Everyone loves to play charades, right? Well, this is literary charades with a little help from Youtube – you have the guess the books that Beth, Christi and myself are describing without the use of speech. Enjoy.
Steve Martini is the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers, including The Rule of Nine, Guardian of Lies, and others featuring defense attorney Paul Madriani. Martini will be at Village Books on Thursday, June 2, 7:00pm for his latest, Trader of Secrets. Click here for info.
My earliest experiments with the written word were limited to feeble attempts at poetry in grade school. Story telling did not come to me until later, though when young and foolish I told some whoppers to my father. I was not good at this as evidenced from the red palm print his pummeling left on my ass.
Writing lies for a living did not occur to me until much later, when I was in my early forties. This followed a brief career as a journalist wherein I attempted to tell the truth but was not always successful, followed by a period practicing law in which knowing the truth was often a disability. In short, I was severely handicapped and overcame great odds to become a storyteller and crafter of creditable fables. How did it happen? Elmore Leonard might tell us that I lacked the sand and skill to write believable ransom notes which, according to him, is among the highest forms of writing and pays the best.
What I remember, however, is that during that hazy period between journalism and the law, that confusing transition between searching for the truth and shading my eyes from it, I stumbled across a couple of books that left a marked impression on me. And the word “couple” is precisely right, for I did not have much time during this period to read fiction.
The two books in question were The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth (1971) and Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett (1978). These two books, for me, cut a swath in fiction and in particular the genre of international thrillers that I had not experienced before, or for that matter since. The Day of the Jackal remains in my view the single best international thriller written in modern times. The fact that a true to form feature film followed closely the story of the novel did not hurt its success and served to reinforce the fundamental element of credibility embodied in the book.
The detailed story of an attempt on the life of Charles de Gaulle, President of France, carried out by a professional assassin code-named “The Jackal” reads not like a novel, but like a memoir of the assassin, co-authored by the detective who tracked him. The meticulous research, the revelation of how to craft a false passport stands up even in today’s high tech era. The political backdrop behind the book, the fact that many of the characters and events peripheral to the story were real, coupled with the ability of the author to move flawlessly from the assassin’s point of view to those who are trailing him and back again all contribute to novel’s success. Within three pages you forget that you are reading a novel. The story is in a word –“believable”. In the end, the reader is left to wonder, did it happen? This is the ultimate tribute to any novel. And Forsyth did it to a “T”. The story rings TRUTH in upper case letters. It was so evocative that it defined an era in terror when a journalist found a dog-eared paperback of the book at the scene of an investigation pursuing Illich Rameriz Sanchez – Carlos, who was later dubbed “The Jackal” as a result. What more can be said?
Similarly The Eye of the Needle authored by Ken Follett, utilized history, historic characters and events to craft a story so steeped in reality and fact as to leave the reader wondering whether he was reading fiction or a detailed intelligence report replete with dialogue from the major players. The topic this time was the kidnapping, and failing that, the assassination of war time British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
In both stories the authors used minute details from history and dropped in as if seamlessly parachuted the fictional characters of their own creation. The techniques employed very nearly resemble those used by the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services) the predecessor of the modern day CIA and Britain’s SOE (Special Operations Executive) to create believable cover stories and identities for spies who were dropped behind enemy lines during World War II. It was vital that sufficient detail and motivation be given to these operatives so that if interrogated and even tortured, the cover story carried a sufficient breath of believability that it would hold up, that it might save their lives. It often did. In my view both of these books meet that test. It was that commitment to detail that caused me to first wonder when I read them, whether I could come close to that standard myself as a novelist – as a writer of lies for a living.
It’s been a busy week trying to keep up with the apocalyptos. I don’t just mean with the people traipsing about in Times Square—the followers of Harold Camping, the Prime Mover of this particular hysterical moment, who looked out at humanity’s eschatological yearnings, saw that they were without form and void, and breathed shape onto them in the guise of an exact date. I mean all the media apocalyptos who have flocked to this story like it’s December 21, 2012, among whom I must now count myself. So be it. For awhile this morning, I attempted to make my colleagues at the Bench answer this question: If you had just one day left, what book would you read? And I received only three responses: Jeannie chose Emily Dickinson’s collected poems; Elizabeth picked “The Liar,” Stephen Fry’s first novel, because “it’s the only book I’ve ever read three times, so I may as well have one more go at it. It’s ridiculously entertaining, a sort of devour-in-one-sitting book, and I think it would be a pretty decent distraction with all the fire and brimstone flying around”; and Ian, who hails from Maine, wrote:
Were I to be reading something on my final day on earth, a taste or preview of heaven, it’d be E. B. White’s “One Man’s Meat,” the collection of short essays on a quieter life during wartime on a salt-water farm in Maine. Chickens, trips to town, slightly awkward conversations with locals. The dark winter morning, lingering summer dusk. Home, in a nicely gilded form.
(Ian, with a Maine like that, who needs a rapture?)
Everyone else felt that if it were their last day on earth, they would not spend it with a book, which suggests that we all need to examine how we spend our days when we don’t think the world’s coming to the end. Elsewhere around the Web, people have been responding very entertainingly to the present anti-crisis. In a Yahoo! conversation group, one Puppy Power! raised what I think are valid questions:
If the world doesn’t end may 21st, can we sue the people who put up the billboards for false advertisement?
