How Did Homer Simpson Get His Name?

Back in that patch when my personal reading was still dominated by purveyors of action-adventure like Clive Cussler Nathanael West was one of the first Literary writers I read on my own time, without recommendation by an instructor or anyone else I knew personally. I ended up reading three of his books--the reimagining of Voltaire's Candide to a Depression-era America on the verge of going fascist, A Cool Million, Miss Lonelyhearts, and probably the most highly regarded of them, The Day of the Locust (the canonical stature of which is, of course, confirmed by its having the #73 spot on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Best Novels published in English during the twentieth century).

To be honest I enjoyed A Cool Million more than the others--precisely because of their touches of Modernist storytelling. Still, if Day of the Locust was often frustrating, it was intriguing enough that bits of it remain with me.

One of the sillier ways in which this was the case was the fact of a major character in the novel being named Homer Simpson, which has ever since had me (and apparently, a great many others) wondering if there was not some intriguing connection between the character and the Homer Simpson everybody knows.

Of course, try hard enough and you can probably find points of comparison in any two objects. Comparing the Homer of the book to the Homer of the show there was, for instance, his comical lapse into extreme verbal incoherence while under very severe stress. (As the narrator explains when the words are pouring out of Homer "A great deal of it was gibberish," and what wasn't gibberish "wasn't jumbled so much as it was timeless. The words . . . behind each other instead of after," while "several sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph.") There was also the way Homer lost his temper in the scene that produces the riot that caps the tale.

Still, character, situation, story--they are all very, very different, and that was as far as I got. However, a few years ago The Simpsons creator Matt Groening gave an interview to Smithsonian Magazine in which he explained that in high school he had read the book and, while writing "a novel about a character named Bart Simpson," the choice of name had appealed to him as appropriate to his own story because "Simpson" had "simp," a shortening of "simpleton," in it, and his father's name was Homer.

As it happens Matt Groening's mother is Margaret Wiggum, while Matt also has two sisters who go by Lisa and Maggie.

I imagine that many accustomed to thinking of works of fiction as mosaics of abstruse allusions of the kind professors of literature make careers out of explaining (or at least, pretending to explain) expected something more profound, or at least more obscure, than that. Alas, whatever literary critics may imagine, or pretend to imagine, in real life artists' choices are often just that simple--as indeed they have to be, if artists are ever to get anything done. Not everything needs to be a "symbol"--or can be.

Martin Caidin's Cyborg as Proto-Techno-Thriller

Researching the military techno-thriller for my book on the subject a few years ago, specifically looking for the linkages between those old invasion stories of the pre-World War I era and the age of Tom Clancy, I found plenty of connecting threads--works across various genres that retained some of the old elements of the invasion story that, developed by later writers, led back to it. Thus by the early 1970s we were starting to get a good many books that look fairly close to the '80s-era thrillers of this type, with many of the elements, but arguably not quite all the way there, with a good example Martin Caidin's Cyborg--the novel on which Kenneth Johnson based The Six Million Dollar Man series.

Cyborg's military-espionage, technological and geopolitical themes, and its action-adventure-oriented and action-packed treatment of them, not least in its technically detailed flying sequences, are certainly consistent with the military techno-thriller's character. Still, there are reasons for thinking of the book as less techno-thriller than proto-techno-thriller. After all, if the flying scenes would do a later techno-thriller credit the real star of the show technologically is Austin's bionics, not a major theme of that form, not least because they are more than usually futuristic for the genre--science fiction-al, in a way that subsequent Steve Austin adventures were. Thus did the third book in the Cyborg series offer crypto-history involving "ancient astronauts," the fourth an artificially intelligent computer. such details Cyborg and its sequels look a lot more Clive Cussler than Tom Clancy, even if representative of the trend leading to the latter.

The Japanaphobic Thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s: Why All the Two-Bit Sociology About Japan?

Reading the Japan-themed thrillers of the '80s and '90s I was struck time and again by how, more than in the case of thrillers about other countries, the authors postured as experts on the culture of their villains and presumed to educate their readers about it--in the main, retailing the clichés then in vogue among Establishment experts. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novel Dragon was no exception, my own review of the book finding it to have repeated the standards

about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America.

However, as was also common to such commentators, whose sensibility tended well to the right of the center of the political spectrum, much as they saw the Japanese as "Other and threatening," they all too plainly envied them that social model--the respect for elites, the deference of inferiors--in part because of the reason why there was so much comment about Japanese culture in the first place. Such persons, as conservatives inclining toward a stress on difference over similarity between societies, have also been prone to explain the hugely important matter of a country's economic success or failure in terms of culture, particularly as it makes for individual qualities. Except when banging on about the necessity of society pandering to "entrepreneurs," regarding itself as owing them everything and they as owing it nothing in return, they brush aside such matters as geography, institutions, the spillover effects of others' actions (and of course, the matter of exploitation) in favor of, for example, chalking up a success or failure to their people being more or less "hard-working," etc..

Looking at the Soviet Union, even in that period in which seemed to them most dynamic (the years surrounding the launch of Sputnik), Anti-Communism meant that they were sure they had nothing to learn from, or admire in, the Soviets. By contrast the Japanese in the '80s, if practicing a form of capitalism that seemed distastefully statist to many commentators (the main source of skepticism about Japanese success in those years), was still a conservative, capitalist, country they feared was beating America at its own game. And that drove them to try and make some sense of the country--if with the meager results that have many of those picking up these books today appalled by what it was common to write then, just as, in relation to many a different culture, many will similarly be appalled by the two-bit sociology standard in the early twenty-first century.

Clive Cussler's 1993 in Dragon

From quite early on Clive Cussler got in the habit of setting his Dirk Pitt novels a few years ahead into the future, so as to offer some latitude for the political and technological changes without which his scenarios would not be as plausible, especially in the case of novels like Night Probe! (1981)--or Dragon (1990). Part I of the latter novel incorporates in Cussler's version of 1993 undersea mining stations 16,000 feet down with all their apparatus and vehicles, and satellites with sensors which can render the oceans effectively transparent to investigators, with these things not merely interesting gimmicks but indispensable to the unfolding of the plot--while the technology gets only more exotic from there, not least where the robotics are concerned.

Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)

Considering the fact it seems to me reflective of the line between "techno-thriller" and "science fiction" having been thinner for '70s-era techno-thriller writers like himself, or his contemporary Martin Caidin (who like Cussler, was fond of writing in not just imaginary technology but cryptohistory and cryptoarchaeology, as seen in The Messiah Stone, or the third of his Steve Austin novels, High Crystal).

The differentiation of the two genres also seems to have gone with the techno-thriller writers becoming more intent on persuading the reader that their fiction was in fact well-grounded. A Tom Clancy, for example, who did read Clive Cussler, and in some cases seemed to follow his footsteps (I suspect Cussler's influence when I look at Debt of Honor), never expected his readers to take seriously anything like Dragon's undersea mining station, or presented his spy satellites as able to peer through the sea that way--and while some of what he envisioned has since come to seem science fiction-al (as with his conception of anti-missile defenses in The Cardinal of the Kremlin), these were lapses, in this case a product of the wildly overblown '80s-era hype about them by which Clancy was taken in, even as he generally strove to "get the details right" to a much greater degree than Cussler did. (Clancy generally purported to write about real technologies, while Cussler, especially in his earlier books, did not hesitate to make things up even when he did not have to do so. Thus in Deep Six an "F/A-21" fighter plane launched "laser-guided" anti-ship missiles at a key part of the narrative. The U.S. did not have, even on the drawing board, F/A-21 fighter planes or laser-guided anti-ship missiles that would have been launched from such, and such would never have appeared in a Clancy novel.)

