The rest of the cast is large. Inevitably most of them need to be lightly sketched, but the interactions of the main characters are what help make the book a winner. It is still regarded by many as Jack Higgins’s finest thriller. A fascinating work that expertly blends fact and fiction, it manages the neat trick of making the reader thoroughly root for the “wrong” people.

  Like Jack Higgins, Zoë Sharp left school early. She spent her formative years living aboard a catamaran on the northwest coast of England and went through a variety of jobs in her teenage years before becoming a freelance photojournalist in 1988. Sharp began her thriller writing career after receiving death threat letters in the course of her work. Her ex-Special Forces turned bodyguard heroine, Charlotte “Charlie” Fox, was praised by the Chicago Tribune: “Ill-tempered, aggressive, and borderline psychotic, Fox is also compassionate, introspective, and highly principled: arguably one of the most enigmatic—and coolest—heroines in contemporary genre fiction.” The first of Sharp’s books to be published in the U.S. was First Drop, which was nominated for the Barry Award. Others followed, including Third Strike.

  69

  Joseph Wambaugh’s

  THE CHOIRBOYS (1975)

  James O. Born

  Joseph Wambaugh (1937–) is the best known of all cops turned writers. Born in Pittsburgh to a police officer and a homemaker, Wambaugh did a hitch in the U.S. Marines, giving him insight into the military culture as well as the discipline needed to write while holding down a job and raising a family. Wambaugh joined the LAPD as a patrolman in 1960, continuing his education, earning first a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s in literature. His first novel,The New Centurions, was published in 1971 and became an instant bestseller. He has since published fifteen novels and nonfiction books. Several of his works, including The Onion Field, The New Centurions, and The Choirboys were adapted into major motion pictures. Wambaugh also created the critically acclaimed 1970s TV series,Police Story. His books are continually on the best-seller lists and highly regarded. Two of his recent novels are Hollywood Station and Hollywood Crows.

  The Choirboys, Wambaugh’s third novel, was published in 1975. It was the first novel he wrote after leaving the LAPD, and it gave him the freedom to let go and show police work, warts and all. In the novel, he takes deadly aim on administrators and some of the ridiculous programs thought up by command staff who are so disconnected from actual life on the street that the programs are not only costly but counterproductive. His observations of drunken police officers are endearing compared to his disdain for administrators. The entire story starts with allusions to the “MacArthur Park incident,” references made by supervisors who are essentially the villains in the story. In effect, the novel moves backward, ending with the actual event at MacArthur Park.

  The bulk of the story centers around a group of patrolmen working the night shift in Wilshire Division of Los Angeles. The station is located close to MacArthur Park, which was technically located in the Rampart Division. The cops didn’t want to cause problems in their own patrol area, or as Wambaugh so poetically put it, “One does not shit in one’s own nest.” Each segment of the novel focuses on a different pair of partners and the wild adventures they live out on the street. These anecdotes reflect the distinct personalities and frailties of the cops involved. For example, Roscoe Rules is a violent bully with a serious inferiority complex that is exposed time and time again. His ego won’t allow a slight to go unpunished or a story of his courage to be told without exaggeration.

  The de facto leader of the group and senior officer is Herbert “Sperm Whale” Whalen, a nineteen-year vet of the LAPD who is also an Air Force reservist who flew in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Sperm Whale would work straight shifts until he had enough days off to fly transports to Vietnam in the late sixties and qualify for combat flight pay. Whalen, like all the characters and most events in the novel, is based on reality. Wambaugh knew an officer who flew missions in Vietnam on his days off. Whalen is the heart and soul of the squad as well as the conscience of the book, and when he is forced to make tough choices, the reader feels them like blunt trauma.

