Protagonist policeman Lou Ford is the personification of this viewpoint and seems to be an exaggerated extension of Thompson’s core beliefs. In calming one of his victims just before dispensing a bizarre brand of justice, Lou offers a bit of philosophy: “It’s a screwed up, bitched up world, and I’m afraid it’s going to stay that way. And I’ll tell you why. Because no one, almost no one, sees anything wrong with it. They can’t see that things are screwed up, so they’re not worried about it.”

  In Thompson’s milieu, it’s not Lou Ford who is insane—it is society. Its rules make no sense, and civilization is only a pretense, a playing field in which the score shifts to those who know how to rig the game. Ford approaches his grisly tasks with a world-weary sense of duty, built on a belief that he’s only undertaking the necessary evils because other people are too weak or afraid to face them.

  “It was funny the way these people kept looking for it,” Lou muses. “Why did they all have to come to me to be killed? Why wouldn’t they kill themselves?”

  Lou is not a textbook sociopath inasmuch as he possesses a rudimentary sense of right and wrong, at least as society holds those qualities. Then again, Lou is not consistent either, facilely shifting from an intellectual who solves calculus problems for fun to a drawling, easygoing dumb cop whom no one would suspect of murder.

  “I guess I kind of got a foot on both fences,” Lou claims. “I planted them there early and now they’ve taken root, and I can’t move either way and I can’t jump. All I can do is wait until I split.”

  Among Ford’s supporting cast, those who are kind and trusting are most likely to come to a bad end, validation that life is unfair and those that can’t grasp the simple guiding principles won’t last, while those who set their own laws, like mogul Chester Conway, consolidate their power over the weak and the timid. As the net tightens around Lou, he outflanks the first criminal psychologist sent to shrink him in a scene that could have inspired the famed Clarisse Starling-Hannibal Lecter face-offs in the classic The Silence of the Lambs. Not only is Lou more well read in the field of aberrant behavior than his questioner, quoting texts and theories; he also manipulates the conversation to ensure no one can form a solid opinion. He fully believes himself above judgment, whether mortal or divine.

  “They could only find proof in me—in what I was—and I’d never show it to ’em,” good ol’ Lou muses after reviewing all the evidence stacked against him.

  To Thompson’s credit, he offers little Freudian groundwork for Lou Ford’s motivation. Reminisces of a childhood incident, heavily veiled, slowly emerge as Lou’s spree accelerates. However, the core foundation of his pathology is that Lou simply is a creature of nature doing what nature does best. If a few people feel a little pain, that’s just the way the game is played, and Thompson’s peculiar brand of justice and balance are always restored: “I wiped my gloves on her body. It was her blood and it belonged there.”

  When Lou is finally snared, it’s a love letter and not a tactical slip that does him in. With a cunning and amused nod to society’s expected norms, he responds to his incarceration with a studied indifference: “I put on a pretty good act, it seemed to me. Just good enough to let ’em think I was bothered, but not enough to mean anything at a sanity hearing.”

  Lou is often referred to as an unreliable narrator, primarily due to the novel’s abrupt conclusion that some feel breaks established rules of narrative fiction. But with Thompson’s brave blend of surrealism, genre convention, autobiography, psychological treatise, and social satire, he emerges as simultaneously both more realistic and experimental than his crime-writing peers. In truth, Lou is the most reliable narrator possible, a metafictional hero who just doesn’t cotton to arbitrarily imposed rules.

  Ultimately, it’s not just Lou who “wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad.” Lou’s not to blame, and neither is anyone else. It’s just the way the game shook out, the way the cookie crumbled, the way the dice fell, the whole clichéd march of time that gets us in the end.

  Much like Jim Thompson, Scott Nicholson is a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist known primarily for his pulp fiction and questionable morality. He’s the author of seven supernatural thrillers, including They Hunger and The Red Church, which was an alternate selection of the Mystery Guild and a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. He is an original bass playing member of the International Thriller Writers’ Killer Thriller Band. He’s currently developing several comic book series, including Dirt, in which he plays a creepy, over-the-top version of himself as the Digger, an undertaker narrating adaptations of his numerous short stories. Nicholson’s other comics titles include The Gorge, The Red Church, and Murder-mouth. As if this exposure to words weren’t lethal enough, he’s also a freelance editor and has written numerous articles about writing in addition to hosting an annual paranormal conference.

  45

  Ernest K. Gann’s

  THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (1953)

  Ward Larsen

  Ernest K. Gann (1910–1991) was the creator of the “aviation thriller.” As is so often the case, Gann’s success was earned through both hard work and good fortune. Not only blessed with a knack for the writing craft, Gann was an accomplished pilot. He was uniquely positioned to witness the birth of aviation, experiencing first-hand the trials of a profession that was tailor-made for storytelling. His body of work is a thoughtful analysis of the interaction between man and machine. His first novel,Island in the Sky (1944), was a commercial success. But it was The High and the Mighty that carried Gann to a new level of recognition. Both novels became movies, as did Soldier of Fortune, Twilight of the Gods, and Fate Is the Hunter. His historical novel,The Antagonists, was adapted into a well-known television miniseries,Masada. Throughout his career, be it as a writer of novels, short stories, or screenplays, Gann brought to his audience an authenticity borne from the trials of experience, and it was this realism that consistently brought his stories to life.