However, it seems to me there may be more than the care to "keep things grounded" and "get the details right" differentiating them--especially from the standpoint of a reader looking back. They might scoff at Cussler's seaQuest-like undersea mining station, or the advanced robotics of the tale, but such stations were supposed to be a near-term possibility when Cussler began writing his books, while there was a lot of hype about robotics, and the artificial intelligence controlling them, back in the '80s, and especially what Japan was supposed to be accomplishing in that field. (Remember, fifth-generation computing was going to change the world!) Expectations in both these areas (like the expectations in regard to anti-missile defense) have become more modest as we became habituated to the generally lowered expectations of an era of technological stagnation in which the "techno" became less thrilling than it seemed just a short time earlier.

Characterizations and Prose in the Popular Thriller: Clive Cussler's Dragon

Recently reviewing Clive Cussler's Dragon I considered the book as a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel from the period I associate with his best. Thus I had much to say of the book's structure and incidents, pacing and action, focus and flow (which had me concluding that even if other entries in the series were stronger in various ways, the book as a whole works, in cases quite impressively).

I did not raise the matter of literary qualities such as characterization and prose--which were pretty much as expected for Cussler novels, and for popular thrillers generally.

That is to say--they were, are, pretty bad in certain specific ways that were outside my concerns as a reviewer at that time, but of which something may be worth saying.

One may as well start with the most conventional of expectations, as laid out by that most conventional of critics, James Wood. Far from the author's "maintain[ing] an unsentimental composure and know[ing] how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary" as Wood says, such that the "author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible," in the Dirk Pitt novels Cussler's voice erupts into the narrative so often and blatantly and melodramatically (for instance, to hint at some doom the characters did not yet expect) one could be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a Victorian-era book for a not particularly sophisticated audience. Thus it is not enough that almost everyone is a superhuman Gary Stu, but we are beaten over the head with the fact by the chunky character sketch he presents at each introduction of one of his principal dramatis personae. The artlessness of the presentation annoys me less than the triteness and falsity of what was being presented, affirming innumerable, quite stupid social prejudices. Still, the artlessness reflects a broader and very frequent tendency to overdescribe that constantly undercuts what Cussler is actually achieving by pouring out more words past the point at which he ought to have stopped. (Pursuing villains Pitt believes have kidnapped his longtime girlfriend Cussler tells us that "if they harmed her, they would die, [Pitt] vowed ruthlessly." Was there an un-ruthless way to vow that?) Quite naturally, this is the kind of novel where characters "shake their heads" every time they utter a negative (perhaps not so much as in Larry Bond's books, but not much less either, this quirk popping up scores of times in Dragon). The narration is also replete with comparisons that use up a good many words in distracting and confusing rather than enlightening. (We are told that the villain's dining hall recalled those of "the most palatial castles of Europe" and then almost immediately told that almost everything in the chamber was "distinctly Japanese," from the paper lantern lighting, to the bamboo carpet, to the paintings by Japanese masters on the walls. So, basically, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to its counterparts in European castles.)

I find myself more sensitive to such failings all the time, which do not improve the reading experience. Nevertheless, grating as they could be the story did more than survive them--much more. It is a reminder that those aspects of literary craftsmanship that middlebrow critics tend to emphasize are only part of writing, not the whole of it, and that like all writers and works which excel according to one measure or another they do so not because they get everything right, but because what they got right mattered more than what they got wrong.

Clive Cussler's Dragon as a Novel of the '90s

From the standpoint of politics Clive Cussler's contributions to the thriller form tend to be of the "orthodox" kind, where all is pretty much well in and with his country and its system save for the nasties, usually foreigners, trying to muck it up. For many years these were usually KGB types (as in Raise the Titanic!, Deep Six and Cyclops), but, with the Cold War drawing to a close, and with Japanaphobia booming, it was for a Japanese plot that Cussler opted--with this the more conspicuous as, while militant anti-Communism and anti-Soviet sentiment can appear so much the background noise to American life as to be easily overlooked, simply accepted as the inevitable even by those not eager to hear more of it, the issue at hand was more novel and controversial for the mainstream.

Rather than merely choosing enemies for his hero according to those politics and then getting on with the story, Cussler is quite emphatic about the view that the economic challenge from Japan, and the Japanese, characterizing Japan as engaged in economic warfare against a United States whose leaders and people consistently failed to see that they were in fact in a war and act accordingly. Indeed, in a piece of particularly striking symbolism (not a word one uses often when discussing Dirk Pitt novels) the villains use as a critical component of their scheme for blackmailing the United States into political and economic submission Japanese-made cars imported into the U.S.--American commentators at the time regarding such vehicles as key symbols of Japanese industrial success and American decline.1 Similarly pointed is the reference Cussler makes to Japanese theft of American aerospace secrets, another then-significant but long since forgotten fear, as the furor over the FSX fighter program demonstrated--which program, incidentally, Cussler references more than once (on one occasion, informing them that a squadron of FSX fighters escort the villain's aircraft back to his home country). Meanwhile all these acts lead up to the villains' proceeding beyond economic warfare to the other kind, with their superiority in robotics becoming a key basis for their subjecting the U.S. to a latterday equivalent of the "Twenty-One Demands" the Japanese government attempted to impose on China during World War I.2 However, long before that point Cussler repeatedly made his view explicit in the remarks of the good guys, be it Pitt's longtime girlfriend Senator Loren Smith grilling a Japanese financier in committee, or the normally cool Pitt's own uncharacteristic political rant when they are alone together that prompts from her the joking suggestion that he follow his father, and her, into the U.S. Senate.

In the process, as was customary in Japan-themed thrillers of the early ‘90s like this one, Cussler retailed the stereotypical and simplistic cultural comment about Japanese society of the approved, "Establishment," experts to whom the mainstream media loves giving a vast platform, and then never calls out when they prove disastrously wrong. Thus we read here plenty about how the Japanese have always been and always will be a closed, culturally homogeneous, individuality-stifling society of ultra-conformists who "know their place"; follow harder, more ruthless leaders who brook no nonsense about rights, egalitarianism and democracy; and cheerfully sacrifice themselves on demand at their leaders' behest; in contrast with open, free-wheeling, diverse, tolerant, liberal, democratic America--such that many an American conservative, if deeming the Japanese irreconcilably Other and threatening, still seems to deep down envy them their model. (Thus does Pitt's rant at one point accuse Americans of "overconsuming" and preferring the "fast buck" over the foundations of prosperity and sovereignty as against the Japanese opposite--with the implication that some fault of the American culture evident in its people as a whole is the cause of the matter, and elite interests had nothing to do with the "fast buck" mentality and the supposed overconsumption. Thus does a different character, surveying a fully robotized Japanese workplace, think to himself of the "workers" operating "twenty-four hours a day without coffee breaks, lunch, or sick leave," and gratuitously add the cheap shot that such a setup would be "inconceivable to an American union leader"--implicitly endorsing the right-wing scapegoating of the '80s that held the "coddling" of the American workers whose unions were at that time being squashed to be what was holding the country back.)

