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 The Prey Series Rules of Prey Virgil Flowers The Kidd Series Other Novels Etcetera | Rules of Prey Warning: These comments may contain spoilers for the novel.
If you have not yet read Rules of Prey,
proceed at your own risk. John Sandford on Rules of Prey It's tough being a street reporter much past the age of forty.
The body can take it, but the mind begins to go. Your fiftieth murder, your
twelfth flood, your ninth tornado, your one-hundredth multiple-fatality car
accident (we don't report the lonely deaths, man intersecting with phone pole),
your two-hundredth political stupidity. At some point, it all becomes routine and uninteresting; you
begin to fail not only your readers, but your sense of ethics. You can't just
write yada-yada-yada two dead, you actually have to pay attention. Because,
really, it's important stuff. You have to read the budget, look at the bodies,
talk to the cops, get estimates on the damages, find new words for describing
the state fair, the biggest porker, the proudest chicken, but you find that you
can't. A small tornado – or maybe it was an in-line wind, I can't
actually remember – once messed up a small Wisconsin town and the farms
around it. I was sent down to do the story, and I did it, talking to victims,
asking if the wind sounded like a locomotive, searching for tales of good luck
and the peculiar, noting the growing prevalence of pink fiberglass insulation
over the old custard-colored stuff (lots of it around when the houses blow
apart) and finally wound up in the farmyard of an elderly dairy farmer. The barn had been pushed over, mostly; or had slumped, anyway.
Part of it had fallen on a large mottled black-and-white dairy cow and had
broken her front legs. She would have to be shot. She sat in a lump in the
middle of the barnyard, in pain, her big cow eyes suggesting that she knew what
was coming. The grizzled old guy who felt obliged to do the shooting – who
considered the cow an old friend – told me about it and then sat on a stump
and cried. I almost couldn't bear it; and knew I was getting to the end of
my reporting rope. I was sure of it when the next bad tornado came around. The
storm had hit in Southwestern Minnesota, and as soon as I heard of it in the
newsroom, I headed for the doors. I knew some editor would be looking for my
ass, would want to send me on an overnight trip to look at
busted-houses-broken-lives-weeping-children yada-yada-yada. I hid out. Very bad attitude for a reporter. I didn't want to stop writing, I just wanted to stop getting
hurt. I tried writing a novel; it didn't sell, but I learned a lot. I wrote an
essay on the artist John Stuart Ingle, published in book form as part of a major
retrospective of Ingle's work. Most of The Eye and the
Heart, The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle consisted of reproductions
of John's paintings, of course, so it really wasn't my book. But it had hard
covers, a slick jacket, and said John Camp (my real name) on the cover. Hmm. Non-fiction. I spent a good part of a year doing medical reporting, and
turned that into another non-fiction book, called Plastic Surgery: The Kindest Cut. But non-fiction too closely resembled the reporting I was
trying to work away from. I decided to try fiction again.and from that decision
came, first, a novel called The Fool's Run,
with its hero Kidd, and then Rules of Prey. The Fool's Run took a year to
write, because I was learning how to do the work. In novel writing, a publisher
doesn't want to hear that you're working on character development this time,
you'll do plot next time, and three books down the road you'll try to pull it
all together. They want all right now, in this book, or try again. I learned how to do the work with Fool's Run. When
she'd sold it, my agent, the estimable Esther Newberg, told me in a typical
one-minute phone call, "You could probably make a living at this. You ought to
write bigger books. You'd make a lot better money." What's a bigger book? "You know – one with more character
development, back story, more plot twists." I began Rules in the middle of the summer and
delivered it to Esther at Thanksgiving. She sold it over the long weekend. I pretty much wrote it in a trance. Because I had to work if I
wanted to feed my family, I was reporting all day and writing the novel all
night. I would walk like a ghost through St. Paul's skyways, failing to
recognize friends and familiar politicians, bumping into posts. I'd lose my car
in the parking garage. I couldn't hear people talking to me; I'd go to political
events and make notes on the book. Everything in the book came from my experience as a newspaper
