Authors: Otto Penzler
His physical presence is another offshoot of conclusion number two—don’t do what the others are doing. For a long time what the others had been doing was making their protagonists more and more flawed and vulnerable. Way back, it had been a welcome development to move away from the uniformly lantern-jawed he-men that had crowded the genre. Heroes became smaller, realistically afraid, physically unexceptional.
On the emotional side, they became battered. They were alcoholics, recovering alcoholics, divorced recovering alcoholics, divorced recovering alcoholics living in cabins in the woods and traumatized by professional mistakes. Literal and metaphorical bullets were lodged near hearts. There was an overwhelming feeling of incipient failure and melancholy.
As with all trends, this one was started by inspired pioneers and then overdone by imitators. By the time I started writing, I was tired of it. I wanted to start over with an old-fashioned hero who had no problems and no issues, and didn’t go in for navel gazing. His physical competence is really an expression of his mental competence too. He’s a fully functioning person.
And I thought it would be interesting to reverse the paradigm in terms of physical vulnerability. Usually, a book’s hero comes up against people he needs to be afraid of.
What if, I asked myself, the hero is the toughest SOB in the valley, and others need to be afraid of him? In my fourth book, Running Blind, an FBI agent called Blake threatens to leak Reacher’s name to a violent psychopath called Petrosian.
Blake thinks it’s an effective motivator—and in real life and most books it would be. But Reacher just says: “Look at me, Blake. Get real. There’s maybe ten people on the planet I need to be scared of. Extremely unlikely this guy Petrosian happens to be one of them.”
I was trying to discover whether drama was possible without the usual David-versus-Goliath structure. I wondered, would Goliath-versus-Goliath work?
I have a fan and a friend who works in the gaudy world of pro wrestling—worked, actually, because he’s retired now. You’ll be shocked (shocked!) to hear that their bouts are heavily scripted and rehearsed, even to the extent of having story conferences. My friend’s major concern is that the wrestling paradigm always has the designated good guy lose, and lose, and lose, before winning in the final round. It was hard for him to come to terms with the absence of a battered underdog. But I always wanted Reacher to be the overdog.
Because I was following my instincts. Remember, “Dickens wanted what the audience wanted.” I was the audience. I wanted the kind of vicarious satisfaction that comes from seeing bad guys getting their heads handed to them by a wrong-righter even bigger and harder than them. I thought, Isn’t that what fiction is for? Because the existence of fiction is a curious thing.
Language evolved way back when leisure was simply unheard of. Language was all about survival and cooperation and the dissemination of facts in pursuit of literally life-and-death issues. For most of our existence language has been for telling the truth. Then fiction started up, and we started burning brain cells on stories about things that didn’t happen to people who didn’t exist. Why? The only answer can be that humans deeply, deeply desired it. They needed the consolation. Real life is rarely satisfactory.
The transaction is clearly apparent in romantic fiction. In real life, you sit on the subway and you see a beautiful girl. Truth is, you aren’t going to dinner with her, you aren’t taking her home, you aren’t going to live happily ever after. In fact, you aren’t even going to talk to her. But in a novel, all that good stuff happens. It’s a way to live vicariously.
Same for crime fiction. In real life, your house gets burgled or your car gets ripped off, they aren’t going to find the bad guys, and you aren’t going to get your stuff back. Someone bullies or disrespects you at work or in school or in a relationship, there isn’t much you can do about it. But something can be done about it in a book, and people enjoy watching it happen. They love it. It’s closure, albeit also vicarious.
So I wanted Reacher to do what we all want to do ourselves—stand strong and unafraid, never back off, never back down, come up with the smart replies. I thought of all the situations that we—timid, uncertain, scared, worried, humiliated—find ourselves in and imagined a kind of therapeutic consolation in seeing our wildest dreams acted out on the page.
So Reacher always wins.