  The novel was groundbreaking on several levels. Wambaugh provided a glimpse into realistic lives of average police officers and used a number of different story lines to merge into the final scenes. He used his unique position as an actual police officer to offer insights that ran counter to the image of the police work portrayed in TV shows and movies. The novel also introduced a phrase to police work that is still used: “Choir Practice,” meaning to share a drink after work and complain about the pressures of administration, the dangers of the job, and the futility of life. The time period of the early seventies still lacked the unending parade of reality shows presenting how cops work and live. At the time, if you didn’t know a police officer, you had virtually no idea what they faced on a day-to-day basis unless you watched Dragnet or Adam-12, which sanitized every encounter with street people. Wambaugh went out on a limb to really present cops as humans in the most difficult of professions. The use of profanity and ethnic slurs flew in the face of the image that the LAPD had tried to cultivate by cooperating with the mild TV shows of the time.

  In 1975, the profession was not viewed in the same way as it is today. Just as the military at the time was seen in a negative light, cops were seen as the muscle of a corrupt government. Wambaugh didn’t make excuses or value judgments about the actions of his cops in The Choirboys. He allowed readers to see firsthand the humor as well as the terror inherent in police work. This was unusual and original. The truth of The Choirboys is evident in the fact that even thirty-five years after its publication the story and characters remain fresh and powerful.

  Joseph Wambaugh holds a unique position of influence among modern crime writers as well as cops. His books and the TV show he created, Police Story, provided a glimpse of police work to a generation of young people looking to break out of traditional professions. A chance to experience something besides a nine-to-five office job, increasing pay and benefits as well as finding excitement, led a new crop of college-educated candidates to apply for police jobs across the country. Wambaugh saw this trend early and uses it in The Choirboys. All of the younger officers in the novel have college degrees whereas Sperm Whale Whalen, the fifty-two-year-old veteran, scoffs at the need to go to college.

  The best of the Los Angeles-based crime writers, Michael Connelly, made this comment in a 2008 Mystery Scene Magazine article about Wambaugh:

  I think his recent books are just as strong as those books he changed the world with. He continues his unique style of weaving anecdotal vignettes into the mosaic of the story. But the story has a point and they are as much reports from the front-lines of modern police work and politics and the city of Los Angeles, as they are full-blooded novels. What Wambaugh never loses sight of is the difficulty in doing the job right and the underlying nobility of going against the odds. It’s what makes police work a calling, not a job, and Wambaugh never forgets this.

  From cops on the beat to phenomenal crime writers, Joseph Wambaugh has influenced generations of people with his honest observations, grand storytelling style, and sense of justice. His unflinching look at life on the street has served as the standard for police novels and TV shows. The Choirboys is Wambaugh’s magnum opus of police work that continues to entertain, educate, and shock.

  James O. Born is a former federal drug agent and novelist who credits Wambaugh with influencing both his career choices. Born’s first novel,Walking Money, was published in 2004. He has four more police thrillers based on realistic lawenforcement procedure. He was the winner of the Florida Book Award for his third novel,Escape Clause. In 2009, the first in a series of police thrillers set in the near future was released under the pseudonym James O’Neal—The Human Disguise follows the life of a state cop in Florida after the world has been drastically changed by war, terrorism, and disease.

  70

  Clive Cussler’s

  RAISE THE TITANIC! (1976)

  Grant Blackwood

  Clive Cussler (1931–) began his writing career when his wife, Barbara, took a night job at the local police department. With the kids fed and put to bed, Cussler found himself alone in a quiet house with time on his hands and an imagination honed by working as an “idea man” at an advertising agency during the day. The protagonist he created, Dirk Pitt (named after his then toddler son, Dirk), was something of a split literary personality: one part contemporary hero—a high-school quarterback, Air Force Academy graduate, decorated pilot, and a marine engineer for the National Underwater Marine Agency—and one part swashbuckler: mannered but dangerous, more comfortable out-of-doors than in, at ease with greasy-handed mechanics and royalty alike, a hero who restlessly scans the horizon for that next indecipherable mystery or astounding adventure. In his spare time, Cussler pursues real-life nautical mysteries, participating in the discovery of over sixty shipwrecks, including Carpathia ( the first ship to respond to the foundering HMS Titanic), the famed ghost ship Mary Celeste, and the Confederate submarine Hunley.