I mean, especially if someone believes them, and has monetary of [sic] other losses, because of being told the world was going to end…. Maybe their [sic] would be less false Prophets, if they were held monetarily and legally responsible for their false testimony and how it effects other people’s lives? What if people don’t bother paying their taxes, because the world is going to end? Shouldn’t the IRS hold the Billboard people accountable for fraud, and pretty much telling everyone not to worry about paying their taxes, cause the world is going to break in half, anyway? I think less people would make up false ending dates for the world, and everyone wouldn’t always be having to hear the next theory about when exactly the sky will be falling next, if they were held legally accountable to the results of their testimony, don’t you?
If some version of this scenario does come to pass (and I am making no predictions), I have no doubt the plaintiff would have no trouble finding a lawyer to take the case. It’s no good for the defense to argue that the Bible itself predicts such an end. As today’s Doonesbury strip points out, “Wait a minute! Did Jesus not say, ‘Of that day and hour knows no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my father only’?” Amen, Gary Trudeau. Live Science asked the historian Lorenzo DiTommaso to give an explanation of why people like thinking about the end of the world:
The apocalyptic worldview springs from a desire to reconcile two conflicting beliefs. “The first is that there is something dreadfully wrong with the world of human existence today,” he said. “On the other hand, there is a sense that there is a higher good or some purpose for existence, a hope for a better future.”
It is worth remembering that many apocalyptos are drawn to last things for the intense joy they promise, not only for the judgment and suffering they’ll rain down on non-believers. At the Language Log, Mark Liberman looks into the meaning of the word “rapture,” and is surprised to find that “that the sense glossed by the OED as ‘A state, condition, or fit of intense delight or enthusiasm’ is a couple of centuries older than the sense glossed as ‘the transport of believers to heaven at the Second Coming of Christ.’” It appears that the word “rapture” didn’t come into use in this second sense until the mid-eighteenth century, thanks to the difficulty in translating the original Greek (something akin to “harpy,” for something that uses an instrument like a grappling hook to snatch things up) and St. Jerome’s Latin (“rapere,” which already had negative sexual connotations by the fifteenth century. As Liberman puts it, “The ‘Rape of the Saints’ was never a plausible candidate”). Oprah understands precisely the positive sense of the word “rapture.” At the final taping of her talk show a couple days ago, she teared up and said:
I’ve never experienced anything like this and I say once again thank you for taking me to a place that’s beyond joyous. I’m going to have to process it and look at it on tape to see what actually happened here. It feels like the rapture, so thank you all for that!
Perhaps my favorite discussion of the rapture, though, is taking place among those who believe the end is near, just not that near. We who don’t spend much time thinking about these things until a prophet like Camping appears tend to forget that for many people, it’s always maybe about to be Rapture time. At the Christian Post, Jim Dixon, the pastor of Cherry Cherry Hills Community Church in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and the author of “Last Things Revealed” gave a more or less mainstream evangelical view:
I think I would be surprised if Christ doesn’t come back soon. By that I mean perhaps in my lifetime, perhaps in my children’s lifetime, and certainly in my grandchildren’s lifetime.
And Tim Lahaye, who for the past couple decades has pretty much owned the apocalypse with his Left Behind series, issued a denouncement of Camping on his blog that ends with a reclamation of his territory: “A great motto for daily living is PERHAPS TODAY. For one day it will happen and we don’t know when, but we don’t want you to be left behind!”
(Image: Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment,” in the Sistine Chapel)
Roaring Brook Press has a superb pop up book – ABC3D by Marion Bataille. What a great way for a child to learn the alphabet.
Today I am going to be interviewing members of the Seattle7Writers for nwbooklovers.org. The lineup is Garth Stein, Kevin O'Brien, Robert Dugoni, Jennie Shortridge, Kit Bakke, William Dietrich and Suzanne Selfors. Quite a crew, right? I'm really excited for this opportunity to sit down with so many amazing authors.
I'm sure upon looking at that list that many of you see at least one author you think is "squee" worthy. You know what I mean. The authors who make you giddy when you see they have a new book coming out. The ones that when you see they will be doing an event in your town, you immediately circle the date on your calendar.
Here at the store, we have a growing list of "squee" worthy authors: Jonathan Franzen, China Miéville, Erin Morgenstern, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Green (what is it with the "John's"?), Tamora Pierce, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and, well, you get the idea.
When I hear someone talk about an author he loves, I can't help but smile. That reader is as enamored with that author as most people seem to be with celebrities. Yet writers spend so much of their time OUT of the limelight. These are people who get jitters in front of crowds, who have hunkered down in their writing caves for hours on end, desperately trying to finish their books, who practically have to let their eyes get reacquainted with the sunlight. Yet, they've created something so amazing that readers are either awed to silence if they encounter their squee-worthy author, or end up blathering incoherently.
Authors are the understated celebrities (a concept that's substantially different than celebrity as author.) That's pretty darn cool
–Lindsey
