It all might have been meant as a joke, but it adds unintentional psychological depth to a character who has no conscience and yet values loyalty and friendship over all else. Betrayal, to him, is worse than murder. Not exactly the shadings you’d expect from a caricature.

  Hemlock works for Mr. Dragon, whose secretary is the anti-Money-penny, described as a squat, gray-haired nurse with sandpaper skin, a fat face, and a faint mustache. Dragon fears that Hemlock is suffering from an ailment known as “Tension Rot,” which could also have been said about the spy genre itself at the time.

  But there is no such rot in The Eiger Sanction, despite Whitaker’s best efforts to create it. He becomes enamored by the conventions he intends to spoof, turning satire into a sly subversion and a clever reinvention of the genre. By the time Hemlock is on the mountain, Whitaker has forgotten the joke, and so have we. He explores serious themes about the meaning of friendship, the emotional vulnerability of trust, and turns the inanimate mountain into a truly terrifying character itself. Even the silly named, sexually voracious women evolve, almost against the author’s will, into fieshand-blood characters with an emotional depth that belies the increasingly halfhearted attempts at satire.

  Ultimately The Eiger Sanction comes off as a darkly funny, exhilarating espionage adventure. Readers embraced it as a straight thriller, earning Whittaker huge sales and wide acclaim all over the world. It was hardly the reaction Whitaker-as-Trevanian was expecting.

  Dismayed, Whitaker set out to spoof his spoof, bringing back Hemlock in The Loo Sanction (aka The Toilet Assassination), but readers and critics alike still missed or ignored the joke and once again took it seriously as a thrilling spy novel.

  He later reimagined Hemlock as Nicholas Hel in his novel Shibumi, his final espionage tale, only now the assassin/spy was not only a deft lover, but he drove women to unimaginable heights of ecstasy by stroking them with razor blades. A footnote from the author warned readers not to try this advanced sexual technique at home unless you were well trained in the erotic arts. Sadly, I dropped out before getting my diploma.

  Despite such ludicrous touches, even Shibumi was embraced as an espionage classic, some regarding it with greater admiration than The Eiger Sanction.

  Trevanian would have appreciated the irony.

  In creating the fictional author and his outrageous hero, Whitaker unwittingly reinvigorated a tired genre with wit and intelligence, while also paying homage to everything that makes spy novels irresistible.

  Lee Goldberg is a two-time Edgar Award nominee whose many TV writing and producing credits include Diagnosis Murder, Hunter, Martial Law, SeaQuest, Spenser: For Hire, Nero Wolfe, Missing, and Monk. He’s also the author of My Gun Has Bullets, Beyond the Beyond, and Successful Television Writing as well as the acclaimed Diagnosis Murder and Monk series of original mystery novels. He served on the board of the Mystery Writers of America and cofounded the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers.

  64

  Charles McCarry’s

  THE TEARS OF AUTUMN (1974)

  Hank Wagner

  Born in 1930 in Massachusetts, Charles McCarry served in the U.S. Army, where he was a correspondent for Stars and Stripes; later, he worked as a speechwriter in the Eisenhower administration. From 1958 to 1967, he was a CIA undercover operative in Europe, Asia, and Africa. McCarry was also editor-at-large for National Geographic and contributed pieces to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other national publications. Besides writing about super spy Paul Christopher in novels like The Secret Lovers and Second Sight, McCarry wrote several other novels, including The Better Angels, Shelley’s Heart, and Lucky Bastard. He is also the author of several works of nonfiction, including Citizen Nader and The Great Southwest.

