Whether describing firefights or the thrill of discovering a link between two seemingly unrelated crimes, Perry manages to give the story near-constant breathtaking momentum. Like the clank-clank-clank of a roller coaster climbing the first steep hill, short, tightly constructed scenes at the beginning portent the ride to come. You can almost feel your head snap one way then the other as you read.

  But it’s not always a sudden twist or rushing action that exhilarates. Through the use of dramatic irony—that is, our knowing something the characters don’t—Perry gives readers additional layers of insight and emotion. How can we not smile or groan in pleasant frustration at Waring’s sometimes faulty reconstruction of crimes we as readers witnessed? Rather than unraveling mysteries in sync with the characters, the fun lies in watching them try to catch up with what we already know. And as this catching up grows quicker, we realize the characters are learning; they’re adjusting their thinking to better understand their adversaries.

  Careful readers can catch subtle hints of Perry’s disregard for “rules.” Take, for instance, the mid-scene point of view shifts that would have English profs and editors reaching for their red pens. But Perry pulls them off so gracefully, they’re almost impossible to notice.

  In at least one area, Perry never plays it fast and loose: the facts. When he writes, as he does in The Butcher’s Boy, that the drive from Denver to Cheyenne takes two hours, you can bet your watch it does. By being meticulous in verifiable details like that, readers take him at his word when he describes things that are harder to prove, like the way in which the mob launders money and how many pounds of pressure it takes to crush a wind-pipe. Because of this verisimilitude, readers feel they have been on the Las Vegas Strip without actually having walked it, or think they know how to work a crime scene as well as any investigator.

  Years ago, I satiated my fiction cravings with a steady diet of horror. Then a friend convinced me to read The Butcher’s Boy. I was hooked. I hadn’t realized that thrillers could be so—thrilling. My bookshelves are now crammed with hundreds of thrillers I’ve read over the years. Perry’s novels occupy a special shelf in my office.

  In writing my own novels, I have no doubt that I am influenced by Perry’s bold style of telling stories: his tackling heady challenges, such as creating likeable bad guys, using dramatic irony to build suspense and show character growth, ignoring traditions and formulas and rules—in short, his doing whatever it takes to tell a damn good story. Call it a guilty pleasure, liking a book about a nasty assassin so much that it changed my reading life—and career—forever. But a pleasure it is.

  Robert Liparulo is a former journalist, with over a thousand articles and multiple writing awards to his name. He is the author of the thrillers Comes a Horseman, Germ, Deadfall, Deadlock, and Lunatic Fringe as well as the best-selling young adult series, Dreamhouse Kings. He is currently working on a trilogy of sniper novels, based on the critically acclaimed short story, “Kill Zone,” that he contributed to James Patterson’s ITW Thriller anthology. In addition, he is penning a novel and script of a political thriller with the director Andrew Davis. He lives with his family in Colorado.

  82

  Tom Clancy’s

  THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1984)

  Chris Kuzneski

  Tom Clancy (1947–) grew up in Baltimore, and received an English degree from Loyola College. Attracted to the armed forces since he was a boy, he turned his attention to writing when poor eyesight kept him from a military career. While working full time as an insurance salesman, Clancy wrote The Hunt for Red October at night on his dining room table. He finished it on February 28, 1983. Knowing no better, he drove the manuscript to his editor instead of mailing it. A year and a half later, it was published in October 1984. The book introduced the character of Jack Ryan, who would later be featured in several of Clancy’s other novels, including Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears. These books have another thing in common: they were adapted into major motion pictures. In 1996, Clancy aimed his expertise in a different direction. He cofounded Red Storm Entertainment, a computer game company that launched the Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon franchises. In addition, he licensed his name and the Splinter Cell brand to Ubisoft Entertainment. Less than a decade later, Tom Clancy is more than a best-selling author. He is a multimedia giant, whose name is synonymous with military action.

