The second great influence of the book is its pioneering use of the plot twist to create suspense and tension. When Crusoe has been alone on his island for more than two decades, and indeed grown quite used to, if not happy with, his solitude, he travels down to the beach one day and finds a solitary footprint in the sand. In a single stroke, Defoe tells the reader that everything he knows about this universe, every assumption he has made up to this point, is wrong. Other forms of narrative, particularly stage plays, had previously offered readers surprises and turning points, but Defoe stumbled upon the incredible power of the unexpected twist in a fictional narrative. We are inside this character’s head, and we are with him while he must understand how to process this new revelation. Religious writers operating the popular press had long known that the intimacy of reading had the power to move and persuade. It was Defoe who discovered how to use this intimacy to surprise and thrill.

  Crusoe is a seventeenth-century man, and so he spends perhaps more time than would a modern person in convincing himself that the footprint was probably not left by Satan. This leaves the likelihood that it was cannibals, whom he knows to inhabit a nearby island and occasionally visit a distant portion of his own island to cook and eat their victims. The discovery of the footprint leads to his rescue of one of these would-be cannibal victims, the famous Friday, who becomes his companion for the remainder of his stay on the island and eventually follows Crusoe back to Europe.

  There is much that can be said, and has been said, about the problematic relationship between Crusoe and Friday—not to mention the relationship between Crusoe and the boy Xury, with whom our hero escapes from their Moorish captors in the first part of the novel, and whom Crusoe later sells into slavery. Indeed, Crusoe is shipwrecked on his island after he sets out aboard a ship on a slaving expedition, but while he spends a great deal of time reflecting on how wrong it was for him to leave England against his father’s wishes, he seems to have no regrets about his abysmal treatment of non-Europeans. He is, in short, a man of his time, and a flawed and complex one at that, but one whose adventures helped to shape thriller fiction.

  David Liss’s bestselling books include The Devil’s Company, The Coffee Trader, A Spectacle of Corruption, The Ethical Assassin, The Whiskey Rebels, and A Conspiracy of Paper (winner of the 2000 Edgar Award for Best First Novel). His books have been praised for demonstrating the historical roots that led to contemporary flashpoints of injustice, inequity, and corruption. In 2008, at the United Nations Convention against Corruption in Bali, Indonesia, he was named an Artist for Integrity by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. No one is really sure why or what this means, but it very possibly makes him the Bono of historical fiction. Liss’s novels have been translated into more than two dozen languages. Both A Conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader are under development as film projects. He lives in San Antonio, with his wife and children.

  6.

  Mary Shelley’s

  FRANKENSTEIN, or THE MODERN PROMETHEUS (1818)

  Gary Braver

  Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was born to the first great feminist philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft, and novelist and political journalist, William Godwin. Ten days after Mary’s birth, her mother died. Too poor to raise his children alone, Godwin married Jane Clairmont, whom Mary never liked nor did she like her stepsiblings. Expected to emulate her dead great mother, Mary educated herself throughout a lonely childhood. Exposed to members of Godwin’s intellectual circle, she met Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although still married, the poet eloped with Mary to Switzerland when she was fifteen. In 1816, following the suicide of Shelley’s wife, they married, and in a cottage near Geneva the story of Frankenstein was conceived. The 1818 novel was published anonymously, creating curiosity about the author’s identity. When subsequent editions listed Mary as the author, critics found fault with the novel because its author was female. Nonetheless, from the start, the book was a popular success, but life soon turned cruel with the death of two children, then Shelley’s drowning in 1822. Mary wrote several other books and short stories, but none rose to the greatness of Frankenstein.

  Frankenstein is one of the most recognized names in English fiction. A name that conjures up iconic images of the flat-headed Boris Karloff monster in ill-fitting clothes and neck electrodes being chased through fields by villagers with pitchforks. A name synonymous with well-intentioned projects going horribly wrong. Clipped to prefix, it is a metaphor of horrific potentials—e.g.,Frankenfood or Frankencat.

