When we learn how bad it is—Esther is dead and Carol is well on her way to life in a near-vegetative state—we keep our faith with Paul as he tries to come to grips with the tragedy that has altered his life so completely. At first, and fittingly for his character, his reactions are muted and restrained. He doesn’t really know how to react, what to feel, how to respond to the inner turmoil that is inexorably changing his worldview. By degrees, his emotions find outlets—he weeps, he slams his fists on the bed, he walks naked around his apartment, he checks with the progress of the police, he throws up, he starts to drink. All pretty normal stuff.

  Until he fashions a roll of quarters in a sock into a makeshift weapon. This is where things start to change for Paul, for us as readers, and for the modern urban thriller.

  Suddenly, Paul Benjamin has broken out of his reactive mode and has started to think about the problem of crime in New York City. Mostly, he’s still very much in a defensive mode. If something happens to him, he’s going to want to protect himself. This is a reasonable desire, and we readers continue to identify with him and completely approve. This is a smart guy taking appropriate steps to insure his own safety in a dangerous environment.

  When Paul ventures out again into the city, Garfield provides an extended metaphor of urban detritus to show just how dangerous the environment is. (This is one of the great things about Death Wish: the tiny telling details that carry enormous emotional weight.) So we’ve got groups of young toughs laughing, garbage on the sidewalks, bums and drunks, “discarded newspapers, crumpled lunch bags, rusty bottlecaps, rustless empty cans, broken bottles.” All these details, though mundane, serve as a shorthand for the breakdown of civilization in the city as a whole, and lead Paul to the perilous thought: “All right, they’ve been told, they’ve had their chance.

  “He didn’t follow the implications of the thought through: he was afraid to.”

  But the implications are clear enough. Paul is moving toward an active confrontation with the world he lives in. These nonthreatening details of everyday life come to represent for him, and for us, a very real, clear and present danger. Somebody is indeed out to get him—in fact, the entire city is out to get him, and everyone like him.

  The extremity of the paranoia might start to lose us here, except for another inspired bit of plotting. Paul walks home through this terrifying urban jungle, and suddenly a young man comes up behind him, ordering him in the most vulgar terms to stop and turn around. Suddenly—aha!— Paul’s concerns are not paranoia; they are real, and here is the proof.

  His reaction is still reasonable and sane. He has been carrying his roll of quarters all this time, and now has the presence of mind to swing it at his would-be attacker. He misses, and (to Paul’s amazement) the mugger runs off, but the incident marks another step along Paul’s path from victim to avenger. He can actually, by his own actions, assert his dominance over the threatening world he inhabits.

  That same night, Paul happens to turn on the TV, and here Garfield fills in anything that might be missing in our understanding of Paul’s evolution:

  Cowboys picking on sodbusters and a drifting hero standing up for the farmers against the gunslingers . . . It was easy to see why Westerns were always popular and he [Paul] was amazed he hadn’t understood it before. It was human history. As far back as you wanted to go, there were always men who tilled the soil and there were always men on horseback who wanted to exploit them and take everything away from them, and the hero of every myth was the hero who defended the farmers against the raiders on horseback, and the constant contradiction was that the hero himself was always a man on horseback.

  Now Garfield gives it to us straight—the fundamental paradigm shift that turns out to have shaped so many variations of the modern thriller. Paul Benjamin is about to do the job of the man on horseback. He is going to defend the sodbusters against the gunslingers. But, unlike all the mythic heroes before in human history, Paul Benjamin is not one of the men on horseback. He, himself, is one of the sodbusters.

  As the novel progresses, so does Paul’s paranoia, but amid a now-calm coolness that is both agonizing in its suspense and deliberate in its apparent rationality. We readers are carried along as Paul goes off to Arizona on business. He is back to living his humdrum existence. He handles a complicated audit, he meets and beds a woman from a bar, he has many normal interactions with regular people.

  And then he buys a gun.

