Today I hand the blog
over to Scott Adlerberg, which is something I should know better than to do, as
after reading Scott’s description of the primary influences on his new novel (Jack
Waters) I’ll now be compelled to up my game. I always enjoy reading
Scott’s posts on the Do Some Damage blog, so it’s a treat to have him with us
today.
Crime, Revenge, and History
A
murder takes place within the first few pages of my new novel, Jack
Waters. The killer, who is the title character, goes on the run from
his home in New Orleans. This crime determines the entire course his life
will take from there, so it's fair to say that crime is a central component of
the book. Still, when people ask, I don't describe Jack Waters as
a crime novel per se. It's set in 1904, on a Caribbean island where
Jack Waters goes after fleeing the United States as a fugitive, and on this
island where he starts a new life, he becomes embroiled in a rebellion against
a nasty dictator. He takes up with the rebels and has many dangerous adventures
with them, all the while pursuing his own secret agenda. What is this agenda?
I don't want to give everything away. But the point is that Waters wants
to overthrow the dictator for reasons that have little to do with politics and
much more to do with personal vengeance.
So
Jack Waters, no question about it, is more of a historical
adventure tale than a crime novel. Of course, that doesn't mean it isn't
soaked in blood. It also doesn't mean that the books that served as an
inspiration for it, though not specifically crime fiction, don't have a lot of
tension and violence. They do. And I thought it might be
interesting to look at a couple of these works, sources I drew upon for my
deep dive (if 114 years is deep) into the past.
Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von
Kleist (1810)
Heinrich
von Kleist's novella is one of my favorite stories of any length of all time.
If Jack Waters has a primary model, Michael Kohlhaas is
it. Set in the 16th century, in Saxony, the novella is about a
horse dealer, Kohlhaas, who suffers a clear but relatively minor wrong at the
hands of a nobleman. All Kohlhaas' attempts to get legal redress for the wrong
fail, and through a series of escalating events almost surreal in their
strangeness, he becomes public enemy number one and winds up leading
a full-scale uprising against the region's powers that be. He's
feared by some (a terrorist to them) admired by others (a revolutionary to
them), and the 80 or so pages of the narrative are remarkably dense
with incident. The story is dark and thrilling, and
qualifies as a revenge story for the ages, and perhaps most striking of all is
Heinrich von Kleist's tone. Kleist never moralizes, and no matter how odd the
events unfolding, no matter how frenzied the action, he maintains an uncannily
flat voice. Sentences are long and complicated, motivations tangled,
brutalities extreme, but for the duration, the Kleist narrator remains
controlled and dispassionate. It's hard to get a sense of where the author
stands in regard to what he's depicting. Years later, another master of
the outlandish, Franz Kafka, was a huge admirer of Kleist's stories, and one
can understand why. Kafka learned a lot about "deadpan style"
from Herr von Kleist.
Michael
Kohlhaas is
also an example of a certain kind of story you don't encounter often - a moral
tale without an evident moral. It's obvious from what goes on in the
novella that it's preoccupied with morals and ethics and the quest for justice,
the idea of justice as it relates to the idea of vengeance, but the
author never lets you come down easily on any one side. The story reads
as if it should have a moral or a point you can put your finger on, and yet, in
the end, it conveys a sense of ambivalence. The story's telling is linear
and its style crystal clear, but as a reader, you're not quite sure what you're
supposed to take away. A couple of readers have described Jack
Waters as "a dreamy fable" and "a fractured fairy
tale", and I have to admit I was happy to see they had this
reaction. It's an effect, from the time I started the book, I was
consciously shooting for, and to whatever extent I achieved it, I have no
qualms about declaring that it's something I learned in large measure from
reading Michael Kohlhaas.
Little Apple by Leo Perutz
(1928)
Little
Apple is
another story about revenge and a man obsessed. It was written by Leo
Perutz, a Czech-born Austrian writer who lived from 1882 to 1957. Perutz
is an author who wrote in German and sold well during his lifetime - he wrote
11 novels in all - but who now has become almost unknown here. It's a pity
because a number of his books remain in print, and he's a master of
fast-moving, suspenseful novels that often are set in the past and involve
adventure and mystery. Jorge Borges, Grahame Greene, Ian Fleming, and Karl
Edward Wagner are among his stated admirers, and an Austrian writer
contemporary of his once described his work as "the possible result of a
little infidelity of Franz Kafka [him again] and Agatha Christie".
That gives you a pretty good idea of what he's like.
Little
Apple starts
as World War I ends. An Austrian soldier named Vittorin has just been released
from captivity in a Russian POW camp. Though he returns to his family and
a fiancé in Vienna, he vows to return quickly to Russia to inflict revenge on
the sadistic camp commandant who brutalized him and his fellow prisoners during
their captivity. Nothing can deter him from this quest, nobody can talk
him out of it, and he makes his way back to 1919 Russia, now undergoing a
massive civil war after the Bolshevik Revolution. In effect, Vittorin undertakes
a manhunt in a Russia in chaos, and he gets buffeted around by all sorts of
perils. Despite the dangers and many setbacks, he persists. Not unlike Michael
Kohlhass - and Jack Waters - he's a monomaniac, and he has a remarkable ability
to maintain his focus despite the threats and shifting political conditions
around him.
Perutz
is a model for me in how to tell a historical tale in a compressed fashion. His
prose is spare and uncluttered. By showing you just the details you need
to see, he creates a vivid world at the same time as he keeps his narrative
moving forward. He's good at dipping into the dark recesses of his
characters' minds while maintaining pace and momentum, and he's able to keep in
balance quite well the contrast between the individual pursuing his goal and
the larger events going on around that individual. The reader never loses
perspective on either. These are all things I tried to accomplish
in Jack Waters, and again, as with Kleist's novella, I had a great
source to study.
Needless
to say, these two works are not the only literary influences on Jack Waters, but they are two prime
ones, and if you haven’t read one or the other, I couldn’t recommend them more.
In my own mind, at least, single-minded, justice-obsessed, revengeful Jack
Waters, a man who knows how to survive in a turbulent world and exploit political
conditions for his own ends, is a character Kleist’s Kohlhaas and
Perutz’s Vittorin would respect and admire.
(Broken
River Books released Scott’s new novel, Jack
Waters, on January 12.)