  Novels can turn into personal touchstones for readers, becoming part of their mental landscape, especially the books read in one’s formative years: The Tears of Autumn, published in 1974, when I was fourteen, became one for me. The book had everything a teenage reader who had just devoured Ian Fleming’s Bond books could want: a global scope, a stoic hero (Paul Christopher, who had played a key role in McCarry’s brilliant first novel, The Miernik Dossier), sex, violence, action, and political intrigue. On top of that, it delved into the labyrinthine mystery surrounding what was perhaps the defining moment of the second half of the twentieth century, the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  As the novel begins in the early fall of 1963, it’s truly a heady time for Americans. The initially shaky Kennedy administration has finally found its feet and is looking forward to conquering the new frontiers it sees ahead. A cockiness and arrogance pervade Camelot, an attitude that CIA operative Paul Christopher, on assignment in Vietnam, perceives in the Americans he associates with in that country—all too sure of themselves, they assume that things will inevitably go their way. Thus, when the uncooperative brothers Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu of South Vietnam are assassinated as part of a coup on November 1, 1963, with the tacit approval of the U.S. president, many consider their deaths as acceptable collateral damage. But actions have consequences, and in this case, their deaths set in motion a complicated plot of revenge from beyond the grave that culminates in the tragic events of November 22, 1963.

  Kennedy’s assassination so shocks the country and its citizens that ten days pass before even Christopher realizes what truly occurred. When he does realize the truth, it comes as swiftly and surely as divine revelation. “The explanation struck like a bell in Christopher’s mind.” Suddenly, the brilliant operative knows exactly who killed the president and why. The difficulty of his task, he knows, lies in convincing his skeptical superiors that his theory is valid, and staying alive long enough to prove it. Undaunted, Christopher breaks with the CIA, and embarks on a relentless and perilous quest to bring the truth to light.

  So, just what makes this book a must-read?

  First, it provides a plausible solution to the riddle of who killed JFK, seizing on several theories (i.e., the involvement of the Vietnamese, the Soviets, the Cubans, even the American mob), blending them into a seamless whole that, given what readers experience vicariously through Christopher, seems to arrive at a stark core truth. This seems almost inevitable, when you recall that the book began life when McCarry, having used his journalistic talents to develop a theory on who ordered the assassination, proposed a nonfiction work on the subject to his publisher. The publisher thought the idea had merit, but urged McCarry to pursue the idea through his fiction.

  Second, it offers a hero so compelling that some, such as Washington Post critic Patrick Anderson (the author of the insightful The Triumph of the Thriller), have accused McCarry of making his protagonist too perfect. The accusation has some merit, especially when you consider how “Renaissance man” Christopher is described by a superior early in the novel: “Three things: first, he’s intelligent and entirely unsentimental. Second, he will go to any lengths to get the truth, he never gives up. Third, he is not subject to fear.” All this is true, at least to those he associates with professionally. Readers, however, are privy to his secret, that he is somewhat less than mythic, a human being who is sentimental and regretful about events in his past, and fearful for those around him—the moment when he thinks his lover Molly might have been harmed in retaliation for his probe into the assassination is absolutely gut wrenching, and his relief in discovering he is wrong is palpable.

  Third is McCarry’s ability to make even the most outré elements in his tale seem absolutely normal. For instance, a key element of the plot hinges on several horoscopes drawn by a mysterious Vietnamese named Yu Lung—in fact, the assassination would never have taken place had these readings not been favorable. As rendered by McCarry, and experienced by Christopher, superstition and conjecture come to seem like science, at once adding an intriguing, alien element to the story, and emphasizing the extreme differences in the cultures involved. Another example is the presence of Dieter Dimpel, a Nazi-loving, mountain climbing, acrobatic dwarf, an expert in retrieving information from seeming impregnable spaces. Using Dimpel, McCarry injects some welcome humor into the proceedings, simultaneously making the potentially loathsome character sympathetic.

  Finally, there’s the beauty of McCarry’s prose, and the literary allusions that add zest to his work. Reading McCarry, you might find yourself thinking of G. K. Chesterton (like Gabriel Syme, the hero of Chesterton’s classic of paranoia The Man Who Was Thursday, Christopher is also a poet), of W. Somerset Maugham (Ashenden or the Secret Agent is a particular favorite of McCarry), or even of Ernest Hemingway (in that McCarry’s classic style often echoes that of the author of To Have and Have Not). A major allusion involves Shelley, as a key clandestine meeting takes place at his gravesite in Rome. You’ll also find yourself reflecting on Fleming’s Bond, Greene’s Maurice Castle, le Carré’s George Smiley, even Condon’s Captain Bennett Marco. That McCarry, one of America’s finest spy novelists, manages to evoke all these disparate elements so expertly is a tribute to his intelligence and skill.