It was a less than one-dimensional view of Japan that (a few token remarks about the villains not representing their country's people aside) overlooked the reality that all societies are complex, divided, conflicted, with Japan's no exception--as the "experts" should have better appreciated at the time, and would have appreciated at the time, had they bothered even to pay attention to the (Japanese) cartoons and (Japanese) video games their own children and grandchildren were growing up on. Now it all looks still more foolish. (After all, what a far cry this image of a hyper-dynamic but overcrowded superpower intent on acquiring Pacific Rim Lebensraum is from our contemporary image of a stagnating country in danger of being unable to keep itself peopled, as its supposedly ultra-conformist young people are now derided as NEETs, hikikomori, "parasite singles" in what the more prominent social commentators belatedly realized was not a purely Japanese trend!)

Cussler's espousal of these ideas to the point of building a thriller around them can seem the more significant in that, if Japanaphobia had been a theme of American popular culture for years (with Black Rain a hit and a grown-up Marty McFly being fired by his caricature of a Japanese boss the year before Dragon hit bookshelves), Cussler was still probably ahead of the curve, his book preceding by years other bestsellers emergent from that mood such as Michael Crichton's Rising Sun or Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, and so not just a sign of the times, but a likely influence on them. Indeed, I got the feeling that Clancy (whose applause for Cussler's novels I see in the front matter of my paperback copy of this book) not only read this one, but was considerably influenced by it as he wrote Debt of Honor--in the care he took to dissociate the villains from the Japanese government and the people, behind whose backs they for the most part operate; the attempt at nuclear blackmail in defense of the country's economic position; the Japanese-American intelligence agent key to exposing the villains' plans; and even the assault by vengeful Japanese villains on American legislators (the kidnap of Congressman Mike Diaz and Senator Loren Smith, perhaps, the germ of the idea for Debt's finale).

These days any attempt to make a movie of Dragon seems unlikely in the extreme--given how Hollywood has twice attempted to launch a Pitt franchise, and each time seen it end in very costly failure, while I suspect that, addicted as the studios are to sequels and prequels, reboots and remakes, Hollywood these days is less prone than before to adapt material that has appeared in book than in other forms (for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people read books these days, the interest of yesteryear's bestselling thrillers have a short half-life, and the Pitt franchise being rather a less hot "property" than it was in the early 2000s).3 Still, we are hearing reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie.

I suspect that if such reports have any substance to them, and the movie actually gets made, it will bear no resemblance to that book in this respect, not least given the present attitude toward Japan in the U.S. press. Cussler's book is heavy on evocations of Japan's wartime aggression and atrocities; of the fact that that Japanese Establishment responsible for them never lost power (war criminals' remaining in power, and seeing their descendants follow them to the same high places) or ceased to defend its crimes; and of the equally factual reality that that Establishment hypocritically attacks Western racism and colonialism while denying its own racism and insisting on the "uplifting" character of its colonialism. By contrast today the American press can seem more eager to see Japan rearm than the Japanese people themselves, with that people's anti-militarism leaving American commentators scratching their heads--ever obtuse toward how people actually feel in Japan, and the neighboring countries, where memories of the war do not line up neatly with what seems convenient to American neoconservatives.

1. One might add that Cussler and his characters repeatedly compare the brown paint job of the cars in question to the color of "fertilizer," and at at least one point, more directly compare it to the substance “fertilizer” is intended to evoke.
2. As it did of China, Japan demands of the U.S. concessions of strategic territory it regards as particularly significant to its interests and ambitions (outright cession of not just Hawaii but California, just as Japan had demanded the cession of the Fukien province on the opposite side of the Strait of Formosa); and cession of control over government finances and the direction of its economy, not least by demanding accept Japanese administrators in key government positions. As Cussler makes no reference to the 1915 demands I have no idea whether they were a model for him here or not. (Cussler displays little interest in Japan's imperialism prior to World War II, and is all too reflective of the kind of comment available to most Americans at the time in that the experts tended in general to have no knowledge or interest in Japanese history, about which little was available in English--as many an anime fan learns when their interest is stoked in, say, the Shinsengumi and tries to read up on them.)
3. Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels had been around for three decades in the early 2000s, but this particular action-adventure series, like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, weathered the end of the Cold War and the broader collapse of the action-adventure fiction market rather better than most of the competition. Moreover, the coincidence of its release with one of the twenty-first century's most catastrophic events would seem to have helped make 2001's Pitt novel, Valhalla Rising, a stronger than usual seller; while the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity seems to have strengthened the interest of Hollywood in the rights to comparable thriller series (like Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series, which got a movie version in 2007, and the Pitt novels, which got their second crack at the big screen in 2005's Sahara). No such inducements to Hollywood's giving Pitt another chance have been seen since.

Review: Dragon, by Clive Cussler

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

As a reader of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels I have long felt that Cussler hit his peak with his early 500-pagers--his first cracks at what book critics in the '70s were, in the wake of bestsellers like those of Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, calling "super-thrillers." Those books were specifically 1986's Cyclops, 1988's Treasure, 1990's Dragon, and 1992's Sahara.

Of the four I have tended to think Dragon the weakest. In fact, where I read the other three straight through, cover to cover, on first picking them up, I remember skimming long stretches of Dragon--and only recently picked it up again.

I think I still like the other three better. But my impression of this one is more favorable than before--even if looking at the book again I am reminded of what I did not like about it so much. If there is vigor, briskness and ingenuity here, Cussler had also been very productive for two decades at the time he wrote this one and, like most writers at that stage of things, was reusing significant elements of his older work. The derelict ship in the book's opening sequence, the associated marine disaster, the involvement of Asian shipping in it, very obviously recall the plot of Deep Six. So does the structure of what follows--not least in its failings. The opening incident has a very great deal to commend it--a robust combination of suspense, action and gadgetry that includes the book's finest "set piece," with the manner of Pitt's involvement in the disaster giving a stronger than usual dramatic edge to his desire to get the culprits (it isn't just "Someone killed my favorite second cousin" this time), while also laying key groundwork for the finale. Still, at bottom the kind of thing that in a Bond film would probably be packed into the few minutes of the pre-credits scene, here it takes up almost a quarter of the book before the investigation and associated adventure properly begins. Moreover that adventure has a comparatively disjointed feel. An early display of self-assertion on Pitt's part apart, the book consists of a weary Pitt time and again being told to take a long flight out to some scene to perform some incredibly unlikely and hazardous task by government officials previously unknown to us who are the ones actually managing the crisis and solving the mystery as they send Pitt off after this clue or to perform that task. (Indeed, I could not think of any prior Pitt adventure which was not only so scattershot--a quality epitomized for me by the junket to Germany--but in which Pitt was so passive.)

Moreover, where such disjointedness in thrillers of this type is so often a matter of a writer trying to cram in more action than the frame of the narrative can hold, the book, while offering plenty of adventure, danger and violence, is relatively light on "action," if one thinks of this as physical confrontation, and especially interpersonal combat, between hero and villain. The good guys have their first proper brushes with the enemy only a third of the way in, and Pitt his first contact with enemy agents after page 200 of my 542 page paperback edition, after which there is still less than we tend to get in the bigger Pitt books. The principal car chase has Pitt pursuing a vehicle with no human inside it, while there is just one proper shootout, and that shoehorned in that action-cramming way (the villains electing to send what feels like a platoon of ninjas to take Pitt out, just because he seems "a threat," resulting in a set piece that could have been easily excised without doing the slightest damage to the narrative). Indeed, if Pitt's personal motive for "getting to the bottom of things" are stronger than usual, the way in which things play out mean that there is no final face-to-face confrontation with any of the villains, these in the end destroyed impersonally or left to others with which to deal. (The final fate of the figure set up as "the big bad" is very anticlimactic, particularly given that Cussler gives us a suitably Bond movie-like capture-the-hero-and-then-chat-with-him-over-a-luxurious-dinner scene before that.)

