Crichton’s inventiveness changed the thriller landscape. His wild musings continue to keep me up nights and inspire me to find the magic in our world. Insomnia is a small price to pay for that gift. Thanks, Michael.

  Josh Conviser grew up in Aspen, Colorado, went to high school in Santa Barbara, California, and graduated from Princeton University in 1996. He has lived in Europe, Asia, and Australia. An avid mountaineer, he climbed in ranges around the world, including the Himalayas, before giving up the mountains for the jungles of Hollywood to pursue a career in screenwriting. He was the executive consultant on HBO’s series,Rome, and has several films in development. His first novel,Echelon, a techno-thriller, was published in 2006. His second book,Empyre, came out a year later.

  59

  James Dickey’s

  DELIVERANCE (1970)

  Terry Watkins

  Atlanta-based poet James Dickey (1923–1997) burst onto the national scene in 1970 with the publication of Deliverance, his most famous and enduring work. The multifaceted Dickey wore many hats: writer, teacher, hunter, athlete, copywriter, and air force officer. In 1965, his book of poetry Buckdancer’s Choice won the National Book Award. But it was Deliverance, the terrifying and visceral story of four Atlanta businessmen seeking escape from their mundane lives by canoeing down the doomed, soon-to-be-dammed Cahulawassee River that thrust Dickey onto best-seller lists. A combative, Hemingwayesque personality, the burly, hard-drinking Dickey waded through the literary scene with both fists clenched. He excoriated other poets, lectured with passion, and struggled the rest of his life to live up to the hype that Deliverance bestowed upon him. He was never able to recapture that glory or garner the further critical acclaim he sought. Battling with critics, alienated from his wife and family, Dickey continued writing what he considered his best work even as his health deteriorated. He died three days after giving his last college lecture.

  Deliverance illuminates the unique American male zeitgeist and its connection to Old West frontier values. Few works by American writers express the conflicts ingrained in our mythologies and frontier legacy as does this simple canoe trip that propels four urban dwellers into decisions that are irrevocable and morally uncertain. In 1972, two years after the novel was published, the John Boorman movie adaptation—a powerful kinesthetic thrill ride with Jon Voight cast in the role of Ed and Burt Reynolds as Lewis—was a masterful cinematic rendering of the story that earned three Academy Awards and six Golden Globes, further enhancing Dickey’s reputation and fame.

  The four adventurers are unprepared for this journey into the darker regions of the American experience. They begin in the mountain town of Oree, and immediately display a disrespect for the primitive hillbilly “outsiders,” one of whom informs the sarcastic Bobby, who’s made a comment about his hat, “You don’t know nothing.” This portends the first violent action that fractures the chaste, male bonding, wilderness experience with a violent homosexual rape of Bobby by two hillbillies and transforms the journey into a terrifying nightmare. This rape takes place on the banks of a virginal river that is itself about to be raped and destroyed by civilization.

  The trip’s organizer and enthusiast is Lewis, a self-styled macho survivalist who fantasizes he’s preparing for the collapse of civilization and the return to wilderness existence. Lewis kills one of the hillbillies involved in the rape. The other man escapes. Ed, the viewpoint character who leads us through the story, is a graphic designer who admires the macho, muscular Lewis and sees himself as soft and weak in comparison. Ed will ultimately be forced to replace Lewis, who is rendered impotent by a broken leg at the moment of the final crisis. The unmarried, wisecracking Bobby, now the victim of the most feared of male defeats, is useless. The fourth member, Drew—the most adjusted to his life, a man who loves his family and his job with a major soft drink company, and who embraces the laws and believes they are applicable under all circumstances—finds himself having to choose between those very laws and the potential threat the death of the hillbilly might pose to himself and his family. He decides to join a cover-up of the killing. Soon after, Drew dies in the river rapids. But was it by a rifle shot from the cliffs by the hillbilly who escaped, or did Drew hit his head on the rocks and drown? That question sets up the final crisis.