  There is a long-held maxim that those who exhibit vitality in their writing do the same in their lives. Perhaps no author better illustrates this maxim than Ernest K. Gann. Gann grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and began developing his storytelling gift at an early age. In 1926, when he was sixteen, he made his first film, a modest but entertaining feature that started a lifelong association with the big screen. It also set a standard for success—the picture cost two hundred dollars to make and grossed four hundred in its first week. This relationship with motion pictures would blossom later in Gann’s life, but not until he had made his mark as a writer.

  Gann was an adventurer first and foremost. He took up flying at an early age, beginning as a barnstormer, and advancing through the ranks of aviation until he was hired by American Airlines. During World War II, he signed on with the Army Air Corps and flew DC-4 Skymasters for Transport Command, a duty that took him quite literally across the world.

  It was during Gann’s period of flying for the commercial airlines that he decided to pursue writing. He put long layovers to good use, creating fiction that was drawn from his firsthand experiences in the cockpit. The early days of aviation were far removed from today’s aerial mass transit system. Aircraft of the early decades were prone to malfunction, and maintenance was a mixed bag with the quality varying widely. The aviators themselves were a rich lot: colorful characters who spent long days in a cockpit where the command structure was absolute. The captain was the master of the vessel, an authority of undeniable nautical heritage. Indeed, many parallels can be drawn between Gann’s leading men and other infamous literary skippers—the Blighs and Ahabs of legend.

  Gann’s first three books were nonfiction, brought out in the early days of World War II.Island in the Sky, however, published in 1944, was the work that launched his career. The story was based on a harrowing Arctic rescue mission and became an instant bestseller. Gann continued producing a book roughly every two years until 1953, when The High and the Mighty was published.

  Its plot is an adaptation of an actual commercial flight Gann had worked from Honolulu to Portland, Oregon, while flying for Matson Airlines. Gann later revealed that the flight in question was laced far more with comedy than the taut suspense delivered in The High and the Mighty. In any case, the essence of the plot follows standard Gann form—take an exotic setting, populate it with colorful characters, then furnish an extraordinary situation (a passenger plane running out of fuel over the Pacific Ocean), and let the drama come.

  As with many of Gann’s books, the exotic location in The High and the Mighty did not involve palm trees or foreign tongues, but rather isolation and machines. Passengers and crew prepare for a Pacific crossing, and soon all are gliding miles above an unforgiving ocean. The cabin of the ship is a world to itself, functioning as a containment chamber to test the wits and nerves of everyone aboard. Throughout the story, there’s some contact with the outside world, but Gann is effective in using this distant chatter of radios and signals to reinforce the aircraft’s seclusion.

  The skipper is a troubled man, an experienced aviator who has lost his confidence. In Gann’s words, it was Captain Sullivan’s “secret which he intended to keep to himself. He was a man in charge, but a man losing his nerve. A man who will lock up when the chips are down—as they most certainly will be.” Countering the skipper is copilot Dan Roman. Roman is vastly experienced, but carries demons of his own, guilt centered on a long-ago decision made when he was the pilot in command. The book relies heavily on flashbacks to develop characters, a technique made necessary by the physical and chronological constraints of the story.The High and the Mighty flies to a satisfying conclusion, but not before testing everyone involved.

  The book was later adapted into a film classic under the same name, John Wayne delivering perhaps the most famous slap in cinematic history. The later twisting of the story line into the Hollywood spoof Airplane (1980) gave aspects of Gann’s original work a near iconic status.

  Ernest K. Gann’s work had a significant impact on the thriller genre. The High and the Mighty set the groundwork for a slew of disaster novels, beginning with Arthur Hailey’s Airport (1968). The technical detail that gave his stories such authority was eventually brought to another level, with a military bent, by Tom Clancy in The Hunt for Red October (1984).

  In 1979, when Ernest Gann was sixty-nine years old, he was given the opportunity to fly in a U. S. Air Force U-2 spy plane. He never hesitated. Writer, rancher, sailor, and adventurer—through his books, Gann gave his readers an enticing sample of a rich life. His gift continues long after his passing, and The High and the Mighty remains his indelible signature on the world of thrillers.

  Ward Larsen’s first novel,The Perfect Assassin, was honored with numerous awards, including the Florida Book Award Silver Medal for popular fiction, and the Military Writer’s Society of America Gold Medal. He was a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force for seven years, including twenty-two missions in Operation Desert Storm, and also served as a federal law enforcement officer. His recent novel,Stealing Trinity, a World War II thriller revolved around the Manhattan Project, garnered rave reviews. Ward is both a commercial airline pilot and a trained aircraft-accident investigator, skills that are the subject of his international thriller,Fly by Wire.

