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| International Bestselling-Author David Morrell (photo courtesy of David Morrell) |
When I first saw the book Murder as a Fine Art, I was intrigued by
the author’s name: David Morrell. Known
the world over as the father of Rambo, Morrell had authored First Blood, a book that many people
mistakenly call “Rambo” since its principle character became one of the most
recognizable pop-culture icons in the world.
A Victorian murder mystery written by the father of Rambo? Was this a bad mash-up of testosterone and
fog-shrouded streets? Murder as a Fine Art turned out to be a
well-crafted, complex novel about the 1854 gruesome murder of a family that
mirrors the unsolved Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811. Morrell’s foray into Victorian London was
richly decorated with what was obviously a great deal of research. The story and the characters were lots of
fun. Morrell had delivered a
crackling-good Victorian thriller.
But I kept returning to my
original question: A Victorian murder mystery written by the father of Rambo?
I was curious enough to request
an interview. At the time, in the fall
of 2013, Morrell had to turn me down.
His schedule was full. He was
right in the middle of working on a sequel to Murder as a Fine Art. We
eventually agreed to reconnect in the spring of 2014.
During the interval I began to
research Morrell’s diverse career. Look
him up online and you’ll find short stories, thrillers, comic books, and essays
in addition to his twenty-five-plus novels.
Morrell has completely embraced the eBook revolution. In fact, he holds the rights to most of his
books in the eBook market, since so many of the original contracts he signed
were written before the days of digital reading platforms. One short story that caught my eye was They.
Available as a single, this thriller is something like Little House on the Prairie meets Wolfen.
(Morrell explains in the foreword how Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories
influenced this particular piece.)
Another single, My Name is Legion,
is a World War II adventure involving the French Foreign Legion. These are only a few of the titles
available. It is impossible to read
everything out there; the man’s been writing for more than four decades.
I had never read any of Morrell’s
books until I picked up Murder as a Fine
Art. One of the benefits of Morrell
writing a Victorian murder mystery is that it is drawing in readers who are
unfamiliar with his early books. He had
certainly drawn my attention.
Murder as a Fine Art and the
Art of Time-Travel
We finally talked over the phone
once Morrell had finished a major revision of the text to Inspector of the Dead, the sequel to Murder as a Fine Art. Understandably,
it was foremost on his mind.
Most of the time, editors of
mainstream fiction are looking to cut down the word count of any and all
manuscripts that come across their desks.
His Victorian novels, however, bucked this trend. According to Morrell, every time he sent Inspector of the Dead to his Mulholland Books editors, Josh Kendall and Wes Miller, they would send it back, asking for more detail. This was encouraging to hear. The
prevailing line among writers, editors, and anyone else associated with the
publishing industry is that readers today just won’t read anything with
detailed descriptions. They don’t care
about them, won’t spend the time it takes to read them, and they haven’t the
intelligence to absorb them. Did this
mean there was a new wind blowing through the halls of publishing houses? Well, there’s more to it than that.
We’ll start at the beginning; how
a renowned writer of modern thrillers came to publish a Victorian novel, how
the author who gave us John Rambo turned his attention to the London, England
of the 1850s, and how this beginning, as with so many beginnings, started with
the tragedy of death.
In 2009, Morrell explained, his fourteen-year-old
granddaughter, Natalie, died from a rare form of bone cancer known as Ewing’s
Sarcoma. This in itself was a terrible
blow. It is often said no man should
outlive his children. To experience the
death of a child’s child is to experience an exponential grief. But there was a greater despair to be found
here. Morrell had already lost a son to
this rare bone cancer in 1987. The
number of people who fall to this sickness in the United States is only a few
hundred every year, yet the Morrell family had lost their second loved one to
this disease. Morrell’s response was to
retreat. “I wanted to get away from the
modern world,” he admits. “I wanted to
disappear into another era.”
Morrell is known as a tenacious
researcher, having been trained in hostage negotiation, assuming identities,
defensive/offensive driving, and many other skills he incorporates into his
novels. At times it might even appear he
goes a little overboard in this area. He
is a graduate of the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security and the
National Outdoor Leadership School for Wilderness Survival. Not only did he become a private pilot
subsequent to his research for The
Shimmer but he has also earned honorary lifetime memberships in the Special
Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers.
Retreating into the past, he
brought this nearly manic obsession for research with him.
Still dealing with grief over his
granddaughter’s death, he followed his daughter’s advice to watch a film about
Charles Darwin. The film, Creation, explores Darwin’s breakdown
after his own daughter’s death, and includes a mention of Thomas De Quincey and
his theories in the same vein as if he were a precursor to Freud. Morrell was intrigued; soon enough, he was
hooked.
Thomas De Quincey was a
journalist and essayist best known for his Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater, published in 1821. It is an autobiographical account of De
Quincey’s laudanum addiction and the effect it had on his life. Not only did this work influence the literary
efforts of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Nikolai
Gogol, but it also influenced the study of psychology and abnormal
psychology. And now we can add David
Morrell to that list of influences, especially after he read De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as One of the Fine
Arts.
Once the idea of a book began to
take shape in his mind, Morrell admitted to his agents what he intended to
do. According to Morrell—“They said
‘Well, it’s a big risk’ and I said ‘I know, but you know what? If I don’t write this I don’t think I’m ever
gonna write anything.’”
Surprisingly, and to their
credit, they agreed.
He was soon in the midst of
writing an imitation Victorian novel.
Morrell felt early on that the style would have to match the story. “I’m very big on form and content. That what a book is about should match how it
is written.” He enjoyed the challenge of
using techniques that no one uses anymore, including the Victorian habit of
inserting journal entries into the story.
