercover mission to find out whether a British spy working covertly in Germany is still alive. They have been chosen because they are “above suspicion.” Of course, they also sound very much like the real-life professor and Mrs. Highet.

  Such a simple story idea, but in such simplicity lies genius — and risk. Frances and Richard leave for Paris, Nürnberg, Munich, Innsbruck, Pertisau, Innsbruck again, and finally Verona. In another’s hands, this could be a trite travelogue. Instead we have brainy and resourceful protagonists (no perils of the hapless Pauline here) who deal with secret codes, dead drops, safe houses, disguises, searched suitcases and hotel rooms, narrow escapes, and betrayal. Complexity is added by several subsidiary characters who enter and leave naturally, each bringing suspense and information to the plot.

  MacInnes tells the story almost entirely from the viewpoints of the two protagonists, slipping smoothly between them, sometimes paragraph to paragraph. The skill of this technique for a first novelist is impressive. In the opening third of the book, we see quick vignettes of unnamed, dangerous professionals who are uncannily smart and adept at surveilling our hero and heroine. It gives us chills, waiting—waiting—waiting for the Nazis to close in.

  Occasionally over her career, MacInnes was criticized for writing “types,” not characters. Sometimes that was true, but often she was already using a more daring and today more contemporary means of characterizing—allowing the characters to show who they are through their thoughts, words, and deeds, rather than writing long paragraphs of personal history.

  While the private detective novel is an American invention, originally a novel of the proletariat, the spy novel arises primarily from Britain’s literary soil, and MacInnes, who was British by birth and American by choice, took the understatement, occasional stuffiness, and velvet-cloth-over-cold-steel conventions of the long-beloved British conception, giving it an American robustness and a global viewpoint.

  An example is Henry van Cortlandt, an outspoken American newspaperman, who bluntly questions Frances about whether the Brits, who had been appeasing Hitler, would ever stand up to the Nazi juggernaut: “And you’re telling me Britain is going to take off its nice clean coat and get its nose all bloodied up defending Poland?”

  “A country fights for two main things, either for loot or for survival,” Frances explains. “If Poland, or any other country, is attacked, then it is the signal for any other nation who doesn’t want to become part of Germany to rouse itself. It may be the last chance.”

  A citizen of the world, Helen MacInnes wrote like one, displaying a keen and nuanced understanding of history, politics, culture, and geography, all in service to her taut and exciting adventure tales. The result is that Above Suspicion enlarged and refined the international espionage novel, forever changing it and becoming a template for those to come.

  New York Times best seller Gayle Lynds is the award-winning author of eight international espionage novels, including The Last Spymaster, The Coil, Masquerade, Mesmerized, and Mosaic. Her books have won such awards as Novel of the Year (The Last Spymaster) given by the Military Writers Society of America, and the 2006 American Author Medal given by the American Authors Association. They have also been hailed by People magazine as “Page-Turner of the Week” and “Beach Read of the Week.”Publishers Weekly lists Masquerade along with books by John le Carré, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, and Helen MacInnes as one of the top ten spy novels of all time. With Ludlum, she created the Covert-One series and wrote three of the novels, including The Hades Factor, which became a CBS miniseries. A member of the Association for Intelligence Officers, she is cofounder (with David Morrell) of the International Thriller Writers organization, and is listed in Who’s Who in the World. Born in Nebraska, raised in Iowa, she lives in Southern California.

  38

  Cornell Woolrich’s

  “REAR WINDOW” (1942)

  Thomas F. Monteleone

  Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) was as odd and tortured as many of his characters. The product of a broken marriage, he was raised by his mother in New York City. He attended Columbia University, but never graduated. His first novel,Cover Charge (1926), was a contemporary homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald, as were several to follow, but they didn’t reveal his true talent—the ability to capture the angry desperation of the doomed. He is well known for his famous line: “First you dream, and then you die.” In the 1930s, he began writing darker tales of crime and suspense, which found an appreciative market in pulp magazines. As he continued to write short stories and novels under his own name, he also created two successful pseudonyms: George Hopley and William Irish. Woolrich is a founding father of noir fiction, although he also wrote many stories in the Weird Tales mode that were beautifully strange and hinted at the supernatural. He published several collections of his short stories and twenty-five novels, one of the most viscerally compelling of which is Rendezvous in Black. Thirty-six films were based on his work, including Phantom Lady, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid (adapted from Waltz into Darkness). Despite such apparent success, he spent most of his life staying in cheap hotels with his mother and drinking himself into oblivion. It’s fitting that so many of his titles have “black,” “night,” or “darkness” in them. By the time he died just before the age of sixty-five, he was a shattered ghost of his prior self.

  Because of the famous 1954 film by Alfred Hitchcock, “Rear Window” is the most well-known and widely recognized work by Cornell Woolrich. Given the memorable performance by James Stewart, this shouldn’t be surprising, but the short story has also been honored in its original form with its inclusion in The Mystery Hall of Fame, edited by Bill Pronzini, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, based on a poll of the Mystery Writers of America selecting the greatest mystery, crime, and suspense tales of all time. The story first appeared in the February 1942 Dime Detective magazine under the title “It Had to Be Murder,” but when Woolrich included the tale in his 1944 collection,After Dinner Story, he changed the name to “Rear Window.”