  Frankenstein is also the title of an English novel that has been in print since 1818. Yet, although most people are familiar with some of the story’s elements through the hundred or so movies,Frankenstein is a book that few people have read. One reason is that Hollywood has unfortunately made people think that they know the novel’s plot, leaving them ignorant about its remarkable insights into human nature, moral responsibility, compassion, justice, and suffering. These insights are especially applicable to the monster, a sentient creature created artificially and forever an outsider to nature and human society, a creature who, in spite of Hollywood, has no name—which is Shelley’s point—but who is referred to as monster, as well as demon, vile insect, phantasm, abhorred form, etc. by his own creator, Victor Frankenstein.

  There are many reasons why Frankenstein is a must-read if for nothing else than appreciation of the brilliant vision of the nineteen-year-old girl who penned the tale. Unlike other gothic narratives of Mary Shelley’s day, Frankenstein is not a linear narrative but contains, like Chinese boxes, stories within stories told through multiple points of view via diaries, letters, and reported conversations. Together they are organically linked and thematically bound into a coherent artistic whole, which like any thriller, keeps the reader turning the pages as the dread mounts.

  The most important storyline is that of Victor Frankenstein, the son of a wealthy Swiss family. From an early age, he hungers for knowledge, but not ordinary classroom knowledge. He yearns to “chase nature to her hiding place.” Just before he departs for his studies, untimely death claims his mother. Victor cannot bring her back, but at the University of Ingolstadt, he hopes to conquer death. Rejecting the warnings of his professor, he applies modern scientific methods to the lofty dreams of ancient al-chemists. After two years of self-imposed isolation in his lab, disregarding communiqués from his father, his betrothed Elizabeth, and best friend Henry Clerval, Victor discovers the secret of life and animates a lifeless corpse assembled from charnel-house body parts. On a stormy November night the creature comes alive, but Victor is horrified by the enormity of his creation and flees.

  For the rest of the book, Frankenstein suffers the consequences of his creation and the dereliction of his responsibility to the monster and those he loves. When the creature begs Victor to befriend him, Victor refuses. When the creature pleas for a female companion, he is denied. Though ugly, the creature is pure in heart and spends two years in the woods, secretly doing chores for a family of cottagers, all the while learning language and admiring their humanity and loving bonds. But when in desperation the monster attempts to befriend the blind patriarch, he is discovered and driven with sticks from the home.

  Like Adam banished to the wilderness, the monster is enraged at his existence and decides that he too “can create desolation” and strikes back at his creator, not to murder Frankenstein but to deprive him of all that he has been denied—family, justice, friendship, and love. He kills Victor’s young brother, William, frames cousin Justine for the crime, murders Clerval, then strangles Elizabeth on her wedding night. Once his revenge is complete, the creature flees to the North Pole where Frankenstein pursues him, dying in the process, while the monster disappears in the frozen gloom, taking his own life.

  Beautifully written, the tragic tale explores such universal themes as the need for friendship and love. On a psychological level, Victor’s fate explores the themes of dehumanization and desexualization. Cutting himself off from friends and lover, Victor nearly wastes away in his obsession; and his rejection of Elizabeth in order to create life artificially underscores the desexualization of himself and his fiancée. Likewise, he denies the creature his humanity and a mate. A dark logic plays out when the creature kills Elizabeth moments before she and Victor can consummate their marriage.

  Also, the novel explores the difference between knowledge and wisdom. With conscious parallels to Genesis, Victor Frankenstein is both Adam picking the forbidden fruit and God who creates life, then abandons the creature to fend for itself. This hubris, the reckless pursuit of glory and forbidden knowledge, is the cautionary theme of the novel.