As excited as he was about the
book, there were those who questioned his judgment.
“When I told some fellow authors
what I was doing they were horrified.”
They assured him he would lose his readers, and destroy his career. Morrell simply didn’t care. He was already known for not allowing himself
to be pigeonholed as a one-trick genre writer.
He had dabbled in Westerns, Psychological Horror, and even Super Hero
comics during his forty plus years as a writer.
And with his current issues of grief and a need to step back from the
pain of this world it was easier to follow his heart in this endeavor.
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| Murder as a Fine Art artwork by Tomislav Tikulin, courtesy of David Morrell. |
Once the book was completed, it
caught the interest of then head-editor at Mulholland Books, Little, Brown by
the name of John Shoenfelder. In
Morrell’s words, Shoenfelder “told me that he went in to his boss at Little,
Brown and told him that this was an important book and it needed to be
published, no matter that it seemed a departure for me.” Shoenfelder was given the green light.
And that was it. With the publishers on board, the book, or to
be more precise, Morrell’s passion for the book became contagious, drawing in
more supporters. Morrell told me people said,
“You know he’s done this weird thing but, my heavens, you know, it’s really
interesting.” Gaining more attention
than many of his more recent books, Murder
as a Fine Art was chosen by Publisher’s
Weekly as one of the top ten Mystery/Thrillers of 2013. Even better, it made the top five for Library Journal.
Morrell knew his gamble had paid
off. “God knows it could have gone the
other way,” he gamely confessed.
Morrell says the email response
to Murder as a Fine Art from readers
was tremendous. The good news was that
his fan base had joined him as he led them down this new path. But the better news was that he was hearing
from readers who had never read his books before. They were loving it and asking for more.
So were his publishers.
Morrell is not a series
writer. It is part of what has kept him
from being stuck in a rut, like so many of his contemporaries. (Realize that his contemporaries consist of writers from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and the 2010s. Many of them can no longer be listed as his
contemporaries, since their time came and went long ago.) That he has more often than not found a way
to reinvent himself is a big factor in his longevity. But his tendency to shy away from recurring
characters did not prevent him from dipping his quill back into the inkwell for
another adventure in Victorian London.
(Morrell was willing to acknowledge that a close friend read the first
book and immediately told him he had a trilogy in the making. Though he didn’t jump at the idea, he says
her suggestion has always remained nestled in the back of his mind. But he’s not making any promises.)
And that brings us back to Inspector of the Dead and his editors’
requests for more detail. You see, in
his modern thrillers, Morrell never felt the need to provide much detail to the
world around us, since readers were already familiar with the day-to-day elements
that make up our modern lives. In his
opinion, writers don’t need to add details that would be understood by a
reader. But since he had chosen the
alien world of Victorian London, and he had learned so much about it, he just
felt that readers needed a little help to get them to take the trip with him.
As he wrote that first book he
had kept a note by his computer which read: Try
to make readers believe they are truly in 1854 London. Using shelves and shelves of research
material on the time period, and at the same time befriending and relying on
several historical experts in that era, Morrell began to fill his story with
these rich details that would facilitate the reader’s ability to co-exist with
him in that bygone London, something unnecessary for writer’s from that era. Their readers were well acquainted with such
things as the hygienic customs of the day and the cultural habits of all the
classes.
It was this desire to recreate
the past accurately that aided him in avoiding the recent steampunk fad. I have teenagers who introduced me to
steampunk around the time Morrell would have been writing Murder as a Fine Art. It’s
true I enjoyed that little sub-genre for a time, but its overuse in books and
movies shortened its lifespan. I told
Morrell I was glad he had avoided giving Thomas De Quincey a steam-powered
airplane in which to run around. Morrell
was amused at such an idea but said wasn’t the least bit tempted to go that
route. While he was aware of the
steampunk revolution, as it has been called, he was determined to remain true
to his goal and that note by his computer.
Morrell wasn’t ready to begin
sharing too much of the story of Inspector
of the Dead but he did make sure I understood that it wasn’t a simple
matter to insert the details as requested by the editors. Most importantly, it had to be done in such a
way as to insure that the pace of the novel remained consistent. In fact, this last round of edits brought
more than a few new details to the book.
According to Morrell, he realized that he needed to change and expand a
portion of the book, and it meant an increase of nearly 15,000 words. While it meant a great deal of time had to be
spent getting it right, he was able to complete it in time. Deadlines, after all, and his ability to meet
them, are a personal pride of his. He
emphasized this by repeating something he’d once told a fellow author. “We all know authors who are more talented
than we are, there’s always someone more talented, but can they meet the
deadline? Can they perform
professionally and be part of the team in order to take this very complicated
process and bring it to fruition?” His
experience has taught him that if you can’t do that, your career will never get
off the ground. “Deadlines are the
absolute,” he said, adding off-hand, “I’ve never missed one.”
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| Murder as a Fine Art artwork by Tomislav Tikulin, courtesy of David Morrell. |
On June 14, Murder as a Fine Art will come out in trade paperback as a book-club edition. Added material will include study questions, an interview between David Morrell and Thomas De Quincey biographer, Robert Morrison, and an essay by Morrell in which he discusses his approach to writing thrillers.
Inspector of the Dead is scheduled to be released on March 24, 2015.
(Part Two of this interview, in which our discussion turns to Frank Sinatra, Stirling Silliphant, and Rambo, is available at this link.)
For more information on David Morrell, visit his website at DavidMorrell.net.
eBooks by David Morrell: I highly recommend his short story They.
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