reporter. I don't know how many dead bodies I've seen, or crime scenes I've
attended, but it's a lot. I've covered dozens of court cases, spent weeks in the
state penitentiary talking to killers, most of a year watching a variety of
surgeries, including crime-related emergency surgeries. I put it all in there. None of it's real, of course. Cops don't act like Lucas Davenport – they'd be fired or
even imprisoned if they did. They aren't rich, they don't drive Porsches, most
could give a rat's ass about fashion. Lucas Davenport does all of that. Nothing
better, Lucas feels, than a really good-looking new suit. He's like that because
he's a cross between cops and movie stars. I wanted him to be a star. I wanted
him to be different. I wanted him to be a mean, tough cop that women liked. Listen: a lot of writing comes out of you in a burst, our of
your heart and your experience, but there's a good deal of calculation, too. I
wanted to make people like Lucas Davenport. And when it came to thrills, if I
had to make a choice between a good thrill and good police procedure, I didn't
hesitate to throw the procedure overboard. I found, when I was done, that cops mostly liked it. There was
enough reality layered in the book – mostly stupid stuff, the kind of
stupid stuff that is the fabric of the lives of most street cops – that
they approved. Terrific. I got the same reaction from street reporters. Even
better. When I wrote Rules, it never really occurred to me
that this one guy, Lucas Davenport, was going to be a second career for me. I
thought Rules would be a stand-alone book, and that my next book might
involve, say, a female FBI agent. Still have her in my mind, but I've never gotten to her.
Davenport has carried me on through fifteen more novels, and it's been a hell of
a ride. Enjoyed most of it; had a few bummers. Gonna do a few more, I think. – John Sandford, December 2,
2004 The order of the books This is the first novel in the Prey series. It is
actually the first of his novels to get released in any form. It is not, however, the earliest of his novels that ended up
getting released [1]. That honor goes to The Fool's Run, which he wrote from mid-1987 to
early 1988. Rules of Prey was written later,
in the summer of 1988. Sometimes, when an author becomes famous, the publisher will
ask for older, unpublished writings to release as "new", on the grounds that
it's new to the audience. This is not one of those cases. Rather, the author
had two books simultaneously in the publishing pipeline with two different
publishers. This is rare [2], but it makes sense when you
know all the details. Starting in 1987, the author wrote The Fool's Run with the specific goal of
producing a saleable thriller. He finished it early the next year, and sent it
to his agent. She shopped it around, and it sold for a modest amount. He then
wrote Rules of Prey over the following summer. Rules of Prey sold much
faster than The Fool's Run had, for a larger
amount, and to a different publishing company than the one that had purchased
The Fool's Run. At this point, neither book had come out. The Fool's Run was slated for a late 1989
publication [3]. Rules of
Prey, however, was put onto the fast-track to publication by G.P.
Putnam's Sons [4]. It came out two months before
The Fool's Run. This led to a problem [5]. The company
publishing The Fool's Run (Henry Holt & Co.)
had a stronger claim to his real name, since they'd had a contract first. If
Putnam published a novel under that same name, Henry Holt could conceivably get
free publicity from it. They asked the author to come up with a pseudonym, and
he chose "John Sandford", the surname being his paternal grandmother's maiden
name [6]. So in July of 1989, Rules of
Prey came out from Putnam under the name John Sandford. The following
September, The Fool's Run came out from Henry
Holt under the name John Camp. The pseudonym went on to become the more famous of the names,
and eventually the novels that had been published under the Camp name were
reprinted under the Sandford name. That led to its own set of difficulties,
but that's a discussion for another page [7]. The original ending The story did not change much from its first to final drafts
[8], except for the ending. Here's how the original ending
worked: Despite having interfered with Vullion's "master stroke", the
police have no hard evidence linking him to the other crimes: he hasn't left a
note, the style of attack is different, and so on. Lucas knows that
Vullion is guilty, but he can't do anything about it. In a contrived situation – I do not remember the
specifics – Lucas and Vullion end up together in Lucas's office, with
nobody else there. I believe it was ostensibly so Lucas could interrogate him.