  Frankenstein has a unique claim in the history of literature as the progenitor of modern science fiction, demonstrating that thrillers can be found in many genres. Written early in the modern scientific age and on the threshold of the Industrial Revolution, the novel is the forerunner of every cautionary tale about science without foresight or ethics, knowledge without wisdom, the abuse of power, the dereliction of responsibility, and the dehumanization and desexualization that results in our slavish dependence upon technology. Likewise, Frankenstein’s monster is the prototype of every sci-? machine, robot, and computer in revolt.

  Frankenstein is a manifesto of the dilemmas of living in our scientific age—dilemmas expressed in today’s anxieties over genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and other innovations. In essence, the book says that because we can make something, it doesn’t mean we should.

  Gary Braver is the best-selling author of seven critically acclaimed thrillers including Elixir, Gray Matter, and Flashback, the only thriller to have won the prestigious Massachusetts Book Award. His Skin Deep has been called “a gripping, twisty thriller that deserves a wide audience” (Booklist). His novels have been translated into five languages, and three have been optioned for movies. He is the only writer to have three books listed on the top-10 highest customer-rated thrillers on Amazon.com at the same time. As Gary Goshgarian, he is an award-winning English professor at Northeastern University where he teaches science fiction, modern bestsellers, horror fiction, and fiction writing. He has taught fiction-writing workshops throughout the U.S. and Europe for over twenty years. He is the author of five college writing textbooks and has written book reviews and travel articles in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere.

  7

  James Fenimore Cooper’s

  THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1826)

  Rick Wilber

  James Fenimore Cooper was born in 1789 in Burlington, New Jersey, and died in 1851 in Cooperstown, a village founded by his father on the shore of Lake Otsego in upstate New York. One of the earliest American novelists, Cooper is best remembered for his pioneer Leatherstocking Tales and for his sea adventures, though in the course of writing thirty-two novels and several naval histories, he ranged widely in theme. He is said to be the “American Scott,” since much of his work followed the example of Sir Walter Scott’s successful invention of the historical novel.

  James Fenimore Cooper wasn’t interested in inventing a new kind of book when he sat down to write his first novel sometime in late 1819; he just wanted to prove that he could write a better book than the one he was reading, a new novel from England (as almost all of them were at the time).

  And so he did. By 1820, Cooper’s tale,Precaution, was published, and the novel did well enough that he decided to write another,The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), which was set in America during the Revolution. This was a daring literary gamble during a time when most American readers still wanted to read English novels by English writers about events happening in England.

  More success followed as Cooper continued to write other novels set in America, and then, in 1826, came the book for which he is best remembered, the terrific thriller The Last of the Mohicans.

  That’s right—Mohicans is a thriller, the seminal story that began the thriller genre in America. It is also the generally accepted best novel by an author who is important for a number of reasons, including being among the first American novelists, and one of the first to write about American themes using distinctly American characters going through their paces in a distinctly American setting.

  The hero in The Last of the Mohicans is the taciturn frontier scout and woodsman Natty Bumppo; a man utterly at home in the primeval forest of pioneer America, a man unafraid to do what needs to be done to rescue women—or men—in peril, whether it’s being a crack shot, masquerading as a bear, tracking footprints through a streambed, outtalking a venerable and thoughtful tribal chief, or earning the respect and admiration of good-hearted but bumbling British officers. Natty is a man of action, utterly confident and superbly capable, willing and able to use violence when he must, but otherwise soft spoken and serene, a man of quiet strength. He is the first great fictional hero in American literature and sets a pattern for many of today’s thriller heroes.

  Natty has many names. Cooper calls him variously Deerslayer, Hawk-eye, Long-Rifle (or, in French,Le Longue Carabine), Leatherstocking, and Pathfinder. These names serve as useful descriptions of Natty’s competence as a hunter, his aim with a rifle, his attire, and his ability as a tracker. Having created this seminal adventurer in his third novel The Pioneers (1823), Cooper decided to put him into action in four more novels, The Deerslayer (1841),The Last of the Mohicans (1826),The Pathfinder (1840), and The Prairie (1827).

