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056: Modern Suspense Thrillers

I've been carpooling these last few weeks, the old-school method of getting to work, and haven't been able to get any writing done on the laptop. Instead I've been catching up on my summer reading. I just finished James Rollins' Ice Hunt, which will never be characterized as anything but pure, bloody fun. He follows an outline similar enough to the one that Matthew Reilly has been employing to loud and explosive success, and, in fact, I'm willing to bet there is actually a codified outline they are both using. It goes a little something like this:

A) Main hero is an outsider in the sense that he is not directly involved in the central conflict of the book, but through either bad timing or innocent coincidence, he is thrust into the action. He is, invariably, military trained in some fashion, though most likely he has done his time and left the fields and alleys of carnage behind. You know, woke up one morning and decided that he had just had enough of killing. That sort of thing. Most importantly, he is the only one the reader can trust because gosh-darn-it he has rescued himself and become pure again.

B) The military has been doing things they shouldn't be. There will be some nefarious military covert operation which has been running beneath our noses for a long time that is horrific in nature, but still justifiable from a completely military viewpoint. Like the Nazi experiments in genetic modifications during WWII. They were, you know, just trying to build better soldiers in order to keep us all safe from the enemy. The Horrific Military Secret will have suffered some inexplicable catastrophe that requires external intervention, usually in the form of a black ops team or two.

C) Our military isn't the only one who knows about the HMS. In fact, as Reilly uses to entertaining effect in Ice Station, it is better if more than one government is sending their own black ops team.

D) The entire world is threatened by the possibility of the release of whatever nefarious agent the HMS is all about. In fact, protecting the HMS by destroying Life As We Know It is within keeping of the "more is better" approach to the modern thriller.

E) One of the side effects of the research of the HMS is the discovery/creation of some evolutionary offshoot which is, by far, the most dangerous creature that ever hunted mankind. This creature is a cross between a shark with frickin' laser beams attached to its head and a Black Company-esque forvalaka. These creatures don't seem to care much about military or national factions and just kill everyone. Which leads to:

F) Unexpected allies. Our hero is forced to band with either/both/neither of the conflicting military factions throughout the book because of the First Rule of Modern Suspense Thrillers: everyone has their own agenda. And the Firt Rule's Corollary: nothing is as it seems. "Good" and "Bad" become useful delineators of character; you are better off served by classifying participants as either "Useful" or "Aggressors." And use a pencil when you're making notes because classifications will swap places at least twice during the course of the adventure.

G) And, naturally, the Second Rule of Modern Suspense Thrillers is always in play: the situation gets worse. Usually exponentially.

God help me, I love these. The more over the top, the better. Reilly, in Temple, locks his hero in an Abrams A-1 Battletank with a nuclear device (on countdown) and pushes the whole thing out of a cargo plane at 30,000 feet. It just doesn't get any better than that.

Posted by Teppo at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) July 20, 2003

055: Old World Order

I was doing some research on Operation Paperclip and what happened to the Nazi hierarchy following WWII and keep stumbling upon outlandish possibilities that make what I have in mind for THE BOOK OF LIES seem all too possible. Isn't that the old saw? Truth is stranger than fiction. I get a little worried occassionally that I might not be paranoid enough.

This is only tangentially related to things, but worth reading if you wonder who THEY might be. Jeffrey Sharlet wrote an expose on "the Family" entitled "Jesus Plus Nothing" for Harper's Magazine that has been posted online in its entirety. Stick with it, especially for page 7. Tell me you aren't frightened.

Back to fiction where it is probably safer. Now G., before he got tapped on the head and shuffled off to the sanitarium, came to America following WWII where he, as a young French lad, spent some time in the Resistance. As the spiritual arm of the US armed forces swept through Europe in their attempt to retrieve and preserve some of the more important artifacts of the occult history of Europe, G. and other "perceptive" lads were recruited to assist in the recovery and cataloguing effort. Now, let's be tunnel-visioned bureacrats for a moment. Why do all this cataloguing and ordering when you know someone has done it already? And if you're going to use their notes, why not absorb the very guys who made those notes in the first place? Yeah, if Operation Paperclip could absorb Nazi scientists into the Cold War effort and the "Family" could discover, as founder Abraham Vereide noted in a letter to his wife in the late 1940's, that members of the Nazi Party could be just as useful with their unswerving devotion to the new Kingdom of Christ as they had been with their adoration of their previous figurehead, then finding new homes for the occult wizards of the Third Reich isn't too much of a stretch.

G.'s problem -- which will soon be Jack's problem -- is that this is supposed to be a secret.

Posted by Teppo at 11:20 PM | Comments (0) July 16, 2003

054: Ghost Noise

Strangely enough, I've been thinking recently about electromagnetic phenomena and mobile technology (specifically an article from the Fortean Times which I can't find now and which our very own Alasdair Stuart seems to have read as well (see his "After The Tone" story in the X Minute Theater section of WORD). The basic gist of these two items was that ghosts exist in specific wavelength spectrums and that all of our carving up of these bands for mobile and wireless technology has led to a certain amount of interference and, in some ways, death for ghosts. You see, they can't survive with all the noise we're making.