  In early 1985, President Ronald Reagan stepped off Marine One with a book tucked under his arm. A reporter asked him what he was reading, and Reagan held up a copy of The Hunt for Red October for the world media to see. The book jacket was a memorable one. It featured a black submarine, stamped with a red hammer and sickle—a symbol that appeared on the Soviet flag. This was during the Cold War, shortly after Reagan had labeled the U.S.S.R. as the “evil empire,” so reporters were intrigued by the cover image and asked him about the book. When Reagan called the novel “unputdownable” and referred to it as “the perfect yarn,” it made international news.

  “I’m a storyteller who got very lucky,” Clancy told me. “President Reagan got it for Christmas 1984. People noticed it and asked the President about it, and SHAZAM, I became a best-selling author. Quite a jump from insurance agent. Rather like an instant cure for leprosy. I never looked back.”

  Casper Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense, was another fan of the novel. He reviewed it for The Times Literary Supplement, calling it “a splendid and riveting story” and praising the technical descriptions as “vast and accurate.” Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising since The Hunt for Red October was released by the Naval Institute Press, a noncommercial publisher based at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, specializing in naval and military history.The Hunt for Red October was the first fictional work it had ever published, and to this day it is still its most successful book, based on total sales and its impact on contemporary writing. Clancy’s debut novel ushered in a brand-new, extremely popular genre: the modern techno-thriller, books that included a massive amount of technical details and cutting-edge technology while maintaining action and suspense. And The Hunt for Red October does it better than most, taking readers into the middle of the Cold War during a nautical game of hide-and-seek.

  “Red October was based on a true story, the attempted defection of the Soviet Krivak-class missile frigate,Storozhevoy,” Clancy revealed. “I had read about it in the Washington Post in 1976 or so, and it germinated in my head. I decided to up the ante, as it were, by making the ship a missile submarine instead of a surface warship.”

  One glance at the book’s synopsis, and Clancy will have you hooked:

  When Jack Ryan, a young analyst at the CIA, gets word that an unexpected Red Fleet operation is in progress, he thinks he knows the cause: The Soviets’ most-valuable ship, a new ballistic-missile submarine, is attempting to defect to the United States, and the Soviet Atlantic fleet has been ordered to destroy her. Ryan reasons that if the U.S. can find the submarine first, it would be the intelligence coup of all time. But Red October has the entire Atlantic to hide in and a new silent propulsion system that makes it impossible for either side to detect. Or does it? Captain Marko Ramius has plotted his escape with the cunning of a lifelong submariner. Viktor Tupolev, who commands the Soviets’ fastest attack sub, is counting on his boat’s new sonar system to guide him to his prey. And Bart Mancuso, the commander of the U.S. Navy’s new attack sub Dallas, is banking on the sensitive ears of “Jonesy,” his resourceful sonar operator, to identify Red October’s unique sound print and track her down.

  The first time I read The Hunt for Red October, I was still in high school. My father had purchased the book based on the president’s recommendation and because Clancy, like my father, was a successful insurance agent. As soon as my dad finished reading it, I borrowed his copy and dove right in. Within seconds, I was underwater with the Northern Fleet, exploring the Murmansk coast and the bluffs of the Kolo Fjord. But unlike all the books that I had read previously—where Soviet military personnel were portrayed as maniacal bad guys—I actually found myself rooting for the Red October. I wanted Ramius and his crew to escape the clutches of evil and experience the simple joy of shopping for fresh fruit in a supermarket. Or as Visily Borodin (Sam Neill) mentioned in the film version, to buy a recreational vehicle and live in Montana, where he could marry “a round American woman and raise rabbits.” It didn’t matter that most of the technical details about the submarine were over my head. Heck, some of Clancy’s information would have confused an admiral. In the end, all that mattered was that I believed the world that Clancy had created. To me, there was nothing more important than capturing the Red October so the U.S. Navy could examine the new “Caterpillar Drive” system. Why? It was the only way we could stop those Commie bastards from parking an undetected nuclear submarine off the coast of our most important cities. And let’s face it, what was more important than that?

