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| The Prey Series Night Prey Virgil Flowers The Kidd Series Other Novels Etcetera | Night Prey John Sandford on Night Prey When I was young, and working at the Miami Herald as a
reporter, I was a two-packs-a-day guy. When I had a serious story and a short
deadline, I'd sometimes have two cigarettes going, propped in different
ashtrays on either side of my IBM Selectric. Cigarettes make the perfect break from writing: they're
non-fattening, and they give you a little chemical jolt, along with a couple of
seconds to think over the next phrase or paragraph. I quit smoking a long time ago, pressed by my wife and kids.
In the last ten or fifteen years, I've replaced it with the Internet; I keep
the 'net running in the background, while I work on Word up front. When I need
a short break, I click the mouse and look at a news feed. The news feed just now — just now, just this minute, as I
was writing this — says that Robert Parker, author of the Spenser series,
has died. I'm a fan as well as an author, and I've read Spencer novels since I
was in college, as did my wife. I remember her laughing about Parker's
fascination with clothing, and the way Spenser dressed, in his early books. She
accused me of stealing that for the Davenport books, when I made Lucas a
clothes-horse. Maybe I did. I've read about all of Parker's books. I have a first edition
of The Godwulf Manuscript, with his signature, which, back in the olden
days, was about the size of a fingernail. I actually remember reading that book
for the first time, fascinated by the idea of a somewhat noir detective who was
also an intellectual. Used to be a boxer, had a bottle of booze in the drawer,
but knew about English literature. A revelation. And I liked the writing. I mentioned to Parker's editor at
Putnam's one time that while Parker occasionally forgot to put a plot in his
books, he wrote so smoothly, and so engagingly, you'd slip right through the
book without realizing it. I think now, Well, hell. He's gone. He was 77. I never met
him, but I'll miss him. In most of his books, Parker was what I call a clockwork guy.
That is, in a clockwork novel, there's a conspiracy underway, which has
resulted in murder or kidnapping, or will result in it. (The crime has to be
serious enough to engage the interest of the reader. You can't have Spenser
investigating a minor embezzlement, unless it leads to something more serious.)
In a clockwork, Spenser has to break into the logic of the crime, and that
allows him to track down the miscreants. There's another kind of plot that I call the chaos
scheme. I'm more of a chaos guy, because they really represent my view of
the world. I see crime as the product of misplaced greed, misbegotten love, of
sex, of drugs and alcohol, accident and error, the inability to delay
gratification, of television, and mostly, of blind stupidity, rather than
careful, intelligent, insidious scheming. That makes the crimes harder to break into, because there is
no logic to them. It's the Big Lebowski or Fargo view of
crime: vicious, terrible things being done for really stupid reasons —
like minor thievery covered up with murder, or a gang-banger killing somebody
because he saw it done on TV. Night Prey, however, was a kind of hybrid — a
clockwork novel, in which a series of carefully plotted clues point at the
existence of a killer, but the killer operates with the chaotic mind of an
insane man. The killings have a gross pattern, but no there's no logic behind
them. Night Prey also was the first book in which I played a
bit with the problems of criminal law, the fact that cops have to do more than
figure out who a killer is — they actually have to find proof, and proof
that will hold up in court. What do you do if you're intellectually and morally convinced
that a suspect is a killer, who might kill again, at random, at any moment...
and you can take him off the street on burglary? And if you do that, he'll know
that you've been tracking him, that you're onto him for the murders? And that
then, you'll never get him for the murders? Tough choices. When I went back and re-read Night Prey so I could write this
new introduction, I was reminded how I struggled with the character of the
female investigator Meagan Connell. Her plight — read the novel to discover
what it is — didn't come up until I was almost through with the original draft,
and then I had to go back and rearrange everything about her personality, to
make it work. I like the way she works as a character in this version. But
in re-reading, so many other possibilities for her pop up; other things that
could have been done, instead of what I did. I don't know if they would have
worked any better, as story-telling, but it does make me think about the
millions of different possible turns that any novel can take, and how much
infinitely more there is to write. Makes me wonder how many more books Robert Parker had him, how
many more twists and surprising conclusions lie waiting down all our
roads. Still sitting here feeling sad about it. — John Sandford, January 19,
2010 |
1 December 2010  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 © 2011 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. | |