Thrillers

John Fraser

Description

After years of intellectual nourishment from thrillers, along with the delights of suspense, Fraser explores the thought-processes of representative thriller characters coping with high-tension situations that require intelligent problem-solving and bring their values into a sharper focus.

With alert empathy, he follows Jack Carter as he hunts down his brother's killers in Ted Lewis's masterpiece Jack's Return Home ("a kind of dark English Gatsby") ; suffers along with violence-averse Rae Ingram coping alone on a small yacht with a dangerous paranoid in Dead Calm ("a philosophical thriller") by that fine Gold Medal novelist Charles Williams; and gives a lot of attention to Donald Hamilton's young professional men entangled with enigmatic young women in pre-Helm works like The Steel Mirror (1948) where he was learning his craft.

In a fourth chapter, he hacks at the wall between "art" and "entertainment" and loose talk about the "world" of the thriller. Lastly, he reminiscences about a fascinating safari that he made into the sex-'n-violence "Mushroom Jungle" (British pulp fiction ca.1946-54), and offers conclusions about violence and peace.

He avoids jargon, combines an aficionado's enthusiasm with a scholar's accuracy, quotes generously to convey the texture of a work, provides background information for readers new to the topic, and illuminates "craft" aspects of fiction in general. His emphasis throughout is positive.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 29 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781456622121
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright 2014 John Fraser
All rights reserved
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2212-1
Except for quotations in discussions of it, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author or his estate.
The material here has largely come from http://www.jottings.ca/john/voices/index.html , where it was posted in 2002.
Cover design: John Fraser and Barbara Bickle.
The falcon's head comes from the Web, where it is out of copyright.
This book is without the customary scholarly apparatus. If anyone needs information about quotations or allusions, please address enquiries to [e-mail] .
Thrillers is for Benoit Tadié and Raymond J. Peters.
Contents
Introduction
The Best Thriller
A Philosophical Thriller
Writer at Work
A Bit of Theory
Lagniappe and Leftovers
Coda
Appendix
About the Author
Introduction
I
In a well-known passage in Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer (1961), the narrator explains how for him the really memorable poetic moments in his life have been things like John Wayne killing the three badmen with his carbine during the showdown in Stagecoach or the kitten (cat, actually) rubbing up against Orson Welles’ feet in The Third Man as he watches from the shadows. I know what he was talking about.
I also know what Richard Usborne was talking about in his entertaining Clubland Heroes (1953), when he recalls feeling like one of those Rolls-driving Dornford Yates characters entre-les-deux-guerres when in 1950 he headed south in France, with family and sleeping bags, in a Ford 8.
I myself once caused my wife, the artist Carol Hoorn Fraser, some bemused merriment by dragging her around Chicago in the August heat to find locations in the thrillers of Jonathan Latimer. Later, though, she herself had a large map of Australia up on a wall on which she could see the various locales in Arthur Upfield’s Bony books, which she read and reread and was expert in. Sje also loved Modesty Blaise and Willy.
And Provence for me is still partly the Provence of John Welcome’s Stop at Nothing (1959), with its Fifties Bentley, and pastis , and shimmering heat, and dramatic hither-and-yonnings, along with the actual Provence where in the mid-Sixties we spent a couple of summers in the hill village of Seillons-Source-d’Argens and I found an orange Penguin of the book in squeaky-clean Aix.
Years later, on a stretch of two-lane Mexican road with drop-offs on either side, I came a lot closer than I cared for to replicating, in a loaded-down Rabbit slowly overtaking a exhaust-belching bus, a memorably thrilling bit of driving by Welcome’s Simon Herald.
II
Like Usborne, I began reading thrillers early. ‘Sapper’s’ best Bulldog Drummond book, The Black Gang (1922) , on our family shelves, was the first, and I was nine at the time (this was North London in 1937), and it was the first grown-up book that I read. After which, goodbye to boys’ books, and sword-wagging costume dramas by Stanley Weyman and the like. From then on until I was sixteen and started becoming an intellectual of sorts, my favourites too were Buchan, ‘Sapper,’ and Dornford Yates, though I also gobbled up anything by Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charteris, Bruce Graeme, Francis Beeding, and others that came my way.
I returned to thrillers in the early Fifties when I arrived in New York to go, briefly, to Columbia. And after a while, for many years, hardly a day went by when I didn’t read one. Doing a doctorate at the University of Minnesota was wonderful in that regard. Around the corner from our Dinkytown apartment in Minneapolis was a used bookstore with heaps of paperbacks, and down on Hennepin, near the train depot, was a deep narrow store with row upon row of them. The University library, bless it, had a section of crime and espionage novels in its Tudoresque reading room.
III
In The Allegory of Love (1936), C.S.Lewis reports that perfect happiness for him would consist of sitting in a window seat with a view of the sea and reading Italian romance epics eight hours a day.