  The story had such an impact on me, I found myself paying tribute to it when I wrote my first novel,The Plantation. As an author, I’ve always had trouble picking the right name for my characters. I know the process should be a simple one since there are thousands of names to chose from, but for some reason it’s always been a struggle for me. And I mean,always. In this case, I knew everything about one of my main characters—ex-military, extremely intelligent, cultured and well read, yet somewhat of a jokester—except what to call him. Then it dawned on me, my character sounded a lot like “Jonesy” from The Hunt for Red October. In fact, the men sounded like brothers. So I thought, what the hell? I took the surname and ran with it, an homage to the father of the techno-thriller.

  Four best sellers later, David Jones and his best friend Jonathon Payne are still kicking butt in countries around the world. If they’re lucky, maybe one of these days they’ll get to meet Jack Ryan. I’m sure the three of them would hit it off.

  Chris Kuzneski is the New York Times best-selling author of The Lost Throne, Sword of God, Sign of the Cros s, and The Plantation. His thrillers have been translated into more than twenty languages and have been praised by James Patterson, Clive Cussler, Nelson DeMille, Lee Child, James Rollins, Vince Flynn, Steve Berry, and many others. Although he currently lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, he grew up in western Pennsylvania where he played football at the University of Pittsburgh and passed most of his classes. He is currently working on his golf swing, his social life, and his next book.

  83

  F. Paul Wilson’s

  THE TOMB (1984)

  Heather Graham

  F. Paul Wilson (1946–) might be called a renaissance man. Born and raised in New Jersey, he says “he misspent his youth playing with matches, pouring 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 with Zacherley.” A medical doctor, Paul continued with his practice even after finding success as a writer; after all, he had patients who depended on him. While still a student, he began his writing career with science fiction. In 1981, he received acclaim and New York Times best-selling status with his novel The Keep; in 1984, he repeated that success with The Tomb, and Repairman Jack came onto the scene as an engaging antihero with whom decades of readers would fall in love. Paul’s affection for New York is clearly apparent in his descriptions of it. In The Tomb, the city lives and breathes and is an integral part of the complex plot that made it a landmark novel. He initially called the book,Rakoshi —the name of Jack’s adversaries in the story. But the publisher wasn’t sure that people would be attracted to a novel with that title and decided arbitrarily to call it The Tomb. Paul is still curious why, given that there isn’t a tomb in the story.

  To me, F. Paul Wilson’s The Tomb is the perfect book. It has everything: history, suspense, mystery, romance, adventure, and a touch of the occult. It’s an exciting story, well written, and masterfully told—a thriller that defies genre.

  I read it the year it came out, 1984. I marveled that any book could encompass so much, captivate the reader, and build momentum steadily throughout.The Tomb was fresh; it was different; I had never read anything before that brought so many diverse elements to a single novel.

  From that day on, I grabbed everything I saw with the name F. Paul Wilson on it. Years later, when I was finally able to meet Paul, I was with my family, who felt the way I did. We must have looked pathetically silly to him, all of us just staring at him, wide-eyed and gaping. It was somehow reinforcing to find out that the brilliant writer was also an extraordinary man, as down to earth and as essentially kind as his character, Repairman Jack. And why not? The author’s voice displays a remarkably witty sense of humor.

  Let me tell you why this is one of the best thrillers ever written. First, there are those who are excellent writers. They know the language well, know what words to use when and where. Enough metaphors, and yet not too many. Words that form sketches that create vivid scenes in the mind. No clichés. Then, there are storytellers. Perhaps they don’t use language with as much skill, but they tell a story that seduces, amuses, entrances, or creates states of deep thought that linger long after the last page.

  Therein lies one of the beauties of The Tomb. Paul is both a writer and a storyteller. His words create a vital world that enters the mind and remains in the soul. If you have been to a location he’s describing, you agree with his description, and your agreement is often wry, as if you are sharing a joke. If you’re never been there, you still feel that you know the place; you feel the heat, the sweat, the touch of the sun, or the cold of snow. It’s not just reading. It’s experiencing.