  Although McCarry would write about Christopher several more times, The Tears of Autumn is where you’ll find both author and character at the height of their powers, providing readers with one of those rare reading experiences that you learn to treasure—a book that both enthralls and enriches those who read it.

  Hank Wagner is the coeditor of Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads. He is a regular contributor to Mystery Scene, Crimespree, Cemetery Dance, Hellnotes, and numerous other genre magazines.

  65

  Peter Benchley’s

  JAWS (1974)

  P.J. Parrish

  Peter Benchley (1940–2006) was the son of children’s book author Nathaniel Benchley and the grandson of Algonquin Round Table founder, humorist Robert Benchley. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, he worked for the Washington Post as well as Newsweek and was a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson. The idea for his most famous book,Jaws, came after he read a newspaper story about a Long Island fisherman catching a 4,550-pound great white shark. Like Jaws, several of his other novels were adapted into films, including The Deep and The Island. Later in his life, Benchley became an advocate for shark protection.

  It was twenty-five years after the publication of the book that catapulted him to fame and fortune, and Peter Benchley was being lowered into the waters off Australia in a shark cage. “One of these days, one of these fellows is going to take revenge for Jaws,” he said.

  Benchley probably should have feared the critics more than the sharks. They weren’t kind to him when his book debuted, dismissing it as populist trash. And it doesn’t help Benchley’s legacy that his book eventually sank in the wake created by Steven Spielberg’s landmark movie. The comparison is unavoidable and is symbolized in that iconic graphic of the fish rising from the deep toward the hapless woman swimmer that’s become as well known as John Williams’s da-dum sound track. On the dust jacket of the original Jaws hardcover (I’ve got a mildewed first edition on my shelf), there’s the huge fish, rising out of the deep toward the hapless woman. But it looks like a toothless old dolphin, nothing like the fanged monster of the movie poster.

  Is this one of those rare cases where the movie outshines the book? Alas, yes. While Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated movie loops endlessly on cable, Benchley’s slender paperback is readily available only via a mouse click on Amazon or else it is relegated to the bottom shelf in the back of Barnes & Noble. (That’s where I found it after the clerk confessed he didn’t know there even was a book called Jaws.) Though it was a publishing phenomenon in its day, I’d guess few people today read Jaws. So what are we to make of Benchley’s big fish story? Does it merit a place in the pantheon of great thrillers? Or it is just a rusty bucket of chum?

  When Jaws came out in 1974, the critics chewed Benchley to bits, taking him to task for the “rubber-teeth plot,” “lifeless characters,” and “hollow portentousness.” Sniffed the Village Voice: “If there’s a trite turn to be made,Jaws will make it.”

  True, the book has its faults. Its craftsmanship is pulp level; its characters tend toward cardboard thin. And the story is burdened with ludicrous subplots featuring mobsters, ersatz-Cheever class warfare, supernatural omens, and gin-fueled adultery. An adulterous sex scene involving Chief Brody’s wife in the booth of a seafood restaurant is just plain icky.

  Ah, but back in its day, readers loved Jaws. It stayed on the hardcover best-seller list for forty-four weeks, selling twenty million copies. In a single day, one newsstand at O’Hare Airport sold 392 copies. Just seven days after Jaws finally disappeared from the hardcover list, it resurfaced on the paperback list at number 3, bumping off Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. It stayed on the paperback list for a year, rising and falling and fending off attacks from Richard Adams’s Watership Down rabbits, selling an astounding nine million copies.

  Jaws continued to be a phenomenon beyond its publication. The 1975 movie, backed by a massive history-making marketing campaign, became the highest grossing film up to that time (surpassed finally by Star Wars). It generated mass fear, causing a decline in beach attendance. And then there were the imitators. If a twenty-five-foot shark could generate all that money, what could a two hundred-footer do? First came Megalodon and then a self-published number called Carcharodon in which a giant prehistoric shark is freed when an iceberg melts. Others from the “gaping maw genre” were Extinct and Meg. You have to wonder if we’d have Jurassic Park without Jaws. Michael Crichton’s book opens with a girl getting chewed up by a dinosaur on a beach. As Benchley himself said, “Every young man in the world is fascinated with sharks or dinosaurs.”