I despised the statement when I came upon it as an undergraduate. But I’ve sometimes thought that for me it would be a pretty good happiness to sit in that tiny Seillons front garden after a day’s writing, with a pastis at hand and an inexhaustible supply of good new thrillers by the likes of Geoffrey Household, Peter O’Donnell, Martin Woodhouse, Jonathan Latimer, Simon Harvester, Richard Stark, Ross Thomas, Adam Hall, and more recent comers like Barry Eisler, Lee Child, and Don Winslow, along with all the ones that have escaped my notice.
And it wouldn’t be “mindless” escape.
IV
Thrillers sustained me while I was engaged in some reasonably strenuous intellectual activities—getting a Ph.D. in English with an unthrillerish dissertation on “George Sturt (‘George Bourne’) and Rural Labouring Life”; accumulating forty-plus rejections from professional journals (“There have been too many articles on Wuthering Height s”); and doing three books for Cambridge University Press.
The well-received Violence in the Arts (1973), originally a long article drafted in the friendly air of Seillons, had come easily. America and the Patterns of Chivalry (1982), which I’d conceived of as a quickie follow-up with lots of clever generalizations, bogged me down in week-in, week-out slogging for seven years. I had, it emerged, some catch-up to do. When I started I thought of Stonewell Jackson as a laughing cavalier like Robert E. Lee.
At least, though, when we were driving down to Mexico in 1969 and reached Vicksburg, we made the circuit of the fortifications, and saw in the imagination the dead and wounded piling up on the slope in front of that gap in the ramparts (a gun-port?) that the Union besiegers were never able to force their way through. And ten years later, clutching the railings in an attack of vertigo, I climbed the metal lookout tower at Gettysburg and saw for myself the gentle, deadly upward slope of Cemetery Hill.
The thrillers that I particularly enjoyed weren’t just Action. They were discourse, they were individuals engaged in ongoing problem-solving, with attendant risks. They were modes of intellectual being. While relaxing with them, I was more focused and there than during the realworld muddles of the professionl day.
Wittgenstein relaxed with Black Mask , and despised the Dorothy L. Sayers kind of “classic puzzler.”
V
Some “real” novels have mattered greatly to me, among them, in no particular order, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Adolphe, Howards End, Death on the Installment Plan, Good Morning Midnight, Great Expectations, Ulysses, The Death Ship, The Rainbow, The Red Badge of Courage Story of O, Wuthering Heights, Women in Love, Nostromo, To the Lighthouse.
And apart from unsuccessful attempts to interest a BritLit class in The Ipcress File and Orient Express I taught more or less standard works, including, with freshmen, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.
But there’s been enough realworld substance in thrillers for me not to have needed to go for my private reading to the salmon-rush of more or less realist contemporary fiction—enough love, courage, violence, predation, ingenuity, wickedness, group dynamics, organizational in-fighting, interesting foreign parts, best booze, etc.
In the first three chapters that follow, roughed out on the shores of Lake Chapala in 1990, and revised later for my website, I talk about works that in their different ways essentialize for me some of the strengths in thrillers, including the application of truth-seeking intelligence.
They’re followed by polemics about the supposed gap between “real” novels and “mere” entertainments, plus a final medley of bits and pieces. The one called “Styles” is pretty funny.
VI
“The Best Thriller” concerns a novel that’s like rice when you’ve got the amount of water just right and it’s all been absorbed into the grains, and you’ve fluffed it out, and the dish or saucepan is beautifully dry. This is total intense thriller action, without any left-over authorial reflections about life and values, and yet rich in problematic values and doings. And the author, Ted Lewis, is brilliant in his plotting, and flawless in its execution, down to the smallest details of phrasing. The book affects me like a kind of dark English Gatsby.
Is it really-and-truly The Best? Have I read everything? Of course not. But I can’t conceive of any other thriller’s being better.
Jack’s Return Home (1970), an uninviting title that didn’t acquire an aura the way The Last House on the Left did among horror movies, and which was replaced in paperback with Carter and Get Carter , is an intensifier like Singin’ in the Rain , going on from DangerTown novels like Red Harvest (1929), Solomon’s Vineyard (1941), and Blue City 1947), and ebulliently opening up new possibilities for others.
A classic. A masterpiece. And its author died, ravaged by alcohol and self-contempt, at forty-two.
VII
In “A Philosophical Thriller,” we have just that—an existential situation in which, with no possibility of help, a violence-averse mature woman, alone on a small yacht out on the Pacific with a madman, must think and act her way out of looming disaster and save not only herself but her husband, powerless aboard a sinking boat way below the horizon. And a number of thriller conventions about good guys and bad guys and the use of violence are brought into question, and complexities uncovered.
Charles Williams had obviously been affected by his experiences of French intellection during his script-writing stint in France. And he’d written noirs himself, like The Big Bite (1956). But there’s nothing noir or doomish about the existentialism of Dead Calm .
“Closed” situations go back at least to Wuthering Heights