  46

  Jack Finney’s

  INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1955)

  James Rollins

  Writing about him in Danse Macabre, Stephen King said that one of Jack Finney’s great abilities as a writer was “his talent for allowing his stories to slip unobtrusively, almost casually, into another world.” What makes this talent so unique, however, was that it was on display in all of Finney’s work, whether it was mainstream, comedy, fantasy, science fiction, or thriller. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Finney (1911–1995) worked in a New York advertising agency (a background he later used in his novel,Good Neighbor Sam) before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel,Five Against the House (about college students who try to rob a casino), was published in 1954. Aside from The Body Snatchers (1955), Finney’s greatest success came with his science fiction thriller,Time and Again (1970), which is about a secret government project involving time travel to New York City in 1882. The author of nearly two dozen novels and three short story collections, Finney was given the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1987, proving that the ingredients of a thriller, especially as demonstrated in The Body Snatchers, are not limited to any genre.

  “The book is much better than the movie.”

  Who hasn’t heard that statement from time to time? That hope prompted me to pick up a copy of Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I was a high school student, and I had just seen the 1978 remake of the 1956 black-and-white film. I vaguely remembered Don Siegel’s original masterpiece—with the haunting last scene of a raving Dr. Miles Bennell running through the streets yelling, “You’re next!” But as an avid reader of all things pulp, I wanted to look at the source material upon which these two movies were based.

  It wasn’t easy to find. The novel was first published in 1955 under the shorter title,The Body Snatchers, but I finally managed to locate a battered reprint in a second-hand store that specialized in science fiction. I read the dog-eared copy in one long session, baking under a window as the sun moved across the sky. It was a simple story. Aliens invade a small town, replacing its inhabitants with perfect copies. The novel opens with the narrator, a small town doctor in Mill Valley, California, being faced with a peculiar patient, a woman who believes her uncle is not her uncle. While the man looks exactly like her uncle and talks like him, even has all his memories, she insists “his responses aren’t emotionally right . . . there’s something missing.”

  This opens the way for a taut tale of mounting paranoia and suspicion. The effect is heightened by the first-person perspective, a narrator of unflagging commonness, along with a setting as familiar as Mayberry. Dr. Miles Bennell is no swashbuckling hero or brawny champion, nor is he particularly bright or inventive. He is freshly divorced, rather bumbling, too quick to trust, and easy to sway. He lives in a town where “from down the block you could hear the far-off clatter of a lawnmower” and where one could sit “on the wide old porch in the comfortably battered wicker furniture, or the porch swing, eating bacon and tomato sandwiches on toast, sipping coffee, talking about nothing much.”

  This simple setting, with events narrated by an ordinary man, slowly and inexorably persuades the reader to believe in alien seed pods that burst during the thick of night and grow human copies. Richard Matheson and Stephen King (the latter acknowledges the influence of both Finney and Matheson) employ a similar technique in their novels, populating unremarkable towns with ordinary folk and challenging them with extraordinary horrors. The device brings the terror directly into the reader’s everyday world.

  But the dread becomes even more powerful when considered in relation to the decade when it was written. Jack Finney, a native of Marin County, where the story takes place, was also reflecting the paranoia of his time. Much has been written about the story’s parallel to the growing “red menace” of Communism. Between 1950 and 1954, the political witch-hunts of Joe McCarthy created fierce suspicion throughout the United States. Many 1950s critics linked the cold and emotionless pod-people with Communist infiltrators, while later critics maintained that the pod-people were a metaphor for a political culture determined to make everyone identical, tolerating no dissent.

  Finney drew on other real-world tensions to add resonance and topicality to this multilayered novel, to stoke the fear and uneasiness lurking in the hearts of his readers. For example, the narrator, Dr. Bennell, relates a past encounter with a shoeshine man named Billy, a middle-aged black man.

  Billy professed a genuine love for shoes. He’d nod with approving criticalness when you showed up with a new pair. “Good leather,” he’d murmur, nodding . . . He obviously took contentment in one of the simpler occupations of the world, and the money involved seemed actually unimportant.

  But one night, Dr. Bennell overhears Billy speaking to a friend when there aren’t any patrons around. The black shoeshine man reveals the truth about himself, parodying his own antics: “Please le’me kiss your feet! Le’me kiss ’em!” As he continues mocking his customers, Dr. Bennell is forced into a terrible realization.

  Never before had I heard such ugly, bitter, and vicious contempt . . . contempt for the people taken in by his daily antics, but even more for himself, the man who supplied the servility they bought from him.

  This same mimicry and deception is what Bennell witnesses in the pod-people when they drop their masks, revealing their true nature. So, it isn’t just the extremes of McCarthyism that give this novel power, but also the racism prevalent at the time. How can anyone read the above section and not squirm? It forced both sides of the racial divide to wonder who were wearing masks of hypocrisy and what lurked beneath them.

  The novel’s topicality also touched upon another social turn during the mid 1950s: the slow deterioration and wasting of small towns across America following the end of World War II. Mill Valley seems a bucolic, idyllic community, but the fear and heightened attentiveness of our narrator finally completely open his eyes to the true dilapidated condition of his town.

  Everything I was seeing now had been here to see then, except that—you don’t really see the familiar until it’s thrust upon you, you don’t actually notice, until there’s a reason to do so.