  Read in this sequence and not in order of publication, the five novels give us Natty as he grows from an earnest young man to a grizzled veteran of several wars and any number of conflicts with various villains from the 1740s to 1804. But of all the Leatherstocking Tales (as the novels are known collectively), the most enduring has been The Last of the Mohicans, a story so engaging that it’s been made into several effective films, including the 1993 Michael Mann directed version starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Natty and Madeline Stowe as Cora, the woman-in-peril.

  The story follows several main characters during the French and Indian War in 1757, when the French and the British fought for control of North America using various native tribes as allies. (Note that Cooper wasn’t only a thriller author but also a historical one inasmuch as the events in his books occurred years earlier than when he wrote about them.) The British lieutenant colonel George Munro, who has his two adult daughters with him, is defending Fort William Henry from a massive French attack. When British reinforcements don’t arrive, Munro is forced to surrender. But the honorable surrender turns into a massacre when French-allied Indians attack the unarmed British column as it leaves the fort. Nearly two hundred are killed. (The extensively described massacre is based on historical accounts.)

  In Cooper’s version of the event, Munro escapes, but his daughters are captured, and the heart of the novel dramatizes the pursuit of the villainous Huron chief, Magua, who has the women. The pursuit is led by Natty, along with Munro, the earnest and brave British army major Duncan Heward, a slightly dotty (if ultimately courageous) preacher named David Gamut, and Natty’s two Mohican friends, Uncas and his father, Chingachgook. Natty and his friends risk their lives repeatedly in order to save the two women. In the action-filled climax, the heroic Uncas dies while rescuing the women, leaving his father, Chingachgook, as the eponymous last of the Mohicans, another stage in the closing of the frontier, one of Cooper’s main themes.

  The epic scope of this chase novel cements Cooper’s and Natty’s positions as the first great thriller author and hero in the American literary canon. Cooper’s storytelling skills weren’t always matched by stylistic ones, however, with the result that critical opinion has waxed and waned about him. In one famous and wonderfully amusing assessment, Mark Twain took Cooper to task for his failings in any number of areas in his essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences.”

  But then there’s an equally famous essay from Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Van Doren in which he writes that Cooper’s imagination “is almost supreme among romancers, and (it) lifts him solidly above all his faults . . . (There is) an intensity (to his writing), by virtue of which he so completely realized imagined, and often imaginary, events.”

  Today, Cooper is read mostly by students and teachers. His language sounds a little stiff to our ears (as it did to Twain). Also, his descriptive writing sometimes seems a little overwrought. His plotting occasionally relies on the unlikely to fool the bad guys and help the good guys succeed. But the situations and characters found in The Last of the Mohicans are completely recognizable to modern-day thriller readers. Replace birch bark canoes with motorcycles and high-performance European automobiles, and the chase scenes are exquisitely familiar. Replace the tomahawk, bow and arrow, and the muskets with sniper rifles, Uzis, and Glocks, and the plot could have been conjured up by any of today’s most successful thriller authors.

  That’s the point: James Fenimore Cooper created an exciting, page-turning, character-driven, audience-pleasing, action-packed kind of writing that found a large audience in the nineteenth century and influenced directly or indirectly countless later thriller writers. Natty and his friends are still a ton of fun to encounter. Go rent the excellent 1993 movie. Better yet, pick up the novel. It’s a must-read for anyone who enjoys thrillers.

  Rick Wilber first encountered Cooper and Natty Bumppo during study hall in high school and nearly flunked algebra as a result of too much Deerslayer and not enough studying. Rick is the author of the thrillers Rum Point and The Cold Road; a memoir about his family’s life in professional baseball and the challenges of care-giving,My Father’s Game: Life, Death, Baseball; two short story collections and more than fifty short stories and an equal number of poems published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. He has also published several hundred magazine and newspaper travel articles, essays, profiles, and reviews, and is the author of several college textbooks on writing and media studies. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, and teaches journalism and mass media at the University of South Florida.