Here's the strange bit. I upgraded my network at home to wireless. Went 802.11g because that's what all the cool kids are talking about on the schoolyard, and the installation went smoothly enough once I got the terminology all figured out. Everything worked fine. For a while. Now, three nights running, my wireless signal craps out between 9:00pm and midnight. Any other time, it works just fine, but during those three hours, it is like a large void has descended upon my house and the ether just doesn't want to vibrate for my signal.

I'm lying in bed last night, my brain still working over the details and possibilities as to why this might be happening, and I remember these thoughts about ghosts noises on the electromagnetic spectrums on which we are encroaching. There may not be any technological answer to my problem. For three hours every night, the ghosts are howling in my neighborhood. I'm lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what sort of Tobe Hooper style Poltergeist event has occurred to leave such a psychic scar on my street. And then I start to wonder what sort of sacrifice is going to have to be made in order to silence the noise.

It might just be easier to put the long Cat-5 cable back and hard-wire the network again. We always say there is a certain amount of Voodoo involved in IT work; there might just be too much required this time around.

Posted by Teppo at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) July 11, 2003

053: The Five Faces of Jack Maratre

Full disclosure time. I've been having a little trouble with Jack. Not like he's been a rebellious sixteen-year old who's just gotten his learning permit and wants to borrow the car all the time sort of trouble. More of the "who the fuck am I?" sort of trouble. Which isn't the sort of distress I was looking for in a main character. I haven't been making the best sort of progress on paper because I've not be able to get a handle on who Jack is.

I've got a number of folders on my hard drive which contain aborted novels, malformed tales which have been taken off life support and shoved into the back of the metal drawers in the morgue in the hope that no one will ever see the distorted bodies. The commonality in all of them is a sad sack main character -- a fellow who has melancholy and intestinal distress as defining traits -- and, frankly, after writing him for several chapters I'm sick of him.

So, trying to learn from my mistakes here. Too much noir as a child, too much emo-rock / mope-core as a teenager: it doesn't make for a good base from which to draw characters. Christ, it's a good thing I never liked Morrissey's voice otherwise I'd be trapped in a cycle of reoccurring Cthulhu heroes who have an affected fascination towards playing Russian roulette with rusty 19th century six-shooters.

Georges -- who has been reduced to just "G." at this point -- is the fun character. Let's be up-front about that. G. is an aged nonogenarian who survived the Resistance in WWII and came to America knowing something that he shouldn't. Thirty years in an asylum has left him with some answers and an exceptionally heightened sense of paranoia and just how invasive the threads of the Cabinet Noir are in modern society. He's got one mission in life: stick it to the shadow elite before his ticker gives out. Yeah, G. is a fun character. He's also about a hundred and three and, well, I'm just not that keen on a geriatric action hero. It would be like Die Hard XII starring Hume Cronyn or Richard Farnsworth. (Both of whom have already shuffled off to the next iteration and, fortunately, will never have to suffer the iindignityof getting a phone call from their agent concerning such a project. There's still time for Bob Hope, though, he can get himself hooked up to a mobile IV drip and "Yippee Ki-Yeah Mother Fuckers" us from terrorism and high-tech, international thievery.)

I needed a younger protagonist. One who could hold his own against gun-toting grandpa. Someone other than James Van Der Beek perpetually pouting over how the Emmy judges have, once again, overlooked the depth of his soul-searching and tormented angst on Dawson's Creek. Because -- first lesson for the writer -- if you aren't having any fun writing it, you can be sure the audience will hear that same sucking sound when they read it.

For the last eternity, I've been making up homunculi in my lab and turning them loose in slightly uncontrolled environments. For your entertainment, here are my lab notes from these experiments:

1. Jack Maratre, the troubled outsider. First generation Jackie Boy is the one running around the movie trailer posted back in the beginning and who survived the 50,000 word march of last year. He held together fairly well and there are some qualities of him which I will probably recycle and use again. However, his environment was glacial. 50K worth of words and I was barely getting to the fun stuff. I wasn't exactly hooking the readers in and, while a certain amount of that still has some use, it isn't material anyone really needs to see. I needed to truncate the mess and get to the meat of things more quickly. The trouble there was that the back story Jackie Boy was lugging around was too laborious (and ultimately too coincidental) to work. I shaved that hump off him and he collapsed. The body is still good; there just isn't enough soul to keep the spine stiff.