Which is theoretically a problem. He’s a plain, uncomplicated man who breezes through life without evident trouble. Shouldn’t he be boring?
In theory, yes. But readers don’t agree. Because actually he has plenty of minor problems. He’s awkward in civilian society. He gets around his difficulties by assembling a series of eccentricities that border on the weird. If he doesn’t know how something works, he just doesn’t participate. He doesn’t have a cell phone, doesn’t understand text messaging, doesn’t grasp e-mail. He doesn’t do laundry. He buys cheap clothes, junks them three or four days later, and buys more. To him, that’s a rigorously rational solution to an evident problem. To us, it’s almost autistic.
The contrast between his narrow and highly developed skills and his general helplessness humanizes him. It gives him dimension. He has enough problems to make him interesting, but, crucially, he himself doesn’t know he has these problems. He thinks he’s fine. He thinks he’s normal. Hence interest without the whiny self-awareness of the bullet-lodged-near-the-heart guys.
What motivates him?
He has no need for or interest in employment. He’s not a proactive do-gooder. So why does he get involved in things? Well, partly because of noblesse oblige, a French chivalric concept that means “nobility obligates,” which mandates honorable, generous, and responsible behavior because of high rank or birth.
Reacher had the rank and the skills, and he feels a slightly Marxist obligation “from he who has, to him who needs.” Again, that attitude predates the twentieth century by a long way. It shows up in nineteenth-century Western heroes, and thirteenth-century European heroes, all the way back to the Greeks and, we can be sure, much further back into oral traditions where no written records exist. Added to which, in Reacher’s case, is a cantankerousness that provokes him.
In Persuader, during a flashback to his military days, he is asked why he became an MP when he could have chosen any other branch of the service. He gives a vague answer, along the lines of wanting to look after the little guy.
His questioner is skeptical. She says, disbelievingly, “You care about the little guy?”
“Not really,” Reacher admits. “I don’t really care about the little guy. I just hate the big guy. I hate big smug people who think they can get away with things.”
That’s what motivates him. The world is full of unfairness and injustice. He can’t intervene everywhere. He needs to sense a sneering, arrogant, manipulative opponent in the shadows. Then he’ll go to work. Partly because he himself is arrogant.
In a sense, each book is a contest between Reacher’s arrogance and his opponent’s. Arrogance is not an attractive attribute, but I don’t hide Reacher’s because I think the greatest mistake a series writer can make is to get too chummy with his main character. I aim to like Reacher just a little less than I hope you will. Because basically a book is a simple psychological transaction.
“I’m the main character,” the main character announces.
The reader asks: “Am I going to like you?”
There are several possible answers to that question. The worst is: “Yes, you really are, and I’ll tell you why!”
But Reacher answers: “You might or you might not, and either way is fine with me.”
Because, as an author, I believe that kind of insouciant self-confidence forms a more enduring bond.
Does it?
MICHAEL CONNELLY
Born in 1956, Michael Connelly grew up in Pennsylvania, attended the University of Florida (graduating in 1980), and went to work as a journalist in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, mainly on the crime beat. After he was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, he moved to the Los Angeles Times as a police reporter. A few years later, his first novel about Hieronymus (generally known as Harry) Bosch, The Black Echo, was published. Based in part on a real crime, it won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best first novel.
Fourteen more Bosch novels have followed as the LAPD detective became one of the most popular and loved characters of contemporary detective fiction and his creator became one of the bestselling mystery writers in the world. In addition to the Bosch series, Connelly has produced such bestselling stand-alone novels as The Poet (1996), Blood Work (1998) (filmed in 2002 with Clint Eastwood as director and star), Void Moon (2000), Chasing the Dime (2002), The Lincoln Lawyer (2005), which was nominated for a best novel Edgar®, The Brass Verdict (2008), and The Scarecrow (2009).