Lucas, of course, has other plans. Vullion knows that the police have no hard evidence, and even
gloats about getting away with it. So Lucas just shoots him, using a throw-down
gun (as in the final) to make it look like a genuine firefight. In the end, the circumstances surrounding the "shootout" were
altered to make it less contrived, and the result makes it less cold-blooded
than the original. Given how cold-blooded the final product is, that really
says something about how it went down the first time. Naming the book Until recently, all of the novels had been stored on 3.5"
floppy disks, first for Amiga [9] and later for PC. This was
one of the novels done on an Amiga, and the files took up a large number of
disks. I don't think they needed to, but at that point there were
still only a few chapters per disk. For Rules of
Prey the disk labels were: Cop I (1) chap 1-8 ... and all of those had duplicate disks, for safety. So
in total, eighteen disks were used when writing the first novel, all neatly
labeled with a marker [10]. Alas, none of the names on the disks are good names for a
thriller novel, so the author had to come up with something different for
submission. He settled on The Maddog's Game, based on the nickname of
the bad guy [11]. The publishing company changed it to
Rules of Prey, which is more thriller-generic, and that was pretty much
that [12]. Rules of Prey: The Movie There has not yet been a movie made from Rules of Prey. This doesn't mean that people
haven't considered it, or purchased rights, or developed scripts. Given what we
saw of the attempts to do so, it's probably just as well. In 1990, the paperback was doing extremely well, the hardcover
for Shadow Prey had just been released, and
the whole thing appeared, from a Hollywood perspective, to have "hot property"
written all over it. One company, Film & Television Ltd., purchased the movie
rights without optioning them first. That's a relative rarity, and usually
means that the purchasing company is very confident that they will end
up making a movie, rather than just throwing ideas around. Film & Television Ltd., was owned by Dino DeLaurentiis [13]. To say that he has a hit-and-miss record would be to
understate it by a lot. His production company was behind some very fine movies
(Three Days of the Condor, Blue Velvet) and a succession of
extremely bad movies (Orca, King Kong (the 1976 version),
Amityville 3-D, and many, many more). Still, nobody wanted to
pass judgment until we saw a script [14]. They sent us a script. It was terrible. It was the most cliché-ridden pastiche of bad cop shows
and movies any of us had ever encountered. Examples? Well, in order:
... and all that is leaving out the crappy jokes, the godawful
dialogue [21], and the feeling that "Well, this is nothing at
all like Minnesota in the real universe." We complained. The author said that it was nothing like the
books, that it was full of clichés, and so forth. He included examples.
The production company, to its credit, flew the screenwriter out to consult
with him on changes. A month or so later, we received a second script that was
a huge improvement but still really bad. And then the entire project got cancelled for reasons that
were never fully explained [22], and that was the end of it. Footnotes to the comments 1. And even though The Fool's Run was his first novel to eventually
get published, he does have a few prior novels that have
never been published [23]. Perhaps someday they will
be released [24]. 2. And by "rare" I mean "I can't
actually think of any other cases ever in which this has happened this way, but
since I don't actually know that it's a unique case, I won't claim it as
such." 3. It actually came out on my 20th
birthday: September 8, 1989. 4.G.P. Putnam's Sons was purchased by
the Penguin Publishing Group a few years ago, and the whole conglomerate is now
PenguinPutnam. The hardcovers just say "Putnam" on the side. 5. A problem, that is, aside from the
fact that coming out with essentially two debut novels around the same time
could be seen as tacky. 6. In interviews, he'll sometimes say
it's taken from his great-grandfather, and technically that is true. But just
as technically, he did have four great-grandfathers. My way of
specifying it is more exact. 7. In particular, it's a discussion
for the comment pages for The Fool's Run. Go
there and read it, if you wish. 8. I suspect, years after the fact,
that this had a lot to do about how quickly the whole thing went. First draft
in three months, some minor revisions, and that's it. It is by far the
shortest writing time for any of his novels. Nowadays, he'd probably take
longer to write it, and take a full month or two to polish it. 9. Part of my job is keeping permanent
archives of all the books in digital form, for all the various revisions and
rewrites they go through. One stumbling block has been the Amiga. Since I no
longer have one (they're kind of rare now), I still only have the
Amiga floppies. I can't read them with any other disk drive I have, and so the
files are stuck there in an unreadable format. Worse, since it's magnetic media
more than a decade old, there's a very good chance that the disks are
unreadable even to an Amiga. 10. I'm not using the word "labeled" in
a strictly accurate sense here, since he did not use disk labels. Rather, he
just wrote on the disk with a permanent Sharpie marker. Disks were cheap enough
that this wasn't a problem. On occasion, however, he would use a Sharpie to
make temporary notes – phone numbers, addresses, that sort of thing –
on far more expensive items, such as his computer monitor [25]. 11. Two of the foreign translations
have stuck to the "Maddog" theme. There's the French Le jeu du
chein-loup ("Game of the Dog-Wolf") and the Welsh Blaidd drwg ("Bad
Wolf") [26]. 12. That's really all the information
any of us have about the title. There's a joke that somewhere in New York
there's an old lady who does nothing but think up titles for books, all of
which are stored in a large bin until someone needs a title. Any
title. For all I know, it's actually true. 13. I say "was" because it was
apparently part of the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group (DAG), which collapsed
shortly after they sent us the script. I can't prove that there was a
connection. 14. That said, there was still a
general feeling of "Dino DeLaurentiis? Uh-oh..." 15. I am being sarcastic. Ha
ha. 16. Okay, Lucas may be a loose cannon.
