Report from Santa Fe; David Morrell

Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healy Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. Hello, I'm LaRien Mills, and welcome to Report from Santa Fe. We have a special guest today, one of my favorite New Mexico authors, David Morel. Hi. Thank you for joining us. Oh, I'm happy to be here. We've been doing this a little bit for a couple of years, and it's always a joy to come back and continue the conversation. I will say it's more than a joy. It's actually a big thrill. Because what I found is you on the cover of the big, I mean, really, to be the cover of a magazine called The Big Thrill. Tell me about this cover.

Well, it's an organization called the International Spiller Writers, and they're once a month they put out the magazine, and you can see that there were a lot of other thriller authors on there, but for somebody who writes, thrillers and mysteries to have my face on that is pretty overwhelming. I thought it was absolutely delightful. You're a Canadian American novelist. You're best known. You've burst onto fame with your 1972 debut novel, First Blood, which became Rambo and the Rambo industry, was still best, you still know, there were four films that eventually made with the character, and you know, the book was published in 72, which means we're filming this in November of 2016, next year is the 45th anniversary of the book, it's never been out of print, it's been quite a ride, but the film was made 10 years afterward, it took 10 years, Steve McQueen was going to be Rambo at one time, but Steve was at that time

around 45 years old, and Vietnam was a young person's war, and they were in 75 when they thought about making it with him. There was no way he would have been believable, even though he had a chance to do the wonderful motorcycle stuff. Yeah, yeah, well because of this, and in other words, you've been called the father of the modern action novel, and you set out to do something very different, tell me about your relationship to Hemingway and what you notice in Hemingway's war and action novels. Yes, I was a professor, I was a graduate student at Penn State in American Literature, and I had gone there specifically to study Hemingway with a well-known Hemingway scholar named Philip Young, and I wanted to be a writer, since I was 17, there's a classic TV series called Route 66, and a writing for that, a man named Sterling Ciliphant had inspired me to want to be a writer, so I always wanted to do it, but I hadn't, I figured

I probably needed a day job too, so there I was at Penn State in 1968, and I had an epiphany about Hemingway, which is that while he's an artistic writer, he's also an action writer for whom the bell tolls farewell to arms to heaven have not, it's a lot of action books, and I was studying him, and it occurred to me that he had written action as if it had never been written about before, none of the pop cliches such as a gunshot rang out or gun smoke filled the air, that kind of thing, and it was as if he had invented how to write action, and I had, the epiphany I had was what if I could try to write an action book that did not feel like a genre book, and I worked on it for three years, I was a little unclear whether or not there was a market for it, but the book sold almost immediately to a publisher, and one of those wild things that happens to a first novel

it got reviewed everywhere, so the approach that I used to try to find new ways to write about action is why I've been called the father of the modern action novel. Because you change the action genre by taking out all the pop cliches of people expected, and talk about action, the standard action movie has five action scenes in it, Rambo is 96 minutes long, 53 minutes of it are action. It's very weird, if you look at movies from the 60s and 70s hit action movies, let's use James Bond novels, an example, usually they would have five major action scenes with filler between, or if I was talking about Steve McQueen as a fascinates me, bullet, a widely recognized action film, it has the car chase, it has the gunfight at San Francisco Airport, it has an earlier chase through a hospital, but that's pretty much it, most

of it's procedural, but at the time this was considered state-of-the-art, and with what I'm with first blood is, because it's one continuous action scene, so that when they made the film, which is 96 minutes long, that they discovered for promotional purposes to the American film market for overseas distributors, so they said let's condense it, how much action have we got, they discovered they had like 55 minutes or something of non-stop action out of 96 minutes, which includes the credit, so it changed the way movies were made, and the next one after that was Die Hard, which built on, and in fact in Die Hard, somebody asked Bruce Willis, who do you think you are, Rambo, so you can sometimes chase this in the 80s. Well, it was one of the most influential and most watched movies, even politically. Now you say that the book had a longer life because you kept the immediate politics of the time out of it, but in Berlin and Poland, tell me about how Rambo was in the

story. He made a cry, for example. I love to tell the story. I was in, to back up, as you mentioned, I'm Canadian, and I'm not an American citizen, but at the time I was Canadian, in a condition of my card, my student card was that hey, this isn't your country, and there's a lot of times to do with Vietnam, you might have political opinions, keep them to yourself, so I always felt like I was a fly on the wall, and I wanted to say things, but I didn't have the legal right to say it, and this tipped over into the novel, which is about Vietnam, but I think if I mentioned Vietnam twice in the whole thing, I might not even have done that, the novel reads, it doesn't date. You read it today and it feels like it was written yesterday because it doesn't have any time stamps to it.