  Cussler took his first steps into the fiction world with a clear vision of the kind of book he wanted to write and the kind of hero who would star in it. An avid outdoorsman and scuba diver, Cussler’s “he who dares wins” attitude asserted itself early when in 1969, posing as a fellow literary agent, he sent a letter to his now longtime agent, Peter Lampack. Written on stationery Cussler himself created and styled in near-perfect “agent-ese,” the letter asked Lampack to consider two manuscripts written by the son of his best friend. If not for his own impending retirement, the phantom agent explained, he would’ve already signed the writer. Though he didn’t recognize the agent’s name, Lampack assumed they’d met in passing at one event or another, so he agreed to take a look at this son-of-a-friend-of-acolleague’s work.

  Cussler’s first book,Pacific Vortex, which would eventually be published in 1983 after a trio of best sellers, was shelved by Cussler and Lampack in favor of his next effort,The Mediterranean Caper, which found a home at Pyramid Books and met with moderate success, garnering Cussler an Edgar Award nomination by the Mystery Writers of America for Best Paperback Original Novel of 1973.Iceberg, published in 1975 by Dodd, Mead, is a sentimental favorite of Cussler, marking a transition between the linear story lines of Pacific Vortex and The Mediterranean Caper to one with a greater cast of characters, multiple plot twists, and a ruthless, powerful villain bent on changing the course of history.

  Turning his mind to the book that would eventually become Raise the Titanic!, Cussler found himself already forearmed with arguably the most important ingredient in commercially successful thrillers: a larger-than-life protagonist. Backed up by his stalwart sidekick Al Giordino, Dirk Pitt had already racked up what most real-life adventurers would consider a lifetime of challenges: going nose-to-nose with a World War I biplane terrorizing an air force base on the Greek island of Thásos, narrowly escaping from a labyrinth known as the Pit of Hades, salvaging German U-Boats and Japanese I-Boats converted into automated heroin-smuggling vehicles, finding a missing billionaire’s yacht gutted by fire and embedded in a massive iceberg, trekking across the blasted moonscape of Iceland, and fighting a shadowy organization determined to topple the governments of an entire continent.

  With his first two books, Cussler had charted relatively unknown territory in the literary world of that time. His brand of high-concept, high-stakes maritime action had gone unrepresented in the thriller genre for two decades since Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean (one of Cussler’s models) in the 1950s. During the two years leading up to Raise the Titanic!’s publication, best-selling thrillers had been dominated by a man-eating shark (Jaws by Peter Benchley), Cold War spies and mercenaries (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré, and T he Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth), World War II intrigue (T he Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins), and a historical caper (T he Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton). In fact, so atypical were Cussler’s first two books that he and Lampack were encouraged by industry insiders to steer the next book into more familiar genre categories. Trusting his instinct, Cussler declined. Still, he understood the crux of the issue: how to fuse Dirk Pitt and his swashbuckling adventures with a topic that would grab the attention of the reading public. At the time, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were engaged in not only a Cold War but also an arms race that had packed their respective arsenals with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the planet many times over.

  Raise the Titanic! started with a series of what-if questions. Cussler asked himself: What if the US government developed a sound-based shield able to obliterate incoming ballistic missiles? What if the shield’s power source, a mineral known as byzanium, existed in only one accessible place on Earth, a tiny island off the northern coast of the Soviet Union? What if the government discovered that the byzanium had long ago been spirited from the island by a mysterious mining concern known as The Coloradans? And finally, what if the missing byzanium was now in a place no one could reach? Cussler’s answer to the last question reflected both his and Pitt’s nautical leanings, as well as their drive to explore the unknown. The byzanium, Cussler decided, had been placed in the hold of the HMS Titanic, only to be lost when the supposedly unsinkable ship struck an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Enter Dirk Pitt and the National Underwater Marine Agency.

  Published in the late fall of 1976,Raise the Titanic! landed on the New York Times best-seller list just before Christmas and stayed there for the next twenty-six weeks, making Cussler, Dirk Pitt, and NUMA household names to readers across the country.