  By the time he returns to New York, Paul Benjamin has become the prototypical urban avenger, intent on going out into the neighborhoods and eliminating the evil that lurks there. He starts shooting criminals. He is clean, efficient, self-righteous, and deadly. In the last scene of the book, Paul kills three vandals after they attack a train, and as he is walking away he notices that a uniformed policeman has seen the whole thing. The cop turns around and does nothing.

  Clearly, the cop, who represents civilization, is grateful to Paul Benjamin and to all the people who would be like him.

  Paul Benjamin was the first in a whole generation of fictional urban vigilantes, avenging real or imagined wrongs without feeling the need to resort to the hierarchy and rules of formal law enforcement. The novel, Death Wish, became the template for how this apparent acceptance of unfettered violence turned into an acceptable, even moral, characteristic for a hero to possess. Garfield gave us the rationale—step-by-step, emotionally convincing, powerful, with a relentless logic that made its argument seem universally true.

  Ironically, Brian Garfield himself never wanted the book to be a clarion call for revenge, or for Paul Benjamin to be an admired hero: “I meant it,” he says, “(if you believe in the influence of subtext) as a cautionary lesson, not a recommendation. Revenge is a universal fantasy but, in practice, it isn’t a solution; it’s a problem.”

  John Lescroart is the author of nineteen novels, fourteen of them in the San Francisco–based Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky series. Libraries Unlimited has included him in its publication The 100 Most Popular Thriller and Suspense Author s. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his short stories appear in many anthologies. His first novel,Sunburn, won the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for best novel by a California author, and Dead Irish and The 13th Juror were nominees for the Shamus and Anthony Best Mystery Novel, respectively.The 13th Juror was also selected for inclusion in this volume. Guilt was a Readers Digest Select Edition choice.The Mercy Rule, Nothing But The Truth, and The Suspect were major market book club selections. The Suspect was also the 2007 One Book Sacramento choice of the Sacramento Library Foundation, and was chosen by the American Author’s Association as its 2007 Book of the Year.

  62

  David Morrell’s

  FIRST BLOOD (1972)

  Steve Berry

  David Morrell (1943–) was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, and moved to the United States in 1966 to study American literature with Penn State’s Hemingway expert, Philip Young. After earning a Ph.D., he taught at the University of Iowa for sixteen years and eventually became an American citizen. All the while, he wrote fiction, inspired in his teenage years by the mix of action and ideas in Stirling Silliphant’s scripts for the classic television series Route 66. Morrell’s 1972 debut novel is probably his best known: First Blood. The character of Rambo (who has no first name, Hollywood bestowed the label “John”) eventually earned a place in worldwide culture—an interesting evolution, considering that the character was christened after an apple, a delicious Pennsylvania type known as Rambo that Morrell’s wife brought home from a roadside stand one day. Morrell has, so far, penned twenty-four novels, four nonfiction books, countless short stories, and a comic book series—many of them New York Times best sellers. His classic spy novel The Brotherhood of the Rose was a top-rated NBC miniseries that premiered after the Super Bowl in 1989. Many writers (myself included) regard him as one of the finest craftsmen working today, so knowledgeable that we respectfully refer to him as the “Professor.”

  In the summer of 1968, America was erupting. The Vietnam War was literally tearing the nation apart, riots and demonstrations so polarizing the country that one generation seemed utterly confounded by the other. Recently arrived in the United States on a guest visa was a twenty-five-year-old Canadian named David Morrell. He was married, with an infant daughter, preparing for a career as a teacher, fascinated by the United States, eager to learn about something he knew nothing about: the Vietnam War.

  What he discovered deeply disturbed him. But something Socrates once said came to mind.No one commits wrong intentionally. For Morrell, that truism about how we rationalize everything we do became worth exploring, so he decided to write a novel that would allegorize the Vietnam War. Not to make a point. Or take sides. That could have been a problem since the terms of his guest visa specifically stated, on threat of deportation, that he should refrain from expressing political opinions. Instead, Morrell decided to tactfully objectify America’s bitter philosophical and cultural divisions, transposing the brutality of Vietnam—and the radical conflicts that war generated at home—to a rural Kentucky town, creating a miniature version of the Vietnam War on American soil.