  With Lewis injured, Drew dead, and Bobby useless, it falls to Ed to save the day and carry the survivalist banner by ascending a dangerous cliff in order to kill the man they believe is trying to kill them. Ed’s climb and his actions must transcend his own self-image. He needs to become his macho hero, Lewis. The weakness that made Ed’s arm shake so that he missed his opportunity to kill a deer earlier in the story must now become steady so he can kill a man. When Ed finds his quarry on the top of the cliff, his decision to execute him to protect the group comes with doubt. Is this the man who is after them? Maybe he’s just wandering through. But the predicament cannot be escaped. A decision has to be made, and made quickly. To guess wrong could be a death sentence for Ed and the others. Or it could mean a cold-blooded execution of an innocent. Ed sees no third option. No way out of the dilemma. Is it of greater moral value to kill and be wrong, or not kill and be wrong? This is an inescapable quandary, when the truth cannot be known in the moment of crisis and a decision has to be made.

  The aftermath for the survivors hints at the impact on their lives. Lewis is a gimp. Bobby slinks off into the shadows. As for Ed, the ordeal pushed him into the role of the mythological warrior, the savior, but he has a big price to pay. His triumph leaves him unable to ever integrate fully back into the protective skin of normal life. He has killed. He has lied and participated in the big cover-up, and with these dark secrets comes the fear that “Somebody may be after me,” suggesting this is something he will never escape. He has seen the dark side of life and has suffered the same post-traumatic syndrome as soldiers, accident victims, and others who have encountered an event that rips away the thin veil of civilization to reveal the primitive, violent realities underneath.

  Deliverance challenges the reader to confront the same difficult questions that Ed faces. What are we willing to do under the pressure of extreme circumstances? What value triumphs in a survival crisis? What will this mean later? The decisions to take violent and deadly actions under great duress, and the consequences to those who survive, are what elevates the book well beyond sheer entertainment and places it firmly on the shelf of great thrillers.

  Terry Watkins, author of screenplays and the thrillers The Big Burn and Stacked Deck, is an outdoorsman and Vietnam veteran who grew up in the mountains of north central Pennsylvania on a steady diet of Western myths. He spent so much time roaming the hills that he acquired the nickname “Little Daniel Boone.” When he went off to Vietnam, he carried with him the blinding baggage of the mythologies of the Old West from the Indian Wars to the Alamo and the OK Corral. When he returned from that conflict, many of these long-held views underwent challenge. He found in Deliverance a powerful expression of the conflicts and contradictions inherent in those iconic macho ideals.

  60

  Frederick Forsyth’s

  THE DAY OF THE JACKAL (1971)

  F. Paul Wilson

  Born in Ashford, Kent, England, Frederick Forsyth (1938–) was educated at Tonbridge school, and later Granada University, Spain. After serving in the RAF from 1956 to 1958, he worked as a reporter for the Eastern Daily Press in Norfolk, before joining Reuters in 1961. In 1965, he began working for the BBC. There, he covered the Biafran side of the Biafra-Nigeria war. In 1968, he left the BBC to return to Biafra, where he reported on the war, first as a freelancer and later for the Daily Express and Time magazine. In 1970, he decided to write a book using the research skills and methods he had developed as a reporter. That book,The Day of the Jackal, became an international bestseller and spawned two feature films. Subsequent novels include The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, and The Afghan.

  Frederick Forsyth’s first novel (that last bit bears repeating: first novel) put a new twist on a number of spy-thriller conventions. Although not a true spy novel, it’s structured as one: Its titular character, a professional assassin, functions very much like a spy—forging new identities, moving secretly from country to country, dealing with traitors. It’s also very much a procedural, leading the reader in great detail through the intricate measures the Jackal takes to avoid detection and all the methods his pursuers employ to track him down.

  Set in 1963, the novel also takes the unprecedented step of making Charles de Gaulle the assassin’s target.

  Excuse me? Charles de Gaulle was not assassinated; he died of natural causes the year before the novel was published. So unless this takes place in an alternate universe, the Jackal is doomed to failure. How can you possibly build suspense—let alone maintain it for the length of an entire novel— when the reader knows from the get go that the plot is going to fail?