  The plot is deceptively simple. The protagonist, Hal Jeffries, is confined to his apartment because of a broken leg and passes the time by observing the lives of his neighbors across the courtyard of his New York building. He watches them through their open windows and begins to suspect one neighbor, a man with the ominous sounding name of Thorwald, of murdering his wife. Woolrich cleverly ratchets up the suspense and tension by building his case against Thorwald through a series of voyeuristic scenes described in great detail. Each account of the target’s actions, taken separately, appears mundane and unremarkable but, when examined sequentially and layered with the nuances of close observation, coalesces into a damning portrait of guilt.

  This technique demonstrates one of Woolrich’s enduring talents as a writer. He was able to describe overly familiar scenes and clichéd dramatic situations with fresh, often poetic feeling.

  There was a woman living there with her child, a young widow I suppose. I’d see her put the child to bed, and then bend over and kiss her in a wistful sort of way. She’d . . . sit there painting her eyes and mouth. Then she’d go out. She’d never come back till the night was nearly spent. Once I was still up, and I looked and she was sitting there motionless with her head buried in her arms.

  Woolrich’s attention to details—often oddly dark and inappropriate additions to a scene or a setting—became a powerful narrative tool in his hands. A gradual compilation of elements and objects and actions that somehow did not “add up” allowed Woolrich to create a sense of something terribly awry, or worse, with abject dread as the consequence.

  The story also exemplifies a recurring plot device in Woolrich’s fiction—the difficult determination of innocence or guilt in many of his characters. Some of the more successful ones include “You’ll Never See Me Again,” and “If the Shoe Fits.” Woolrich creates doubt almost effortlessly because even the nominative heroes of his tales have their own flaws and personal demons laid bare to the reader.

  What makes “Rear Window” compelling, and ultimately thrilling, is not only the growing sense of culpability in the suspect, but the equally disturbing obsession that surges in Jeffries. He becomes utterly convinced that his neighbor is a murderer and uses his belief to justify acts (such as persuading his assistant to break into the suspect’s apartment) that are not only illegal, but possibly dangerous. As the story ramps up to its powerful climax, the reader becomes as fearful and suspicious of Jeffries as Thorwald, the obvious villain in the piece.

  With this in mind, it is not surprising that Hal Jeffries comes across as less than likeable, less than honorable, and certainly not an acceptably satisfying hero that was typical of the age in which the story appeared. Woolrich delighted in dealing with characters like Jeffries because of the added ambiguity and doubt they injected into his fiction.

  In the typical noir tale, the protagonist is plagued by powerful, most likely sinister, forces. Often he feels overwhelmed, not only by the palpable sense of danger, but also by the realization that he may lack the ability to understand the forces which threaten, much less control them.

  “Rear Window” is a brilliant inversion of that basic noir paradigm. Hal Jeffries, the protagonist, through his latent voyeurism and ever-increasing obsession, creates his own world of menace, then enters blindly into a labyrinth of deception and suspicion that could ultimately destroy him. Although he ends up solving a crime, the reader is left in the annoying position of having to cheer for a protagonist who may not be all that admirable. Perhaps, suggests Woolrich, Jeffries is a little too real, a little too much like ourselves.

  Thomas F. Monteleone has been as equally prolific as Woolrich, but a lot happier. He sold his first short story to a science fiction magazine in 1972, and since then has published more than a hundred others, as well as twenty-eight novels and four collections. He has also edited seven anthologies and is a four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award in four different categories—novel, collection, anthology, and nonfiction. He is the author of the New York Times best seller and Notable Book of the Year,The Blood of the Lamb, and the immensely popular The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Elizabeth, and daughter, Olivia, and likes it a lot.

  39

  Vera Caspary’s

  LAURA (1943)

  M. J. Rose

  Vera Louise Caspary (1899–1987) became one of the most prominent female authors and playwrights of her generation, writing more than twenty-one novels. Several of her books were turned into movies, including Bedelia. Caspary also wrote plays and movies. Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives were both based on her screen stories. The Washington Post called Caspary’s life “a Baedeker of the twentieth century. An independent woman in an unliberated era, she collided with or was touched by many of its major historical and cultural events: wars, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, Hollywood in its romantic heyday, Hollywood in the grip of McCarthyism, the footloose life of the artistic rich, publishing, Broadway.”Laura, her best-known work, was adapted into a popular film in 1944, directed by Otto Preminger with Gene Tierney in the title role and Dana Andrews playing the detective.

  Vera Caspary wrote thrillers—but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specialty was a specific type that she pioneered—the psycho thriller. Typically, thrillers emphasize plot development as opposed to character development. They focus on an action arc as opposed to a psychological arc. But a successful psychological thriller does both, more or less equally. The suspense comes from the human interaction between characters who prey on each other, trying either to confuse, destroy, or deceive.

  Laura is a superb example of a perfect melding of all those elements. This haunting novel written in 1941 (its working title was Ring Twice for Laura) and published in 1943 is about a dead woman—or so we think when we start to read. Laura Hunt started as a daring and ambitious secretary at an advertising agency and worked her way up to become a top executive (Caspary had a similar background). Laura’s inability to balance her professional and private lives results in her murder.

  If a mystery is a who -dunit, this thriller is a how -dunit. And Laura satisfies both definitions. Who killed her (a jealous suitor) is certainly a mystery that needs to be solved. But there’s also the mystery of who in fact was killed. As soon as the supposed murdered woman shows up unharmed and very much alive, we’re not only startled—we’re reading nonstop suspense. (Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo, based on the Boileau/Narcejac novel D’Entre Les Morts, seems strongly influenced by Caspary’s device, as does the Brian De Palma 1976 film Obsession.)