  Instead of shotgunning the narrative with many points of view, he focused on only two. Rambo, the Vietnam vet, Green Beret, former POW, and Medal of Honor recipient. A man haunted by the war, repulsed by the violence he found in himself, embittered by the hostility he sometimes faced from those he fought to protect. In rebellion, he allowed his hair and beard to grow, shunned all possessions, and wandered the back roads of America, looking like a hippie. Searching. He represented those disaffected by the war.

  Wilfred Teasle represented the establishment. A Korean War hero, recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, Eisenhower Republican, chief of police in Madison, Kentucky. As troubled as Rambo, he’s old enough to be Rambo’s father, haunted by a different set of war memories, but equally as controlled by them.

  By alternating back and forth between each man’s anger, Morrell allowed the reader to identify with each man’s motivations. As with Socrates—no one commits wrong intentionally—these two likewise draw from deep, well-meant convictions, making one mistake after another, their rationalized fury eventually guaranteeing a mutual destruction. Morrell was careful not to favor one character over the other. He wanted the reader to understand both sides and become dismayed as the two protagonists proved incapable of doing the same. At one point, Teasle sends for the Special Forces officer who trained Rambo—Colonel Sam Trautman, whose first name Morrell meant to echo that of Uncle Sam. In the end, after Rambo kills Teasle, Trautman kills Rambo, thus completing the allegory inasmuch as the representative of the system that created Rambo is the person who destroys him and turns out to be the only winner.

  The palpable vividness of the prose in First Blood is matched by the book’s unrelenting pace. Until its publication in 1972, few thrillers dramatized so much intense, continuous action. From the moment Rambo breaks out of jail totally naked and hijacks a motorcycle, escaping into the nearby mountains to fight a private war, the novel set a new standard for unrelenting speed.

  Often referred to as “the father of the modern action novel,” Morrell’s First Blood has sold millions of copies around the world and remains in print to this day. Inevitably, Hollywood discovered the tale and created four films, not to mention a Saturday morning cartoon series. The fact that the second and third films (and the cartoon) are patently false to Morrell’s initial concept is irrelevant. The films exist in worlds of their own and, collectively, manufactured a pop-cultural icon—Rambo—one that aided an emasculated America, in the 1980s, to again feel good about itself: Ronald Reagan’s so-called new morning.

  Reagan himself elevated Rambo as his standard-bearer in numerous press conferences, once remarking that, after watching a Rambo film the night before, he knew what to do the next time there was a terrorist crisis. Morrell himself experienced the phenomena when, one day in 1986, he was on a publicity tour in England and picked up the London Times to find a disturbing headline: US RAMBO JETS BOMB LIBYA.

  Not exactly what he had in mind when he first manufactured that alltoo-real conflict between Rambo and Teasle. A novel that questioned war and its devastating aftermath, a story that brought to life lingering cultural wounds left by the Vietnam debacle, became a shorthand political metaphor—a rallying cry for even more violence. Morrell himself commented in 2000 that he thought it ironic that a 1970’s novel about the political polarization of America (for or against the Vietnam War), became the basis for films, in the 1980s, that resulted in a similar polarization (for or against Ronald Reagan).

  Eventually the Oxford English Dictionary cited First Blood as the source for the creation of a new word. Rambo. Complicated, troubled, haunted, too often misunderstood. Precisely like First Blood itself.

  Steve Berry lives on the Georgia coast. After twenty-nine years, he no longer practices law, but continues to serve as one of five members of the Camden County Board of Commissioners. He began writing in 1990, and though his undergraduate degree was in political science, it was Steve’s interest in travel and history that led him to write international suspense thrillers. His many books include The Amber Room, The Romanov Prophecy, The Third Secret, The Templar Legacy, The Alexandria Link, The Venetian Betrayal,The Charlemagne Pursuit, and The Paris Vendettta. Steve is an international best seller with books in forty-three languages, for a total of nearly eight million copies in print worldwide. He also served as co-president of International Thriller Writers.