  In the hands of Frederick Forsyth, it doesn’t matter. He makes it work.

  The Day of the Jackal was inspired by the real-life assassination attempt on de Gaulle in 1962 after he endorsed independence for Algeria. A group of French militants calling itself the OAS waged a campaign of terror against it. A fellow named Jean Bastien-Thiry was executed for masterminding the plot.

  The novel opens with Bastien-Thiry’s execution and a recap of the failed attempt on de Gaulle. Shortly thereafter, a remnant of the OAS hires a professional assassin known only as the Jackal to finish the job. Wisely, the Jackal tells his employers nothing about his plans, and just as wisely, Forsyth tells the reader nothing as well. Instead, he does what all good storytellers do: He shows. We follow the Jackal, whose true identity we never know, through England, France, and Belgium as he researches de Gaulle, sets up false identities, and purchases the weapon he’ll use for the assassination. Slowly, piece by piece, we see the plan begin to take shape.

  On the other side, the French police realize that the former OAS reprobates are up to something. They capture a bodyguard named Kowalski and brutally interrogate him (believe me, he’d pray for waterboarding instead of the electric wires attached to sensitive parts of his anatomy) to extract what he knows, which isn’t much beyond the name “chacal” (French for jackal). Eventually, a doggedly persistent French cop, Inspector Claude Lebel, is set on the trail of this nameless, faceless killer. He traces the Jackal to an apartment in England occupied by a man named Charles Calthrop (note what the first three letters of those two names spell) but misses him.

  Now the cat-and-mouse game begins in earnest, with the Jackal receiving tips from an OAS contact in the French government that help him stay one step—sometimes less than that—ahead of Lebel.

  In contrast to Robert Ludlum, who published his own first novel,The Scarlatti Inheritance, that same year, there’s little passion in Forsyth’s prose. The affect is generally flat, with the Jackal showing scant or no emotion. He isn’t a radical firebrand; there’s no pleasure for him here (other than, perhaps, the satisfaction in bringing off this nearly impossible feat), no emotional or ideological stake. It’s simply a job—a challenging one, yes, but still a job.

  Forsyth writes in what I call movie mode. We witness the action from outside; rarely are we allowed into the hearts and minds of the characters. This should make for an uninvolving read, but in Forsyth’s hands it’s curiously compelling. The torture scene is a perfect example. Its matter-of-fact presentation is utterly chilling.

  Unlike the characters in James Bond-style novels, the Jackal is no bon vivant. He doesn’t high roll in casinos or dally in five-star hotels. He’s more at home in the underworld, the demimonde of gunrunners and forgers. He even has an interlude in a gay bar.

  Whether we’re following the Jackal or the police, Forsyth renders the locations in exquisite detail. Never do we question that the author has spent time in these places. And it is perhaps this attention to detail that empowers the Herculean suspension of disbelief necessary to overlook the historical contradiction so central to the plot. Everything is so real, the Jackal is so skilled, so expert at his profession that, yes, never mind what history says, this man just might be able to assassinate de Gaulle.

  And as we read on (perhaps to our dismay, perhaps not), we find ourselves rooting for the Jackal. He may be a cold-blooded killer, but his foes are equally ruthless. And he’s the underdog, a man on a high wire with no safety net, single-handedly facing down the combined police forces and intelligence networks of Western Europe. Every time the authorities start closing in, we can’t help hoping he outwits them . . . again.

  In the end the story comes down to a battle of wits between the Jackal and Lebel, and along the way the two men develop a grudging mutual respect. The final scene between the pair is delivered in Forsyth’s typical affectless style:

  Lebel stared into the eyes of the other man…

  “Chacal,” he said. The other man said simply, “Lebel.”

  After that it’s a matter of who can shoot first.