  But beyond the sheer numbers, there are good reasons why Jaws has earned its stripes as a seminal modern thriller.

  First, the fish is a terrific character, undoubtedly the best-rendered character in the book (Benchley even gives the shark its own point of view). The story comes alive when the shark is on the page, pulling the narrative along in its wake, diverting our attention from the extraneous stuff. (Spielberg understood this and jettisoned the subplots).

  Second,Jaws tapped into a primal but very believable fear. Benchley broke the realism barrier between fiction and nonfiction, giving us a predator from the real world—the beach no less, a place of fun and beauty on the surface, but a place of darkness and danger below. Chief Brody is all of us when he stares out at the ocean and thinks: “In his dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his fiesh, demons that cackled and moaned.”

  Lastly, at its basest level, Benchley’s great white shark is one heck of a serial killer story. As one character tells Chief Brody: “Sharks are like ax murderers. People react to them with their guts.”

  And that is the bottom line. The greatest thrillers give us a fiend that taps into our deepest fears. The greatest thrillers deliver a visceral punch that stays with us long after we have turned off the light or folded up the beach blanket. With Jaws, Peter Benchley created a monster for the ages, the second most famous fish after Moby Dick.

  As for his literary legacy, we’ll let Benchley have the last word: “It’s nice being a little rich and a little bit famous, but dammit, I didn’t intend to rank with Melville.”

  P.J. Parrish is the New York Times best-selling author of two series about biracial police detective Louis Kincaid and his lover—female homicide detective, Joe Frye. Parrish is also a regular contributor to short story anthologies, among them Detroit Noir, These Guns for Hire, MWA’s Death Do Us Part, and ITW’s The Chopin Manuscript. Her titles include A Thousand Bones, South of Hell, A Killing Rain, Thicker than Water, and Paint it Black. She won ITW’s Thriller Award, the Shamus Award, the Anthony Award, and was nominated for an Edgar.

  66

  William Goldman’s

  MARATHON MAN (1974)

  Hank Wagner

  Born in 1931, William Goldman grew up near Chicago. He received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1952, and an M.A. in English from Columbia University in 1956. It’s hard to pick a place to start a discussion about Goldman’s lengthy, varied, and successful career. But surely you’ve heard of at least one of his sixteen novels, which include No Way To Treat a Lady (1964) and The Princess Bride (1973). Or screenplays he wrote for films as diverse as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Stepford Wives (1975),Misery (1990), and Maverick (1994). Or read one of his memoirs, like Adventures in the Screen Trade, where he (in)famously summed up the entertainment industry with the phrase “Nobody knows anything.” If not, you certainly should, as Goldman likely forgot more about writing and storytelling than most writers will ever know. Objective proof? Well, Goldman received two Academy Awards, one for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (original screenplay), and one for All the President’s Men (adapted screenplay). He also received two Edgar Awards for Best Motion Picture Screenplay, one for Harper (1967), the other for Magic (1979).

  Author Gene Wolfe defines good literature as “that which can be read with pleasure by an educated reader and reread with increased pleasure.” That’s certainly the case with William Goldman’s Marathon Man. A classic thriller, it’s also a class in thriller writing. Reading it, then rereading it, is as exciting as watching a skilled magician perform, then having him take you aside afterward to explain just how he accomplished his illusions.

  Marathon Man is one of those novels that make you profoundly envious of those reading it for the first time. From its first pages, where readers are transported into the mind of a cranky old man named Rosenbaum, who’s consumed by road rage against the driver of a VW ahead of him who is just . . . going . . . too . . . slow, to its oddly touching, bittersweet denouement, you realize that you’ve placed yourself in the hands of a master, someone who is utterly ruthless about grabbing, then holding, your attention.