From the standpoint of flow and of focus the result is a far cry from what we got in, for example, Sahara, once the Calliope gets upriver. Still, if it does not work in every way on the whole it tends to work very well indeed. Disjointed as the narrative was, I still kept turning the pages, in part because Cussler keeps the pace brisk (helped in this by the frequent changes of scene the structure allows), while if feeling like a collection of bits the bits, even the shoehorned bits, tend to be very good (as with that shootout with the ninjas), such that the reuse of old elements is often to superior results (Dragon never dragging the way Deep Six often did). If that still does not quite put it on a level with favorites like Sahara, Treasure or Cyclops, it pleasantly surprised me again and again by reminding me just how good these adventures were at their very best, and still beats just about anything else in the Dirk Pitt series for sheer entertainment.

Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin, Masters of the Novelized Wargame

In learning that Tom Clancy, while getting the byline on the cover, had a cowriter in wargame designer Larry Bond, one may wonder which of them had the greater hand in producing what is for many the definitive techno-thriller of its kind Given how no later Clancy novel hewed so much in the direction of a "novelized wargame" one may suspect that it was more Larry Bond's book than Clancy's--and the impression is for me confirmed by the three novels Larry Bond did write afterward in which he did get the byline (while a cowriter of his own got the "junior partner" treatment, Patrick Larkin). These are, of course, 1989's Red Phoenix, 1991's Vortex, and 1993's Cauldron.

Some may think that when I write of Bond as writing a novelized wargame I say this derisively. I do not. The books' emphasis on the "big picture," on the unfolding of their scenario and the movement of the "pieces," was for me their great virtue. In contrast with some of their colleagues the author(s) had no pretense to being Flaubert--and wasted little time trying to interest me in characters who were simply not all that interesting, or impress us with stylistic flourishes (apart from occasional awkward attempts to dramatize reactions by having characters theatrically "shake their heads" or frown in the middle of a train of thought). Bond was astute enough to start his stories with a bang, and get the shooting going in a big way a third of the way in, with the narrative ranging from the councils of government to the skullduggery of spies and commandos and coup plotters, and later, from the frontlines of mechanized battles to dogfights in the air to the bridges of warships, and even events on the "home front" as well. The generally brief scenes changed quickly, and as the above suggests, the techno-military action was plentiful and varied, while the authors made a point of keeping us apprised of the larger situation, adding up to a satisfyingly comprehensive view. In the course of those books I was unlikely to encounter anything quite so over-the-top exciting as, for example, Dale Brown offered at his best, but the Bond-Larkin books were, for me at least, the most consistently and broadly engaging; books that were easy to get into, and which tended to proceed relatively smoothly afterward, avoiding clunkiness and turgidity even as they ran to over five hundred pages in hardcover.

Certainly this characterizes the first of those books. As the title's evocation of Red Storm Rising suggests, this is the most Red Storm Rising-like of the books, with U.S. and South Korean forces battling an invasion of the South by the Soviet-backed North, and the novel offering a wide-field view of the action by land, sea and air as seen through a long list of "dramatis personae" (the authors' own term, in the listing of them he offers at the front of his book). In considering that scenario I think it worth noting that while scenarios of conflict on the Korean peninsula were to become very well-worn, they were still comparatively fresh at the time of his book's release (much more so than Soviet tank armies rolling through the Fulda Gap, or Soviet moves on the Persian Gulf). The scenarios, if never very plausible, was also more so than it would later be, when the North Koreans lost Soviet backing and saw their economy wither, while the South grew only richer, more politically stable, and stronger (one of the world's most industrialized and wealthiest countries, facing off against one of the world's poorest). One result is that as a Red Storm Rising-in-miniature (a major regional conflict rather than a world war-level conflict) it is competently executed, and even comes with a twist ending. Indeed, the comparative ease of following events along, perhaps not unrelated to the more manageable scale of the scenario (recalling Red Storm Rising I realize I understood things at sea and on Iceland well enough, but generally had just a vague idea of things on the ground in Germany as I read my way through), and its relative novelty, meant that even if it did not reach the heights of the big book from 1986 (what here could compare with that earlier novel's Battle of the Atlantic?), I actually liked it better overall.

Still, I find the other two books the Bond-Larkin team produced the more original and striking in their ways. In opting for the rarely utilized setting of southern Africa, Vortex did not simply relocate the familiar U.S.-Soviet clash to a new region, but went for something a bit less familiar and a bit more complex. Here apartheid is on its way out in South Africa, but a senior hardliner, Karl Vorster, schemes his way to a seizure of power he uses to try and turn back the clock, complete with a reconquest of newly independent Namibia. Cuba's Fidel Castro, just as he did when South Africa previously attacked its neighbors, responded by intervening militarily, sending his armed forces to help the Namibians resist the invasion--and drawing Soviet support in after him. This sets in motion what, due to the unwillingness of the U.S. to either back the new South African government, or side with the Cubans in stopping it, becomes a complex, multi-sided game in which the United States aims to prevent both Vorster's victory, and the Soviet bloc's getting the upper hand in the region. Moreover, the novelty and intricacy were complemented by a greater than usual plausibility for the genre (and indeed, probably these authors' best-grounded scenario thus far). At the same time, if I did not usually read Bond's books for their characters, there was a bit more than the usual of such interest here. Vorster and his clique made more than usually memorable villains, while along with the well-wrought geopolitical maneuvering and military action I found myself looking forward to catching up with foreign correspondent Ian Sherfield as he pursued his story on the ground.

The third book, Cauldron, was not quite so original--at least at first glance. It was a fairly straightforward collision of two sides, with the U.S. fighting a plain and simple war to stop an invasion of an ally--or in this case, allies. That the enemy, in this case, was a Franco-German-led "European Confederation" ("Eurcon") may also seem fairly typical of the early '90s, with anxiety about U.S. industrial decline, German reunification, the apparent consolidation of the European Union, and questions about the cohesion of the Western alliance amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and fears of a turn from free trade to neomercantilist trading blocs leading to a spate of U.S. vs. Germany techno-thrillers.

It has to be admitted that the scenario looks rather strained today. Still, apart from displaying their usual competence in handling the techno-military side of things, Bond-Larkin were more sophisticated than any of their colleagues about laying the groundwork. (Indeed, I found myself wondering whether he had not been looking at theories of international politics not normally associated with the genre--the sort of stuff that uses words like "imperialism.") Here the West Europeans, particularly a France and Germany whose going their own way precipitates the collapse of the NATO alliance, turn the newly ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe into semi-colonies, an unstable, uncomfortable arrangement in a situation of deepening trade war, and deepening global economic downturn, which in turn contributes to an influx of refugees from the global South. Callous and exploitative mishandling of the refugee crisis by EurCon triggers a revolt in Hungary against their client government, prompting aggressive military intervention by French forces that soon has them more broadly fighting the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and then staging an outright invasion of those nations to keep them under Confederation control. The U.S., with what remain to it of its European allies, intervenes to stop their aggression, while EurCon strikes up a deal with Russia (weakened, unstable, but still very heavily armed), raising the risk of things getting even uglier, fast . . .

Of course, things (fortunately) did not work out quite the way laid out in the novel. Still, Bond's greater than usual sensitivity to some of the forces that drive international politics gives the book a greater than usual interest almost thirty years later, especially with a heavily industrialized Germany treating its European "partners" as a periphery, imposing unpopular economic terms from above, and even rearming for the sake of a greater "world role," while trade war resurges and the ultra-right is on the march everywhere.