  Born and raised in New Jersey, F. Paul Wilson misspent his youth playing with matches, poring over Uncle Scrooge and E.C. comics, reading Lovecraft, Matheson, Bradbury, and Heinlein, listening to Chuck Berry and Alan Freed on the radio, and watching Soupy Sales and Shock Theatre. He is the author of more than forty books: science fiction (including the novels Healer, Wheels within Wheels, and An Enemy of the State), horror thrillers (among them The Keep, The Touch, and Reborn), contemporary thrillers (The Select, Implant, Deep as the Marrow), novels that defy categorization (The Fifth Harmonic and Virgin) and several collaborations. In 1998 he resurrected his popular antihero, Repairman Jack (who first appeared in the 1984’s The Tomb). The thirteenth installment in the series,Ground Zero, was published in 2009. Much of his short fiction is collected in Soft and Others, The Barrens and Others, and Aftershock and Others. He edited two anthologies (Freak Show and Diagnosis: Terminal) and has also written for stage, screen, and interactive media.

  61

  Brian Garfield’s

  DEATH WISH (1972)

  John Lescroart

  Brian Garfield (1939–), a major creative force in American popular culture over a good part of the past half century, has forged a career that is nothing less than staggering in breadth, depth, and longevity. The author of over seventy books of Westerns, mysteries, action thrillers, spy novels, history, and biography, with total sales of over twenty million copies, Garfield has screen credits that are hardly less impressive. To date, eighteen films and/or television programs—including Hopscotch, Recoil, Relentless, The Last Hard Men, and the many iterations of Death Wish —have been based on his work (and two more are currently in production). As a young man, Garfield performed the hit song “I Can’t Quit” on American Bandstand with the band, The Palisades. His musical comedy, “Legs,” based on the Rockettes, played at Radio City Music Hall. Garfield has proven himself a master in all of the original American popular arts. In Death Wish, he created an archetypical hero who continues to be a mainstay of popular fiction and film—the average man driven by circumstances outside of his control to become an avenging vigilante.

  There isn’t a novelist in the world who wants to hear this, but Brian Garfield wrote Death Wish in about two weeks. This was in 1972. After visiting a friend in New York City on a snowy night, he came back to his car for the two-and-a-half-hour drive back to his home in New Jersey, and found that someone had slashed the canvas roof of his ten-year-old convertible. The rage he felt—and that grew over the long drive—led him to the question, “What would happen to somebody who got that furious— and stayed that way?”

  The protagonist in Death Wish is a middle-aged, slightly paunchy accountant named Paul Benjamin. (In the many movies based upon the novel, Charles Bronson’s character is named Paul Kersey—“for no more sinister reason,” Garfield says, “than the fact that there’s a good character actor in movies named Paul Benjamin, and anyhow ‘Kersey’ was easier for both Charles Bronson and Vincent Gardenia to pronounce.”) In almost all important ways, Benjamin is an extremely unlikely hero. Not only is he physically unprepossessing; he is by his own admission an unexciting specimen. In his job, he works with numbers and spreadsheets. His two friends are stereotypical, dull accountants. He and his wife, Esther, never quite let their marriage bloom into something romantic—rather, they are what he calls Aquarian acquaintances.

  In short, no one would normally think to cast Paul Benjamin as the hero of a thriller. He is pretty much the opposite—an Everyman with a reactive, rather than proactive, temperament. The character arc tracing his development from nebbish accountant to avenging urban vigilante has changed the landscape of the thriller world ever since.

  The novel begins with a superb first sentence: “Later he worked out where he had been at the time of the attack on Esther and Carol.” Strong as this opening is, its true power comes from Garfield’s strategy in writing the next few pages, where we follow Paul as he takes a cab with one of his friends back from a bibulous lunch to his job—they’re bellyaching about crime and the generally benighted state of New York City. Next, at the office, Paul enters into a lengthy, essentially meaningless discussion with one of his colleagues. Finally, he has a phone call with a client.

  Each of these encounters, unremarkable and even boring in themselves, might in a lesser author’s hands have been little more than scenes with talking heads. But because of the pulled-pin character of the book’s opening sentence, these scenes become excruciatingly, almost unbearably, suspenseful. More importantly, they establish our identification with Paul Benjamin’s character since the point of view is consistently and always his. We’ve got to find out exactly what happened to Esther and Carol, and no matter what it was—whatever it is, it’s bad —we’re with Paul, the secondhand victim, every step of the way.