But what cop would ever throw down his gun? Ever? In the real
world? 17. This is best said in a gruff
voice, as of a veteran street cop arguing with the bureaucratic and cowardly
chief of police. When my sister and I were mocking the script, we'd re-enact
bits of dialogue with over-the-top voices. It says something about how bad the
dialogue was that we could never get it over-the-top enough. 18. It may in fact have just been the
attic of a church. You know, because that makes so much sense [27]. 19. The original ending for the book
may have been contrived, but this raises contrivedness to an art
form. 20. When my sister and I were visiting
our parents for Christmas, we happened to catch the movie Off Limits
(1988) on some movie channel. The bad guy, when shot, falls backwards through a
stained glass window of a church, to the ground below. We both thought it
hilarious, because it seems like such a cliché that it's almost like an
urban legend: everyone knows about it, but nobody can pin down where it
actually happened in a film. Well, Off Limits is at least one movie in
which it does. 21. It's not exactly that it was
bad. It's that it was overly dramatic all the time. Imagine,
if you will, a movie wherein the dialogue is nothing but catchphrases
and taglines from famous movies [28]. "I'll be Back." Or
maybe "Do you feel lucky, punk?" That's what it was like. 22. That's not quite right. It's not
that the reasons weren't fully explained. It's that after receiving the second
script, we never ever heard from them again. Eventually the author asked
someone, and they said that it'd been scrapped a long time ago.
Whatever. 23. Their titles are The Wheel Key
Number [29] and The Chippewa Zoo. He also has an
unpublished novel that was written after he was established as a
thriller writer. It's a ghost story tentatively called Night
Moves. It will probably never, ever be published. 24. Actually, they probably
won't. 25. Seriously, he did that. Not on the
screen of course, but on the beige plastic frame around it. He also
put a few things (in permanent marker) on the computer itself, on the keyboard,
and other things like that. Never anywhere that would cause functional
impairment, but it really ruined the look. 26. "Blaidd Drwg" is roughly
pronounced "Bly-th droog". The "dd" in Welsh is a discrete letter – a
voiced "th" sound, as in "there" – and is based on the old letter ð.
The "w" is a vowel that is literally a double-u. Now you know. 27. I am being sarcastic
again. 28. Actually, that sounds like a kind
of neat idea. The result would certainly be post-modern enough to get it a cult
following, even if the movie was total crap. Still, please don't take it as
some kind of challenge [30]. 29. The title looks ungrammatical
until you know that Wheel Key is one of the Florida Keys. 30. Unless you want to, of
course. |
13 May 2008  The Prey series, the Virgil Flowers series,
the Kidd series, The Night Crew, Dead Watch, The Eye
and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle, and Plastic
Surgery: The Kindest Cut are copyrighted by John Sandford. All excerpts are
used with permission. All original content on the website (excluding the message
board and some other specifically disclaimed text) is copyright © 2008 by
Roswell Anthony Camp. Please do not steal anything from these pages. If you
want to borrow something, write and ask first. Help keep moofs happy. | |