Afterward, quite naturally, I looked forward to Bond's next book offering something similar, the more so as by that point I had read pretty much all of the books of the '80s and early '90s that had looked promising, and there was not much new material of the type coming out. (In the mid-1990s Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle were on hiatus, at least where this genre was concerned; Payne Harrison seemed to have moved on; etcetera, etcetera.) However, like their colleagues, Bond and Larkin changed tacks at this point, with the next (and last) two books Bond would write with Larkin (or with anyone for the next decade), following a more conventional course in The Enemy Within.

The Enemy Within was undistinguished by any great originality of premise, or sophistication in establishing it, such as had been so much an asset in the last two books. What it boiled down to was that the Iranians (in spite of what seemed a change of government holding out the hope of better U.S.-Iranian relations) were after control of the Gulf, pure and simple--a well-worn cliché years earlier. And they were contriving to narrow the U.S. edge by tying up American forces at home so as to give them a window of opportunity in which to make their move. (As it happened, Bond's former cowriter Clancy would have a story identical in these details out the same year, Executive Orders, even if the precise means the Iranians used to achieve the end were different.) And by tale's end it proved to be not Red Phoenix-Vortex-Cauldron stuff, but more conventional spies-and-commandos stuff, with an implausible load of melodrama, with the hero and villain having a history culminating in treachery and mortal conflict, and a love story prominent in the narrative's unfolding, and the hero going rogue at the eleventh hour to stop the bad guy who used to be his friend as in so many '80s action movies. Not what I hoped for from Bond and company, it was still a brisk enough read that I was not unentertained, and quickly polished it off, but looked ahead to the next one in the hopes that it would offer a return to the older approach.

Alas, it was a sequel to The Enemy Within, continuing the adventures of that book's heroes, Peter Thorn and Helen Gray, with a scenario that was still more thoroughly standard B-movie, down to the heroes having to go rogue, and stop the villains all by their lonesome, in a raid on the enemy facility in which they go in guns blazing against vastly superior opposition but somehow mow down lots and lots of enemies with their guns as that enemy for some reason can't shoot straight to save their lives (literally). I was not, of course, entirely averse to such, but, again, it was not what I had been hoping for, the more in as this kind of fare was already so much more commonplace than what the Bond-Larkin team used to do, and a Clive Cussler, or Matthew Reilly, did it with more flair, too. Along with the fact that my enthusiasm for the techno-thriller was on the wane, I am not sure that I would have rushed out to pick up Bond's next afterward--but as it was Bond, like so many of his colleagues before him, went on hiatus too. He did not produce another collaboration with Larkin, and indeed, nothing at all for six years. The next novel to appear under Bond's name was the Jim DeFelice-coauthored First Team series, which debuted in 2004, after which Bond began to produce the Jerry Mitchell submarine novels as well (2005). Indeed, the body of Bond-authored or coauthored work in the twenty-first century was, in fact, to become quite considerable (17 novels in 2004-2018, over one a year on average). One was even a sequel to Red Phoenix, 2015's Red Phoenix Burning. They did, undeniably, find readers. Yet, as with so much else in the twenty-first history of the print techno-thriller, in regard to originality, flair, commercial weight and pop cultural impact, it was a mere epilogue to the genre's resurgence in the 1970s, boom in the 1980s, and bust in the 1990s.

H.G. Wells' "Bookish Illiteracy"

In his Experiment in Autobiography there is a point at which H.G. Wells suggests that the "caricature-individualities" of his realist novels might not seem very relevant for long, that civilization would simply have moved on.

Of course, as with so much else in Wells, his creations remain relevant precisely because civilization did not move on in the way in which he imagined. The problems with which the world was wrestling in his time remain the ones which bedevil it now--the organization of human economic and social life in line with not just the possibilities presented but the necessities imposed by the advance of technology and of knowledge broadly. Economic life, war, "sanity"--considering the situation we are in now it can feel as if society has made little to no progress at all, the past century a waste or worse that has left people scarcely trying even as the challenge has got bigger and the stakes higher.

For the moment, though, I have in mind something rather lighter than those problems, like the "bookish illiteracy" of one of those caricature-individualities he specifically raised as likely to have lost its interest before very long, Alfred Polly (of his 1910 novel The History of Mr. Polly). Mr. Polly, Wells tells us, "specialised in," as he put it, "the disuse of English." This was because, while he was fascinated by "words rich in suggestion" and "loved] a novel and striking phrase," his limited formal education left him with "little or no mastery of the mysterious pronunciation of English"--with this getting worse the more exotic the material got. To him Boccacio is "Bocashieu," Rabelais "Rabooloose."

Still, in spite of his familiarity with such figures his reading was less a matter of middlebrow chasing after classics than of omnivorousness for anything in print, at least insofar as it promised to satisfy a taste for manly adventure, which was what got him into reading in the first place. "Penny dreadfuls" were a big part of his reading diet in those early adolescent years when he was bitten by the bug, with their Haggardesque tales of tropical exploration and dives into the mysteries beneath the sea and battles where young Polly vicariously "led stormers against well-nigh impregnable forts," and "rammed and torpedoed ships, one against ten." And the habit stuck, such that later he liked "Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne."*

Considering all this it seems to me that this is all very far from being irrelevant. Indeed, those of us who have ever been bookish have likely been that before we became "literate" (How do you get to be good at reading if you don't do much of it? And who has not mispronounced words they read but did not hear?); or our taste in that reading (as we are unlikely to become enthusiastic readers if it is all a matter of "eating your vegetables"). Certainly looking back at what--and how--I read at his age I do not think I was so different. If I now bore the readers of this blog by writing about people like Balzac--and Wells' realist novels--the author favored back then was Clive Cussler, a teller of adventure stories where exploration and the sea and battles all figure very prominently (if with rather less of the Victorian sensibility that so colored Polly's consumption), while I might add that even today Dumas' Vicomte appeals to me less than does his preceding tales of Athos, Aramis, Porthos and D'Artagnan.

Of course, it may be the case that Wells did not imagine this ceasing to be the case so much as he imagined it not being the case for anyone in adulthood--that complete literacy would be universalized, and certainly that anyone bookish in inclination would not, through the premature end of a poorly conducted formal education, pronounce "Boccacio" as "Bocashieu." In that case one could give him some credit for being right about Polly-like "bookish illiteracy" becoming less relevant--though not in the way he expected or hoped. In our time it is not illiteracy that appears to be on the wane, but rather bookishness, particularly the kind associated with plain and simple literary pleasure.

* Vicomte is the third novel in Dumas' cycle about the Musketeers, after the original The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After--and not just to Polly but anyone expecting a swashbuckler in the style of the prior two apt to be a disappointment, one reason why film adaptations of Vicomte de Bragelonne are very rare next to the others. (Still, they do take part of the book--specifically the portion now remembered as The Man with the Iron Mask, where we do get some "blood and swash.")

Raymond Benson's the Union Saga (Extended James Bond Series)

Originally Posted on December 11, 2016.

When I first read Raymond Benson's Bond novels I actually found them rather more to my taste than the Fleming originals. They were more accessibly written--Benson not writing Bond as if he were writing Emma Bovary. (The "indirect glance," as Umberto called it, the nonlinearity that made the books rougher going than I expected, are absent here.) Benson's novels also--for the most part--dispensed with the less appealing bits of the characterization. (Bond is getting on in years--but much less the grouchy old Edwardian Tory civil servant overdue for a trip to Shrublands.)