So, jump in the head, I was in Poland in 2001 on a publicity tour, and it was a little surprising to me because the journalists were lined up for three days of interviews and every half hour for three days, and I'm thinking this doesn't feel right, that's something's not right. It's a journalist, a woman of about 35, spoken English very well, said you're having trouble understanding this, and I said yes. She said you have to understand that in the late 80s and early 90s, the Rambo films were against the law in Poland, but we smuggled them in and watched them dressed up as Rambo and then went out to demonstrate against the Soviet troops. So she said in a small way, you could say that Rambo helped bring down the USSR, so you know, you got to laugh at this, but I remember when the Berlin Wall went down on national

television, somebody written Rambo on it as it was before and down, so. Yeah, too bad you didn't get that piece of the ball. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, it was a big piece of the wall, so I don't know where I would have put it. So as father of modern action novel, you've gotten the Thriller Master, Lifetime Achievement Awards, you've been nominated and received most of the Thriller Awards Edgar Nero Anthony, 30 novels, maybe more, 26 languages, and maybe 30 million copies in print. But the last time I looked, it was 18 million and 30 languages, and I just had to be very careful here. I was not having Edgar, I had an Edgar nomination, you know, but I've been very blessed in terms of, you know, people recognizing what I do. Yes, but what you do is you have said that what we are doing is writing the fictional autobiography of our souls. Yeah.

That's how you describe your work. Well, it goes back to what I was saying about trying to write action books or thrillers or mysteries that didn't feel like genre books. So if somebody read Reads My Work in chronological order, it would be very clear what was going on in my mind and in my emotions. The early books tend to be about young men looking for dependable father figures and not finding them. And how does that reflect the role of my father died in combat? My mother tried it at a time when there were a few social services did her best to take care of me and work. She was the same stress and couldn't do it and so she put me in an orphanage for a time and then she remarried, but the man she married, the second man, didn't like children. And there were massive fights and I used to sleep under my bed out of fear telling stories to myself in the dark. And so this need to have a positive role model stayed with me and in a sense, first

blood with the older policemen, it's not like the movie where they might be brothers. This is a father figure and rebellious son, as it were. And that went on for quite a while in a book called The Brotherhood of the Rose to Orphans imagine that are befriended by an elderly man who works for the CIA and is looking for private spies who will do anything for them because of love. And he basically corrupts them and they find out that essentially they were set up to be betrayed. And that older man, it was my stepfather in my mind. So then my son, God bless him, Matthew died when he was 15 in 1987. And the stories changed and now you had fathers as it were, father figures looking for

a son figures whom they could depend upon. And we went on and on and on and in 2009, my granddaughter Natalie, 14 years old died from the same rare moon cancer that killed my son and I was overwhelmed by that and in fact, the motive for my recent books, three Victorian mystery thrillers, was that my double grief as it were had so weighed, I mean it wasn't good, that I just needed to get away into a world that I could control. And I fell in love with the Victorian year in the 1850s London. And so for seven years, I, in my mind, lived there as an escape from the grief that I was feeling. So, you know, these are highlights of over many decades. But if you looked at it in chronological order, you would say, ah, I get it. I see what's called, you might not know the impetus for the emotions, but you would know

that the emotions had changed. When there was a shift in the fictional autobiography, well, I've asked you here because we are celebrating the third in your trilogy of Victorian thriller, murder mysteries with the amazing Thomas Sequencer, a real literary figure, as the detective. I mean, this is an extraordinary creation. So I just want to show this is the third, I can't say the train on it. I just love it, I just love it. This is called ruler of the night, it's part, it's a third, but let's go back. If you start with this one, murder is a fine art, and what is the title for him? It, well, Thomas Sequencer, who was a real person of the period, and was known as the opium meter because he had been the first person to write about drug addiction in a famous book called Confessions of an English opium meter. And he had, because of his opium nightmares, constructed a theory about the human mind, which feels so much like Freud, but it was 70 years ahead of Freud, in which he said

that the human mind was composed of chasms and sunless abysses, layer upon layer in which there are secret chambers where alien natures can hide undetected. Coleridge, Xanadu to Kublakan, down to his son, let's see, I mean, didn't he invent the word unconscious or subconscious? The Quincy invented the word subconscious, and truly anticipated Freud and the whole an analysis of dreams. So I had this notion, it still makes me smile, that the Scotland Yard's detective division had only been created, this is in 1854 or 55, it only been created back in 1842, very recent, and they were happy to have modern crime fighting tools such as plaster casts of footprints. And along comes Thomas to Quincy, in my novel, they didn't work together and realize, you know, talking to them about the chasms and sunless abysses of the human mind, and what