  In the forty-five years since Cussler began writing, his best-selling books have been published in over forty languages in more than one hundred countries. He has 160 million copies of his thrillers in print and has inspired a genre he continues to lead and shape to this day.

  In 2006, at the International Thriller Writers yearly gathering—aptly named ThrillerFest—Cussler was presented with the first-ever Thriller Master Award. Before he was brought on stage, the host conducted an experiment: Would those of the three hundred author attendees who had been either influenced, inspired, or helped by Clive Cussler please stand up?

  Not a chair remained occupied.

  Grant Blackwood, a U.S. Navy veteran, spent three years aboard a guided missile frigate as an Operations Specialist and a Pilot Rescue Swimmer. His high-action credentials are amply demonstrated in his Briggs Tanner international thriller series (The End of Enemies, The Wall of Night, and An Echo of War), as well as the short story “Sacrificial Lion” from the anthology Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night. Blackwood lives in Colorado. His first book cowritten with Clive Cussler, Spartan Gold (featuring the treasure-hunting team of Sam and Remi Fargo) debuted in 2009.

  71

  Ira Levin’s

  THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1976)

  Daniel Kalla

  As versatile as writers come, Ira Levin (1929–2007) demonstrated the breadth of genres that a talented thriller writer can conquer. In fact, as a novelist, playwright, television writer, and Broadway lyricist, he exceeded the bounds that limit most of us. He achieved critical acclaim early with his Edgar-winning debut novel,A Kiss Before Dying (1954). His play,Death-trap (1977), earned him a second Edgar and has the distinction of being the longest running comedy-thriller ever on Broadway. Although not prolific (only seven novels in an extremely long career), he wrote best-selling books in multiple genres, including the science fiction satire,The Stepford Wives (1972), the horror classic,Rosemary’s Baby (1967), and of course the thriller,The Boys from Brazi l (1976). The expression “a Stepford wife” became common in the English language. Most of his works have been adapted as films, often more than once. His other titles include This Perfect Day, Sliver, and Son of Rosemary. In 2003, the Mystery Writers of America honored him with its Grandmaster award.

  People familiar with The Boys from Brazil, the book or the movie, realize the story concerns cloning modern-day Hitlers. But for those who read it unaware, the novel begins far more obliquely. At a mysterious meeting inside a Brazilian restaurant, the leader of an all-German cabal disperses a group of six middle-aged men across Europe and North America to assassinate ninety-four low-level civil servants, all of whom are approaching the age of sixty-five. A young amateur investigator manages to tape the meeting and replay part of it over the phone for famed Nazi hunter, Yakov Lieberman, before being cut off (and cut up) by the plotters. Half a world away, Lieberman—who faces the daunting prospect of a Cold War world that would just as soon forget about aging Nazis—doesn’t know whether or not the call is a hoax.

  Deciding to kick the tires, at first he finds nothing to substantiate the caller’s claim. But that changes when he visits the family of a recently deceased civil servant and meets his son who is an exact replica of another dead official’s child. Lieberman and his ragtag associates soon piece the conspiracy together, realizing they are facing thirteen-year-old clones of history’s most infamous leader. Not only are the ninety-four boys from Brazil cloned from Adolf Hitler; they are being raised under identical circumstances, down to the younger mother and older civil servant father who conveniently dies when the boys hit thirteen (to maximize the chance that at least a few of them will grow up just like the führer.) This puts Lieberman on a crash course with the cabal’s leader, Dr. Josef Mengele (the most famous Nazi to elude postwar justice), and leads to a memorable climax and an ethically ambiguous ending.

  The Boys from Brazil epitomizes the high-concept thriller. In this relatively short novel, Levin manages to toss in more themes, issues, subplots, and characters than most books twice its size. The story could be categorized as science fiction, suspense, thriller, or even historical. And in terms of subgenres, it contains elements of espionage, medicine, war, science, and political thriller.