The books were, I might add, more cinematic in their pacing (the overlong mah jongg game in Zero Minus Ten apart), and in their action. (Rarely on a par with the Clive Cussler novels that then set the standard for me, but satisfying nonetheless--with Never Dream of Dying almost everything one can ask for on that score.)

For much the same reason, I also preferred Benson to John Gardner.

Of course, in the years since I have become more appreciative of Fleming's strengths (and Gardner's)--and of the weaknesses of the Benson novels (apart from the obvious purists' complaint that they are just not like Fleming's, as they could not have been in a different age and market).

Still, the Benson novels have their pleasures. And of course, they are a significant part of the franchise. This is partly a question of sheer volume--there being six of them, plus three movie tie-in novels (of the last three Pierce Brosnan films).

They are interesting, too, because of their being the last literary expression of the franchise before the much-touted 2006 reboot of the Bond films in Casino Royale. Since that time the franchise has had its successes (not least the billion-dollar gross of Skyfall), but the series has been less prolific, and in its identity much less stable. In fourteen years we have had just four Bond novels--as compared with the years when Bond novels came along annually--with the series zigzagging wildly in respect of setting, premise, tone. So far no author has written more than one, while each did wildly different things with their books--Faulks and Boyd trying to pick things up just where Fleming left off in the '60s; Horowitz retreating even farther into the '50s to write a Goldfinger sequel; and Deaver attempting a radical update.

The result is that Benson offers the last real continuity with the older books, and the older conception.

And it might be added, the books are interesting for having been written by a man who came to the series out of its fandom--Benson's first public association with the franchise his authorship of the James Bond Bedside Companion.

All this makes his contributions well worth a look. To that end I review the three novels of Benson's "Union" trilogy depicting Bond's battle with a new, SPECTRE-like criminal organization--High Time to Kill, DoubleShot and Never Dream of Dying.

Also just reviewed is the follow-up, and final Benson novel, which continued one of Never's plot threads, The Man with the Red Tattoo.

Will the New Chatbots Mean the End of the Novelist?

Over the years I have remarked again and again the reports that writers' wages--and certainly the wages of writers of fiction--have long been collapsing. The result is that, while the chances to "make a living" writing fiction (or anything else) have always been few, the path far from straightforward, the remuneration usually paltry relative to the effort and skill one put in--and one might add, society at large deeply unsympathetic to the travails in question (just ask Balzac, or London)--it does not seem unreasonable to say that matters have just gone on getting worse this way.

Consider, for instance, how even in the middle years of the last century there were writers who scraped by (sometimes did better than scrape by) selling short stories to pulp fiction magazines. Any such thing seems unimaginable today--in an age where writers have it so tough that they are giving away vast amounts of quite readable content, and finding no takers. Meanwhile what could be salable seems an ever smaller category as a good many old reliable genres die (consider action-adventure fiction, for example), and what does sell, if always reliant on authors' platforms and "brand names" to persuade consumers to take a look (just remember the unpleasant truths spoken by Balzac's vile Dauriat), the reliance on those supports would seem to have only grown greater and greater, while one is struck by how new platforms and new brand names are not emerging, hinting at the game being one of milking an aging and dwindling consumer base. (Just look at the paperback rack. The thriller novelists you will find there are pretty much the same ones you saw in the '90s--James Patterson, John Grisham and company, with Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler still writing somehow to go by the bylines.)

Indeed, it seems to me safe to say that the key factor here has been the shift in the relation of supply to demand. People spend a lot less time reading fiction than they used to do, their leisure time increasingly consumed by audiovisual media. (I suspect that in this century far more people have played Tom Clancy video games than read Tom Clancy novels.) Meanwhile, due to the widening of educational opportunity, the number of those who endeavor to become published authors has grown, with publishing fiction, while a nearly impossible task for anyone who does not have fame or nepotism on their side, still seeming more plausible than trying to make it as a writer in the more glamorous but more closed-off film and television industry. Still, whatever one makes of the cause, the result is inarguable--and the writers' troubles may well escalate if what we are hearing about chatbots bears out. Whatever writers, critics or readers may think, publishers--who are first, last and always businessmen, moving literature as they want any other good (again, I refer you to Balzac)--prefer to keep putting out the same old stuff that has had takers in the past, and it is inconceivable that they would balk at replacing writers with chatbots. For the moment, of course, they are barred from taking such a course by the limits of those bots, which are much better at producing short work than long (and truth be told, not producing that very well). However, if we see the progress some expect they may get to the point where a human would only be needed to clean up the result--and maybe do a lot less clean-up in the process--within a decade's time, and publishers will not hesitate to exploit the possibility (such that the Jack Ryan and Dirk Pitt novels of ten years hence, and the Alex Cross novels too, may be churned out by some new iteration of GPT). The only question then would be whether there will still be a big enough audience for those books to make the venture profitable.

Why Are People Consuming Less New Music?

Last year Ted Gioia penned an interesting piece about the declining proportion of music sales for which newly created music accounts. In considering the matter I am not so sure that, as he tells us, this is no reflection of the quality of that music. (I defer to the scientific finding that—with less timbral variety and pitch content, louder, more repetitive--it is indeed getting worse, a bombastic yet flat sameness helped along by the degree to which, as Gioia himself has had prior occasion to remark, critics have become claqueurs.)

However, I do think he is right to emphasize the way in which the industry's executives have conducted themselves--sticking with the old and familiar as they mine it for whatever additional profits they can and displaying the rankest laziness and cowardice with regard to the hard work, and risk-taking, involved in discovering and cultivating new talent, and new creations. Admittedly the Suits have always done this--as Balzac makes clear in his portrait of the utterly vile Parisian publishing king Dauriat. Yet the tendency to this behavior seems to have just gone on getting more and more extreme across the entire range of the entertainment-industrial complex, from the movies (where every one of the top ten hits at the North American box office last year was a sequel or remake), to TV (where you can barely tell what decade it is from the line-up), to fiction (where the thriller writers whose names you see on the paperback rack are Patterson, Grisham, Clancy, Cussler--just as was the case back in the twentieth century).

I know the world of music journalism less well than I do those others, but unless it is very different from what prevails in those other areas (where suck-up entertainment reporters write as if they expect every last one of us to grow incontinent with enthusiasm at the announcement of each and every new remake of some classic), I applaud his readiness to criticize the industry. Noteworthy, too, is his sparing a word for what hard times it means for those musicians struggling to "make it," which struggles he acknowledges as meaning something for the culture we live in, and meriting some sympathy--a thing even rarer in our journalism. After all, certainly where print fiction is concerned we almost never see anyone with the standing of Gioia spare a thought for the creatives who have not yet made their names--the default mode instead a sniveling defense of how publishing treats them, and sneers at those who aren't "professionals" yet as worth no one's time, with the "liberal" Guardian and Salon disgracing themselves by publishing particularly nasty pieces of aspiring writer-bashing by the bitter little trolls who had once been slush pile readers. ("The shocking truth about the slush pile" declared the title of the Guardian piece. Rather it was a reminder that we are long past the day when people like Balzac or London could tell the truth about such things in fiction or nonfiction, confirming the not-at-all-shocking truth that their industry, and the media generally, like the society we live in generally, operate by what Carl Sagan called the "Tin Rule": "Suck up to those above you and abuse those below you.") If anything, Gioia's not swimming with this filthy tide merits at least as much applause as his readiness to call out his industry's insiders.

