Introduction to the Gregg Press Edition of The Hunter, by Richard Stark.
Generally speaking, I don’t think writers know who they are; it’s a disability–and an advantage–they share with actors. And it’s probably just as well, really. Self-knowledge can lead to self-consciousness, and in a writer self-consciousness can only lead to self-parody. Or silence.
Whereas actors receive an endless supply of surrogate identities in the roles they’re given to play, writers tend to begin their search for identity in their predecessors. Every one of us began by imitating the writers we loved to read. Those writers had made their worlds so real and appealing for us that we tried to move in and live there.
I was the right age at the right time to be very heavily influenced by the arrival of Gold Medal books. These were in the fictional form known as the novel; but not really–or so it seemed at first. They were stripped down and lumpy and crude, like a beach buggy. Half the time they seemed little more than 50,000-word short stories; all that build-up, all those characters, all that preparation of setting and emotions and scenes and relationships, just to end in a shootout in a swamp. These yellow-spined paperbacks had compulsive strength, but without beauty, like acid rock: but they were interesting.
And either the books got better or my critical sense got worse. In any event, I began gradually to make sense among the by-lines in this new garden, and to realize that here too there were gradations from very good to very very very very bad. Once I’d separated the writers from the bricklayers, everything was fine.
Gold Medal introduced me to John D. MacDonald, Vin Packer, Chester Himes, David Goodis and, by far the most important, Peter Rabe. (Rabe’s Kill the Boss Goodbye [1956] is one of the best books, with one of the worst titles, I’ve ever read.) The understatement of violence, resulting from Rabe’s modesty of character rather than modesty of experience (which is why Hammett had it down pat and Chandler could never quite make it work), was refined in these books to a laconic hipness I could only admire from afar.
(And still do. I’ve never met Rabe, and though I’d love to I’m not sure I should. What would I say to him? What would the poor man be forced to say to me?)
Rabe was not my only teacher, nor did I learn only from the tough crime novel. One of the early Gold Medals, a beautiful western by Clifton Adams called The Desperado (1950), a novel with that same compact, understated, almost reluctant treatment of violence, first introduced me to the notion of the character adapting to his forced separation from normal society. Peter Rabe, in book after book, refined that idea.
I had discovered I was a writer when I was eleven; the world took several years longer to reach the same conclusion. By 1960, however, in my mid-’20s, I was at last a published writer (with Random House and some magazines), I’d quit my final honest job, and I was lunging shakily forward into my vocation. What I wanted to do was gather up armloads of words the way we used to gather up armloads of snowballs when I was a kid; every one with a small hard rock in the middle. I wanted to explain, but more than that I wanted to affect. We all know that feeling from having been called on the carpet in the principal’s office; as we start on that labyrinthine lie, as we tread out over that expanse of thin ice, terrified but committed to self-preservation through prevarication, we keep dropping in the suggestive detail, the pregnant inference, the apparently ingenuous reference, the double-edged word, hoping that the accumulation of technique will somehow overpower the fact that the principal has the goods on us and we don’t have a leg to stand on. That’s when the use of words creates a nervous thrill, and it was that nervous thrill I wanted to recreate, both for me and my reader, in my choice of which words to wing at the page, each one concealing its tiny hard rock. (Later, I learned that comedy uses the same methods for even more disreputable motives, but I’m talking now about my early days.)
In 1962, I was trying to write a first-person novel in which no emotion would ever be stated; only the physical side-effects of emotion would be described, as various high-tension things would happen to and around the narrator. The book was eventually finished, and published in hardcover by Random House as “361? (1962), but halfway through its writing I’d stopped for a while, deflected by an idea for a book I though of as a Gold Medal.
That’s what I wanted, of course, to have two publishers for my work, one for hardcover and one for soft. It seemed to me a very professional thing to have a second position to fall back to. Though I’d had a couple of books published by Random House my life as a self-supporting writer was far from assured and I already knew, unfortunately, that robbery was a tactic of last resort.
The idea of the book had come about in a very mundane way; I walked across the George Washington Bridge. I’d been visiting a friend about 30 mils upstate from New York, and had taken a bus back to the city. However, I’d chosen the wrong bus, one that terminated on the New Jersey side of the bridge instead of the New York side (where I could catch my subway). So I walked across the bridge, surprised at how windy it was out there (when barely windy at all anywhere else) and at how much the apparently solid bridge shivered and swung from the wind and the pummeling of the traffic. There was speed in the cars going by, vibration in the bridge under my feet, tension in the whole atmosphere.
Continued…