  Perhaps most importantly, what Paul did with The Tomb was create characters who are real. I know exactly what they look like. I know why they feel what they do, and I sympathize with what they’re thinking. He manages to create people we love, hate, resent, and fear, and thus we live the emotions of these fascinating friends and acquaintances.

  Repairman Jack is the perfect protagonist. A relentless righter of wrongs, he is also vulnerable. He isn’t the tallest, strongest, or most handsome. In a way, he is Everyman, and in a way, he is the most extraordinary. He has a deep fiber of morality. I would walk through any dark alley with him. He knows the streets and loves them. He will not kill—unless there is no other way. Punishment fits the crime. His methods are possible (finding someone who beat up an old lady and beating him up in turn, breaking his hands) because he exists in nonexistence—a shadow man, he has no social security number and doesn’t file taxes. He isn’t the law—he is a repairman. “He didn’t have a bad face. Brown eyes, dark brown hair growing perhaps a little too low on his forehead. A nose neither too big nor too small . . . the teeth could have been whiter and straighter, and the lips were on the thin side. An inoffensive face. As an added bonus, a wiry, wellmuscled , five-eleven frame went along with the face at no extra charge.” Jack fits in with the crowd while rising above it.

  Then there is Gia, not just the love interest, but the woman who will bring many of the plot elements into play. Through the early part of the book, I simply want to shake her. What is the matter with this woman? Jack cares for her so deeply, and she makes his heart bleed. And yet I understand her as well. I can see her fears for herself, her daughter, and her future. She, too, has wounds and scars.

  Numerous plotlines come together in The Tomb. Repairman Jack must search for the aunt-in-law of his beloved Gia, who is trying to distance herself from him, afraid after discovering weapons in his home and learning what he “repairs.” Meanwhile, he’s also hired to find the mugger who stole the necklace of an elderly Indian woman—an impossible task in the labyrinth of New York City. But he knows the streets, knows how to lure a crook, and he’s not above using a disguise. In an alley he changes into women’s clothing, and sets his trap. Amazingly, he finds the crook, and here the first hints of something beyond the ordinary appear—the crook hadn’t tried to pawn the necklace. He had thrown it away because of the unpleasant sensation he experienced when holding it. The necklace is returned, and a bizarre death befalls the crook. Jack thinks he’s finished with the job, but he’s not. History comes into play, intricately woven into the plot. What had appeared totally unrelated to Repairman Jack suddenly begins to meld together and Jack is left not just to “repair” but to fight a battle for the lives of those he loves. Each page reveals more twists, more clues. Hints are delicately braided into a story that moves eerily into the unbelievable that we believe. Its real; it’s surreal.

  The Tomb combined the thriller, the horror novel, the mystery, and even the romance, opening the door for scores of writers to follow.

  F. Paul Wilson didn’t actually intend to write a continuing character. The Tomb stood alone for many years before Paul brought Repairman Jack back with Legacies in 1998. Jack now has many adventures in print. Thank God F. Paul Wilson delivered more. What makes a book truly brilliant after all the analysis? The writer’s voice. And in every story, with every character, Paul’s voice continues to enchant, thrill, chill, and seduce.

  New York Times best-selling author Heather Graham majored in theater arts at the University of South Florida. After several years of performing in dinner theater, providing back-up vocals, and bartending, she stayed home after the birth of her third child and began to write. Since then, she has authored over 150 novels and novellas, including suspense, thriller, historical romance, vampire fiction, time travel, occult, horror, category, and Christmas family fare. She has been translated into twenty-five languages and has over seventy-five million books in print. Her honors include awards from Walden Books, B. Dalton, Georgia Romance Writers, Affaire de Coeur, Romantic Times, the Lifetime Achievement Award from RWA, and the Silver Bullet award from the International Thriller Writers organization. She has been featured in The Nation, Redbook, People, and USA Today, and appeared on many television shows such as Today and Entertainment Tonight. She thanks God for her career and nominally runs the Slush Pile players, a varied group “performing something like entertainment” at various venues to benefit children’s AIDS societies.