2. Jack Maratre, the action hero. I've got five chapters of this one, including a fairly solid house raid opening. There's even a chapter where Felix has a run in with the border patrol at the Canadian border. This was all written during the opening days of the Iraq conflict and was colored by my reactions to the emergent iimperialist dictatorship of the Shrub and his Inner Circle of Nazi Toadies. I had an idea about a world colored badly by all this and this vision was influencing the direction of the character and draft. In fact, the narrator of Entry 31 is Jack, thirty years after the events of the BOOK OF LIES.

Was it Chekhov who said that if you use a gun in the third act, it had better be on the mantelpiece during the first act? If the BOOK OF LIES works, then there are eight other books to be done before I come back to Jack. And the world may have turned the way he sees it in that discussion by then. Or not, but it can't hurt to lay groundwork just in case I need to come back to it.

But, in the present, Jack as an action hero was the wrong sort of character to be drawn into this book. Too many of the other characters -- G., his incessant desire to get his hands on a gun notwithstanding, and the members of the modern Lunar Society -- were non-combatants in the traditional sense. This turns Jack into muscle. Which makes him secondary.

I liked the house raid opener. I may mark that up and throw out a link to those two chapters. It won't be used, but it might still have some entertainment value.

3. Jack Maratre, the disgraced cop. Pulling the action closer to the front, I've got G. coming out his comatose state and making some noise as he leaves the Belmont Psychiatric Institute. There's information to be had at the Institute (as well as some threads which will lead back to the Cabinet Noir) and, with the fierce blackout of information which happens following the arrival of the Feds, I needed someone who could still have access. A Homicide Detective seemed handy. Until I got to the part where the action moved to another state and I ran into the slight problem of just how a police officer would take himself to another town to pursue a case on which he wasn't currently assigned. A number of other procedural issues raised their heads and it felt like I was trying to jam an entire pig into a three-inch section of sausage casing. No amount of grinder action was going to make all that pork fit.

4. Jack Maratre, cub reporter. More mobility with less responsibility. He could leave town easily, but he won't have any access to the Institute. Too outside with no way in and, with his credentials, he would probably be politely asked to crawl up his own ass and die. No help there.

5. Jack Maratre, listener. Which brings us to Stuttering Jack, Junior Marconi. A number of other aspects of the back story (Jack's family history) suddenly become useful again and I feel like I've found a key to the door which has been previously locked. There are some coincidences to write past, but the climax of Seven is nothing but a tower of coincidences so I figure if it gets flashy enough, no one will care. Or, they'll work themselves out. They usually do.

There you go. I've been looking for a main character who has some meat to him and I think I've finally got him nailed down. Progress.

Posted by Teppo at 07:27 AM | Comments (0) July 08, 2003

052: Marconi's Radio

In 1894, Guglielmo Marconi reads an obituary of Heinrich Hertz and sees something which opens a door in his head. Prior to this event, the budding scientist had been drifting along, dabbling in the sciences, but afterward, he is fired by the idea of wireless transmissions. Two years later he's in London, filing a patent for his method of transmitting signal, and, in 1898, he's demonstrating the device to the aged Queen Victoria, allowing her to talk with her ailing brother at their Isle of Wight estate.

Four years later, he's crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard the steamer, the SS Philadelphia, with a Marconi wireless device in his cabin. He had managed to send and receive a signal across the ocean the previous year, but there were still skeptics. During the boat ride across the ocean, Marconi remained in constant contact with his wireless transmitter in England, maintaining a consistent signal for nearly 2100 miles. The skeptics can't avoid the truth: Guglielmo Marconi knows how to send and to receive invisible signals.

The world just became a smaller place.

Marconi is also a shrewd businessman and over the next two decades, he forms a number of companies that are still with us today. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America eventually becomes the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and when wireless broadcasts become ubiquitous in England, he and a number of his competitors form the British Broadcast Company (the BBC). Marconi understands the importance of keeping knowledge secret and, during the early years of the integration of wireless into the framework of communication, he keeps a strong grip on the spread of the secrets of the wireless. Ships which are outfitted with Marconi devices come with a Marconi operator as well -- these people are the only ones allowed to operate the machinery. They are the only ones who can send and receive the invisible signals.

Now, a century or so later, we've got invisible signals everywhere. The Hertzian spectrum has been carved up like a roast pig. The ether is thick with noise. If you are even listening, how can you know what is worth hearing?

The BOOK OF LIES is becoming populated with listeners. There's Felix Shiers who has always had the sobriquet of "Casper" attached to him. There's crazy, paranoid, reefer-smoking dude. There's Liz Kimbrel, distant siren voice calling out to them through the radio. There's Daniel Caretti, bitter and twisted and looking for a reason for his father's death.

And now there's Jack Maratre. Felix's nickname may not be one that he picked out for himself which meant I needed one that he could use on Jack when the need arose. Something quicker off the tongue than "Jack." Something like "JM." Which has a wonderful two-fold echo. Most think it is a shortened version of Jack's full name, but Felix is thinking "Junior Marconi" when he says it.

Posted by Teppo at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)