Where the Crawdads Sing and the Bestseller List

Not long ago I returned to the depressing activity of perusing recent bestseller lists. I say depressing because of how consistently they confirm every one of my worst suspicions about the state of American publishing--most obviously that an industry which, behind its wearisomely upbeat PR, is in terminal decline in an age in which long-form reading is dying out, and ever more reliant on trafficking in the long superannuated Big Names of the last century, ever more closed to new talent and new ideas, ever more repetitive in its content, ever more blatant in a crassness that has never been better than unbearable, ever more sanctimonious in regard to those outside it and critical of it.

This has certainly seemed to me the case with thrillers after my attempt at a systematic examination of that important corner of publishing, where one finds nothing but the big names and themes of the '90s (legal thrillers by Grisham, forensic thrillers by Cornwell, Patterson's stuff, remained dominant, further down the list "new" Clancy and "new" Cussler novels continue to appear, etc.). And so does it go wherever else I look, with this even proving the case with apparently "new" names offering what may be sui generis work.

Like Delia Owens, whose Where the Crawdads Sing was a bestseller for three years--still on the list as Reese Witherspoon (whose book club, which apparently rivals Oprah's now, did much to promote Owens) produced the film.

Contrary to what some may have thought Owens was not some "first-time" writer catapulted to fame and fortune by her fiction, but, in what is the pattern less touted by the sleazebags of the "You Too Can Become an Author!" industry and the rags-to-riches story-flogging mainstream media but always far more common, an already famous person cashing in on their position with fiction. Already an internationally bestselling author in the 1980s with Cry of the Kalahari, she even enjoyed considerable non-authorial celebrity--as a result of her husband being suspected of murder in Zambia.

Such people can reasonably hope to get a novel into print via trad-publishing with all its resources--not least the ability to command the applause of les claqueurs and make the other "ugly" preparations required for success in the "theater of literature." And when what they offer is, in spite of its superficially non-genre appearance, a murder mystery which in its identity politics and "ecological" sensibility and, above all, its misanthropic outlook, is in line with the zeitgeist as felt by those postmoderns who lead the book-buying audience these days, they can hope not just for success, but grand success--in this case, one of the highest selling books of all time.

By contrast, others can't hope to get their books even looked at--especially if they offer a different point of view from that prevailing among the middle-aged, middlebrows of Park Avenue and the coastal elite to which it never lets us forget it belongs.

Who's Reading Clive Cussler?

Once again it occurred to me to go to Goodreads to check out the evidences it offered of interest in one of those authors I so often find myself writing about, Clive Cussler in this case.

As I expected (because it seems to have been particularly popular with fans--it was certainly my personal favorite--and because of the movie version) Sahara headlined the list with regard to the number of ratings.

What I should have expected, but didn't, was the fewness of those ratings--the book having fewer than 58,000.

I also didn't expect (though I should have) that the next most popular book was the other one with a movie made out of it (and the word "Titanic" in the title) Raise the Titanic!, with less than half Sahara's unprepossessing number of ratings--a mere 26,000, with the number falling from there. Next on the list was the follow-up to Sahara, Inca Gold, followed by Atlantis Found--boosted by the Atlantis theme, I guess--and then Valhalla Rising, which because of its uncanny coincidence with the horrific events of September 2001, got a sales bump that gave it the only place any Dirk Pitt novel enjoys on the Publisher's Weekly top-ten-of-the-year lists, standing at #8.

Where the main-line Clive Cussler (and not Clive and Dirk Cussler)-authored Dirk Pitt books were concerned it seemed that older books tended to do less well than newer ones. Treasure and Cyclops (two books I held in particularly high regard as a fan) trailed the later (I thought, repetitive and tired) Shock Wave and Flood Tide and even the particularly disappointing Trojan Odyssey. Still, it struck me that the more recent, Goodreads-era continuations and tie-ins, the latest installments of which one still finds on grocery store paperback racks, did not better them. (The most “successful” of the post-Trojan Odyssey books was The Treasure of Khan, the most successful of the tie-ins the Grant Blackwood coauthored Spartan Gold, with about half of what Raise the Titanic! got.)

Altogether the pattern seems to me to fit what I saw with Robert Ludlum not so long ago, the biggest hits generally outdoing the less successful ones, later books doing better than earlier ones, and the books that got adaptations to other media doing better than those that did not, all of which combined to put a particularly popular later novel that got a major twenty-first century film adaptation far and away at the top--and almost everything else in the range of 20,000 ratings or less. Given that they were both roughly contemporaneous authors producing broadly similar fiction (writers who came along in the '70s and quickly made their mark with espionage stories of the more action-adventure-oriented type) the parallel may not be so surprising, but I also find myself thinking of how different Cussler could be from Ludlum. Cussler's novels were, generally, more simply plotted and more simply and plainly written than Ludlum's, and especially by the time of books like Cyclops, rather more summer blockbuster-like in subject matter and feel--more accessible, more fun for most, I would imagine. Certainly Cussler had his politics, same as the other genre authors did, but it probably mattered that, if probably not too different from those of his colleague Tom Clancy's, treated relatively casually in comparison with Clancy's stridency in such matters, and because the way the whole was put together one did not take him so seriously (because the plot points revolved around things like secret bases on the moon)--with the result that the books still dated, but perhaps less bothersomely for many who do not necessarily agree with him (so long as they do not look too closely--as one is reminded when recalling the furor over Sahara). Nevertheless, to go by what I see here, the fact would not seem to have helped him quite so much where his readership was concerned.

The Half-Life of the Interest of Popular Fiction

I recall seeing a data set which showed that of some 60 million copies of works of fiction sold in the first half of 2018, some 3.6 million were classics--6 percent or so in a period that I have no reason to regard as unrepresentative. That is scarcely more than the reported sales of just those books with James Patterson's name on their covers (not long ago credited with accounting for about 4 percent of the total), which means that Patterson alone was coming close to matching the sales of every famous old author you have ever heard of put together, from Jane Austen to Emile Zola.

Comparisons aside, this works out to not much more than a copy a year for every forty to fifty Americans. Moreover, consider the reasons for the sales. How many of them are for students in school assigned the books? How many for restocking libraries? And how many to make a coffee table or a book shelf look good? In short, few of even this small percentage of sales are a matter of individuals voluntarily, seriously choosing to read the works in question. Meanwhile, even those who do pick up such books without some educator demanding it do so because they feel they "have" to do so as self-respecting persons of education and culture, many in the most "middlebrow" fashion. The result is that those who pick up such books very often because they genuinely enjoy even a part of "the canon" is very small indeed.

Why raise this all too familiar point again? The reason is that it seems a useful point of comparison with the sales of those books that have become old without becoming classics. Sales of these are harder to glean from the available data. But it seems that even the popular books of yesteryear acquire the disadvantages of age without the advantages of being classics, commercially as in other ways. One is not assigned to read them in school, and librarians feel less obliged to keep copies in stock. Meanwhile individuals looking to show off are less likely to think they can impress anyone by having them on their coffee table or their book shelf, and few will feel they "have" to read them for any reason. All that automatically means fewer sales, and even beyond sales, less chance of their being noticed by those who might actually find them interesting. And when people do happen upon them, in contrast with those approaching Important Literature, with which all but the most callow are prepared to show some patience because even if it is not all that entertaining when they first pick it up it (perhaps, because it has come down to us from another time, with different standards) it may yet prove worth their while, no such case is made for popular fiction. Facing it their demand to be entertained immediately, significantly and fluently is uncompromising, and it must be admitted that given the narrowness of most personal tastes, very little is likely to make the cut.