In 2003 and 2004, Connelly became the first author to serve as president of the Mystery Writers of America for two years. He served as the guest editor for The Best American Mystery Stories 2002. Translated into thirty-five languages, he has won the major mystery-writing awards in several countries (Japan, France, Italy) as well as in the United States.
He lives in Tampa, Florida, with his wife and daughter.
HIERONYMUS BOSCH
BY MICHAEL CONNELLY
A few years ago I was on a book tour that took me to Bryn Mawr, on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. I got in early and had some free time before my reading, so I steered the rental car west to the small town of Devon. At least it was a small town in the mid-1960s, when I lived there as a boy with my family.
By staying close to the railroad line I was able to find Highland Avenue without difficulty. It was here that my family lived in a middle-class neighborhood close to the tracks. Our house was a two-story white colonial that my father, a contractor, had designed and built.
I stopped the car in front of 321 Highland, but I didn’t get out. I just sat behind the wheel and looked up at the house for a while. Things had changed about the place, but many things were still the same. My eyes were drawn to the upper window that belonged to the bedroom I had shared with one of my brothers.
It was in that room that I would lie on the top bunk at night and look out through the window. I could see the lights through the woods across the street and hear the rumble of the freight trains that intermittently chugged by. I could also cast my eyes into the front yard and, through the shadows of the night, make out the mouth of the tunnel that was down there. The tunnel that would often invade my dreams as a boy. The tunnel in which I believe Harry Bosch was born.
The house was on a piece of sloping land, which meant that when I visited friends who lived behind us, I had to go out the back door and climb a steep hill to get to their yards. If I went out the front door to the street, the lawn dropped down into a gulley that led to a brick-lined drainage tunnel that went under Highland Avenue and into the woods across the street. The tunnel was old and filled with mud and fallen brick-and-mortar rubble. Gnarled roots had broken through from overhead and crept down like hands ready to grab you. Spiderwebs clung to these roots in silvery patterns that caught the light that leaked down from above. The tunnel smelled as damp as a flooded basement.
It was an unspoken rite of passage in my neighborhood that every young boy had to go through the tunnel. On his own, holding no one’s hand, and not turning back or chickening out. Those who weren’t up to it faced certain peer group banishments and the attendant verbal abuse. The tunnel was the crucible that separated the boys from the men. And nobody wanted to be a sissy.
You knew who had been through the tunnel and who had not. There wasn’t a neighborhood list in which names were checked off. It wasn’t even spoken about. It was just one of the things you knew as a boy in that neighborhood. You knew who wore the invisible badge of courage that would soon open the door to manhood, and who had chickened out.
All memories of childhood are exaggerated in some fashion. It was said that if you were down in there when the trash truck passed by up above, the roots swayed and the tunnel rumbled like an earthquake. It was also said that if you called out from the middle of the tunnel, your voice made a perfect echo in both directions. I cannot be sure of the tunnel’s dimensions, but my honest guess is that it was no more than five feet high and forty feet from entrance to exit. But to a ten-year-old it didn’t matter. Whatever the measurements were, they were the dimensions of fear.
As the time for me to go through drew near, I thought about the tunnel a lot. It was summer, and I knew that before the season’s end, before school began again, I had to prove myself. I had to pass through that tunnel. At night on the top bunk, I could see it down there waiting for me.
The dreams started that summer. Nightmares, really. Intense and dark, with me always alone. It was always the same scene: I entered the tunnel, ready for the challenge, but a few steps in, the brick walls suddenly started to contract. Then, rippling violently in front of me, up out of the mud, a giant tongue lashed about at me.
And then I would wake up just as I realized I had stepped into the mouth of a great waiting beast.
I didn’t have to go to an analyst then or now to know why the dream had manifested or what it was about. It interrupted my sleep often that summer and then disappeared once I made the journey through the tunnel. Strangely, I have no memory of my actual passage. I cannot confirm the spiderwebs. But I can confirm that I made it and, once through, became one of the boys who taunted those who had not yet passed the test.