  63

  Trevanian’s

  THE EIGER SANCTION (1972)

  Lee Goldberg

  The author known as Trevanian was as fictional a character as those he is credited with writing about. Trevanian was created by Rodney William Whitaker (1925–2005), a film professor at the University of Texas, for the purpose of writing his first novel,The Eiger Sanction. Whitaker told an interviewer that he came up with an idea for a novel, then created “the best writer to do the job. I build up the writer, giving him a voice, a style, a set of insights and prejudices, an educational and developmental background, a set of motivations, an age, a class, a culture, and sometimes a race. [Trevanian] was just the right persona to write spoofs on the shallow macho derring-do/superspy/hot crotch genre.” He also wrote fiction as Nicholas Seare, Jean-Paul Morin, and Benat Le Cagot, among other names. Due to contractual requirements, some of the novels Whitaker initially intended to publish under other pseudonyms came out as Trevanian novels instead (The Main, Summer of Katya, Incident at Twenty Mile, and The Crazy Ladies of Pearl Street), causing some confusion and frustration among readers because of the disparate writing styles. Until Whitaker’s death, the mysterious background and life of Trevanian, who many were convinced was a nom de plume for Robert Ludlum, remained nearly as compelling as the best-selling novels written under his name.

  In 1972, Bond mania was waning and the spy craze it created had peaked. Sean Connery had just returned as 007 in Diamonds Are Forever, chubby and toupeed, driving a moon buggy in the Las Vegas desert. It was a toss-up who was more uncomfortable with Bond at that point, Connery or the audience. The pop-culture secret agent, portrayed as either an international playboy or a morose bureaucrat, seemed not just anachronistic but boring.

  The genre was ready for a major shake-up, and it came from The Eiger Sanction, though that certainly wasn’t how Whitaker’s first novel was intended. He’d set out to ridicule the genre.

  His hero is Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, an art history professor and renowned mountain climber who lives in a converted church with a hidden, subterranean art gallery filled with works by the masters (“This isn’t a house,” one character says of the place, “it’s a movie set.” And it soon was. Clint Eastwood starred in and directed the 1975 film version of the book).

  Hemlock finances his art collecting as an assassin, taking on “sanctions” for an ultrasecret intelligence organization. His mission is to hunt down an unknown, rival assassin who is believed to be one of several mountaineers about to climb the deadly Eiger.

  It’s an enticing premise that, on the surface, doesn’t sound like a satire at all, but a rousing mix of espionage and Alistair MacLean-style adventure.

  Perhaps to puncture that expectation, the book opens with the Inspector Clouseau of spies backing into a rose bush, running face-first into a streetlamp, and tugging his pants from between his buttocks before being ambushed and gutted by enemy agents.

  Despite this comical introduction, an assassin/hero named after a poison, and a cast of characters with such overtly cartoonish names as Yurasis Dragon, Felicity Arse, Cherry Pitts, Randy Nickers, and Madame Bidet, the spoof is actually far more nuanced, written with such intelligence and respect for the conventions of the genre that the author and his readers soon forgot that it’s all supposed to be a joke.

  Naturally, every woman Hemlock meets instantly wants to bed him. But despite his “remarkable staying powers” and his expertise at lovemaking, his attitude toward sex is perfunctory. “It had been simple, uncomplicated, and temporarily satisfying: like urination. And that was the way he preferred his lovemaking to be.”

  Hemlock approaches the seduction of one particular woman with frank and startling pragmatism. “I’m just feeling tough and full of sperm. She happens to be around and looks capable.”

  Not only has he “never experienced that local physical ecstasy we associate with climax,” but when he falls emotionally for the ludicrously named African-American spy Jemima Brown, he suffers premature ejaculation.