All of this affects all fiction. (Certainly those who insist that anything they pick up conform to a 2020s' standard of "wokeness" will find very, very little older fiction bearable.) However, I suspect that it is a particular problem for the thriller genre, and especially thrillers of the "high," big picture type. Political thrillers derive much of their interest from the topicality of their premise--and that tends to decline very quickly. (I recently read a Customer Review of a Robert Ludlum novel from the 1980s in which the reviewer complained about the book's being set in the 1980s, as if the reader were somehow cheated by that! Such a complaint is of course absurd--but reflective of how easily such work loses its interest.)

Meanwhile, with visual media leading and print fiction following, the expectation has increasingly been of brisker, more action-packed thrillers; and in line with the demand for action and briskness (and not only that) the books easier to read. (Back in the '60s, the '70s, even the '80s John le Carrè managed to be among the top bestsellers of his day. Now even a Robert Ludlum likely would not make the cut. Besides the problem posed by how today's superabundance of spy-fi sets the standard with regard to pacing and thrills, he expects his readers to know words like "pavane" and "bromide," which is totally a deal-breaker in an age in which Dan Brown sets the standard with regard to prose.)

Indeed, looking back the fact that I read so much of those thrillers strikes me as having been a matter of picking up the '80s-era hits of Clancy and Ludlum and Cussler back when those books’ authors were, if already passing their peak of popularity, still fairly new, and those writers still fairly prominent on the bestseller lists; in my having a stronger-than-average in their themes; and in the early ‘90s being a period before visual media so totally supplanted those sorts of thrillers in their niche; all of which went to form a rather different interest. But formed that interest was, and so here I am writing about those authors and their books all these decades later, long after, to all evidences, general interest in them has decayed to nearly nothing.

The Reading We Don't Do in School

I have previously had occasion to mention on this blog my reading Graham Greene's brief but valuable essay about "our literary friends"--by which Greene meant those writers who may not "do us credit" in the eyes of the world but whom we truly enjoyed reading when we were young.

Considering the eternal debate about whether or not literacy is declining, it seems to me that the fact that fewer young people have such friends is probably part of the problem. We talk a great deal about how the schools may be failing in their educational mission (in part because their role is the more obvious, in part because teacher-bashing and school-bashing serves the agenda of the "privatize everything" crowd), but overlook how the schools never carried the whole burden. If people on average read better in the past than they do now, this was at least partly because they did more free reading, and likely got more than is appreciated out of material that, to the eyes of the skeptical middlebrow, looked unpromising.

Certainly looking back I think reading such fiction helped me in that way. My reading, admittedly, was not wholly unvaried, but as you may recall John le Carré was way too "literary" for me. (Indeed, even Ian Fleming was too literary for me in those days.) Rather what I went for were the jet-setting shoot 'em up spy novels, the military techno-thrillers, the big summertime blockbusters on paper generally. I inclined, in particular, to Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy (and Larry Bond, and Dale Brown, and Eric Van Lustbader, etcetera, etcetera).

Were the books those authors produced "great literature?" No, not by the standards of "the ancients," or the Medievals, or Franco-Jamesian realism, or Zolaesque naturalism, or Modernism or postmodernism or any other "high cultural" standard with which I am familiar. Nevertheless, taking up those books I was not just practicing my reading comprehension skills, but doing so on material that still had me coping with long, information-heavy, sometimes complexly and intricately structured and detailed narratives (lots of subplots, lots of narrative threads, lots of viewpoint characters). Material that, because of its subject matter, made demands on, and sometimes expanded, my vocabulary and my general knowledge. Material that, while not doing so in the more artistically striking ways, or for the sake of exploring important or understanding of lived life, demanded close attention, and patience, and a readiness to puzzle things out here and there (if only for the sake of following what was going on in some action sequence).

I might add that as one who not only enjoyed reading such fiction but was already aspiring to write it I was more attentive to the books than most. Where the conventionally "dutiful" student of creative writing spends their time trying to write "beautiful" sentences, I went so far as to outline many of these books in detail, trying to work out how one development led to the next, how one scene led to the next; how one fleshed out a narrative so that what might have been boiled down into a summary of a few pages was a whole book; how they distinguished between what was worth conveying and not worth conveying to the reader, and how best it might be conveyed so that the reader would be able to follow along, and preferably, enthusiastic about doing so.

Soon enough my interests as reader and writer changed, and I spent less time with those friends than I did before. But looking back I can see that it was a training nonetheless, a broader one than even that to which I was aspiring as a would-be novelist.

The Savage Doctor--Doc Savage

Decades before the action film subordinated filmic structure and pacing to thrills (the "thirty-nine bumps" that became standard for the Bond films, and which in turn set the standard), pulp writers did the same thing for print fiction, as Lester Dent demonstrates in his Doc Savage novels.

And I must say that the approach has its charms here. In contrast with the more measured pace of so much other earlier fiction, the briskness of old pulp writing holds up surprisingly well, even by the standards of today's action films--and still more, by the standard of today's novels. I won't deny the roughness of the approach, reflecting not just the pace of the story, but the pace at which it was written in those paid-by-the-word days. In line with the priority on pace and thrills logic is casually tossed out the window, while the writing is more tell than show, slight on details and even where minimalist, far from crisp and lean given its tendency to repeat the same few details over and over again. There can hardly be much suspense when the author harps on the hero's invincibility every chance he gets, and we learn very early on that there will always be a hokey out.

Yet the tale, helped by that spareness with description, is so brisk and there is such a spirit of fun that I didn't really care how little sense it made, and if none of the cliffhangers left me wondering if the heroes would make it through this one, I still read to find out how they made it, and even though I was sure the answer would be ridiculous (and was usually right), I felt fairly forgiving. In the process Dent crams into fifty thousand words as much in the way of plot twists, action and adventure as Clive Cussler (whose Dirk Pitt owes a very great deal to Savage) does into books three times' that size, and few use such space nearly so well as Cussler--one reason why, even after having a lot less interest in most contemporary popular fiction of the kind than I used to, I still find myself enjoying these sorts of brief, punchy, vigorous tales.

Doc Savage and Dirk Pitt

If I really got started discussing or even listing the characters who have been influenced by Lester Dent's classic protagonist Doc Savage, I would probably never finish. After all, Superman, another New Yorker named Clark of far more than ordinary human ability whose deceased father raised him from infancy for a life of world-saving heroism and periodically retreats to a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic (yes, Dent uses the term, and near the beginning of the very first Savage adventure too), owes a very great deal to him--and we all know how much the rest of comics owes just to Superman.

Still, given how much I have written about Clive Cussler here it seems worth discussing Savage's influence on Cussler's creation, Dirk Pitt. Pitt lacks Savage's combination of omnicompetence and ultracompetence. I am not sure he can be regarded as a genius at any one thing, certainly not the more esoteric skills Savage possesses, let alone everything. (In fact, the only contemporary character I can think of as really comparable in that respect would be Martin Caidin's Doug Stavers.*)

All the same, Pitt shares the rootless, larger-than-life merry swashbuckler aspect of the character, and something of the dynamics among Savage's group is evident in Pitt's own inner circle as well, down to the ways they annoy each other. (Al Giordino's stealing Admiral Sandecker's cigars recalls for me Monk's relationship with Ham.) It is undoubtedly an important part of his appeal, contributing to the series' continuation for nearly a half century now.

* You may have noticed the initials--Doc Savage, Doug Stavers--are identical, while the first name is similar in ring, "Doug" the closest real name to "Doc" I can think of. And Caidin's lavish tributes to Doug's superhuman prowess are just as (unintentionally) funny as Dent's to his character. Still, Stavers is the very opposite of Savage's goodness, making him an awfully "Dark Messiah."