are they going to do with this guy who's also an opium addict? So I just had, it was delightful to bring that together in the mixture that he was fascinated by mass murderers, and had written a famous series of essays called On Murder, Considered as one of the Fine Arts, which is where the title Murders of Fine Art comes from, and he had, each of the three books has a major Victorian crime that changed the culture, and the murders of Fine Arts about the first mass media murders, publicity driven murders, back in 1811 with a newspaper, there were 52 newspapers, and they were able to get transported by a male coaches throughout England in a couple of days, which is a lightning speed. And so he was so fascinated by this as a young man that in later years, he recreated the murders in one of the essays in bedding the true crime genre, and I thought, this

is too good. So the notion of the first novel was that his essay recreating them was published, and that's real, and that somebody would use it as a blueprint to recreate the murders in actuality, and that he would be forced to work with Scotland Yard. So you know, great, great fun and lots of history. But what else is real is that he influenced Paul, Arthur Conan Doyle. We got Sherlock Holmes out of that. Can you walk us back through the chain of true crime genre? Edgar Allan Poe adored Thomas DeQuincy, and he used a lot of DeQuincy's techniques in his own work, particularly something like the Fall of the House of Usher. So the time came when Poe having studied DeQuincy worked out the first detective story called the Murders in the Remorg.

There were two others that he wrote as well. And in it, he invented the eccentric detective with the worshiping sidekick who wrote down the adventures. And what happened with Conan Doyle is he, and Conan Doyle admitted it. It's not like it's a shock. He lifted wholesale, the formula that Poe had worked out, and he ended with Sherlock Holmes and Watson. But if you go this way, the drug addiction and all that, that you can see in Poe's work, and then comes through into Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes is a drug addict. So where is this going, this going back to DeQuincy? And in one of the stories, DeQuincy has even mentioned and referred to, and, you know, as if everybody would know about him. We're speaking today with David Morel about these wonderful trilogy of historical thrillers starring Thomas DeQuincy, the English author, the wrote Confessions of an English Opie and them eater.

But he transcends his role in history, even Jorge Luis Borges says, DeQuincy lives on in memory like a character in fiction, rather than a reality. And look what you did. When I started reading, I heard about DeQuincy accidentally, and the implication was that he'd anticipated Freud, and I said, well, if he did, I want to learn about this. And as I mentioned, this thought came to me shortly after my granddaughter died. And I became mesmerized by this man who was so unique and whose place in literary history had been denied to him, he's a brilliant author, but denied to him because of the drug stuff. The prejudice against the drugs. But whether he was brilliant and the drugs held him back a little, but he was still brilliant or whether he was brilliant because of the drugs, no one will ever know. But this guy, I mean, he invented new forms of literary criticism, as I said, he invented the two crime jar.

He was an early writer of a type of fiction called the sensation novel, which eventually morphed into what we call thrillers. I mean, literally, it's major influence. And I honestly, I fell in love with a guy, and it was so much fun to do these three books. And as I said, each of them, the first one was about the Radcliffe Highway Murders, these sensational. They changed. They paralyzed. That's murder is a fine art. And then in the next one, Inspector, the dead, the true crimes were the numerous attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria. They were eight attempts to kill her. And one guy tried to do it twice, so there were seven guys and eight attempts. I mean, what he tried to do, two days in a row, and then in the third one, it's the first murder on an English train. So this comes out this week. It comes out on the ruler of the night. Ruler of the night, it's the third in the trilogy.

And you said that coming out of writing these three books was like coming out of a bath this year. Yeah. It was seven years. I, long times, for several of those years, I only read books. I read the grammar in that sentence, is awful. I read only those books, which were related to 1850's London, or the sensation novel, or Thomas de Quincy, or, you know, I gave myself, as it were, a privately earned PhD in American culture. And just to give one example, I was talking about the book, Inspector of the Dead, about the attempts against Queen Victoria. I've read books and books and books about her, and you don't want to overdo the details, but how could I find a detail that would perfectly summarize her history and the way she was? And I seized upon the fact that her mother being very ambitious for her, when Victoria was

very small, and insisted on putting a sprig of, of Holly under her, correctly, it's brittle, sharp, painful, stinging, and it was put under her collar of the child's collar in such a way that if Victoria stood very straight, it would not hurt her. So she had that posture for the rest of her life. And then, you know, for, for, for a ruler of the night, which, as I mentioned, is about the first murder on an English train, I've quickly realized that, I mean, real, that historically the real first murder, I quickly realized how different trains were back there. I'd love to, if we have a moment, I'd just love to talk about there were no corridors in cars, they, the English call them carriages, we call them cars, so that the, the, the carriages were divided into small compartments capable of holding eight people, four

facing this way, four facing that way, a door there, a door there. And when the train was about to pull out of the station, the guard locked the doors. But the windows were bar in effect, these people were in cells. Why? Because there was a fear that people would open the door or they know the window and get brained by a passing post or whatever, regardless, once that train started, you were a prisoner. And, and, and, and, and literally this, this happened, that was the inspiration for, for ruler of the night, a banker got into the car. No one else there was like eight o'clock at night, another guy got in the car, guard locked the door, train pulled out, and that second guy pulled out a knife. And it, it wouldn't matter how much you screamed, no one could help you. Yeah.

And, and this, this traumatized the English society, I mean, it was unthinkable that such a thing would happen, and that traumatized English society, the way, you know, the other crimes and the other novels had. I just loved it. I kind of can imagine being in those cramped compartments and, and not knowing whether the person next to you was going to attack you or not, and that you'd be helpless. And, and you not only talked about the, the trains themselves, but how rapidly, the railroad crisscross Great Britain, I mean, just, it was just like it went from the old male coaches of which dequincey waxes and nostalgic, because they're, they're upset about how fast everything got. And, and, and I mean, there's so much about these books. One of the other things you do, it's a, has to do with form and content. You use some of the devices of Victorian fiction, the journal entries from Emily the grand, the daughter. There is a version of my deceased granddaughter, you know, I can't say about that, talking about that autobiographic autobiography of our souls, a bookseller Barbara Peters,

a friend of mine, said to me, you know, Emily, who was real, but she says, you know, you're making her like your granddaughter, I thought, oh wow, you know, and that may have a kind of two for the way I absorb myself into the books. So you paint a wonderful picture of hydropathy, water taking the water is a water cure. Oh, the, the water cures that the 1850s were in England, who had, you went to these places where they wrapped you up in, in, in sheets in wet sheets and, and wrapped you and wrapped you and wrapped you and set you on a table, and then put more wet sheets on top of you, and we're going to leave you there for hours and hours and hours. Now what happened, it's like a self contained steam bath or a sweat bath, and, and it would, you would get, you'd get a fever, I mean, you're sweating and sweating.

It's a wonder people didn't die with this. And there's a great, great scene in, in, I found it very amusing where, where in a height of the, the Quincy trying to clear his, his, his drug addiction, they wrapped him up like this and he soaked and he's sweating and he's the dreas and suddenly they realize that they, the, the buildings on fire, they got to get out of here pretty fast. And, and, and the, and the daughters, you know, roll unrolling him like this and, and, and, and he's pumping along and as they're thumping, they're talking about how they've figured out how to, who, who the bad guy is, lots of fun. So, um, these books are just a, a remarkable accomplishment. I want to thank you. I turned off the election news. I curled up and read Rule of the Night and just left it as I've read all of them. So, my goal was to make people truly feel they were there. Yes. Yeah. I truly, it was surprised that it was New Mexico when I emerged. But what is the next step that we've looked at your work as the fictional other biography of your soul?

Do you know what the next step will be? You're just going to come out from the Bathys, Bathys figure of Victorian England and see what comes. I'm in, with Victorian withdrawal, I'm, it's almost like, you know, it was, these novels writing these novels was like a drug and I'm, it was truly shocking to finish the book, the last one. And, because I knew there would only be three and two, two, to, to come up as it were and look around and, and be, there's a, there's a, a film that Christopher Reeve was in called Somewhere in Time based upon a Richard Matheson novel, Big Time Return. And he hypnotizes himself into thinking he's back at the turn of the century and something goes wrong. He's got a coin in his pocket that shouldn't be there. And, and it snaps him and all of a sudden he's in the present again. And that sort of happened to me, you know, I typed the end and I did whatever was necessary to get the book through the publishing process. And then I hear I was in the modern world and, it's, it's really been a jolt to me.

I had no exaggeration and, you know, I, I look around and I guess the best thing I could say for, you know, people is, if, if you don't like living in this world, in the modern world, you know, my, maybe I can hypnotize you into feeling you're truly back then. I felt like I was truly back there and I wanted to thank you our guest today is David Morel, going from first blood, which became Rambo of 45 years ago, you know, up to his latest, which is just coming out, ruler of the night, the third in his Thomas sequency, historical thrillers. Thank you for your work and thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. And I'm LaRien Mills. I want to thank you our audience for being with us today on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. What archival programs of report from Santa Fe are available at the website report from Santa Fe dot com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at reportfrom Santa Fe dot com.

Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healy Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.