Reading speech

I write what are called in the publishing industry “psychological thrillers.” This is not a phrase I really understand. It seems to me: all fiction should have a psychological basis, and that every novel should be a quote “page-turner” end quote. Ever read Dickens? Could one create a more compelling story than Great Expectations? I doubt it.

Anyway… several years back, when I was considerably younger, People Magazine did a flattering review of a new book accompanied by a quasi-profile, wherein they claimed: “few writers in contemporary fiction understand the criminal mind as well as Katzenbach…”

This comment was duly celebrated by my publishing house, used in all sorts of promotional material, emblazoned on the back jackets of hundreds of thousands of hardcovers and embossed in gold on the fronts of even more paperbacks. Whenever I give a speech, it is often warmly cited by my introducer. The comment has been translated into dozens of foreign languages, very few of which I actually understand – so, precisely how it comes out in, say, Rumanian or Hebrew or Greek is, well, Greek to me. A film producer once leaned across a dinner table at some famous spot like Spago’s or Elaine’s where the food is significantly less important than being seen eating it and said to me in that wondrously slimy, Uriah Heep style they have, “But John, who understands the criminal mind better than you?”

To which, I of course answered with a combination of blissful innocence and utter arrogance, “Well, I guess, nobody…”

In other words: Everyone thought that observation in People magazine was a compliment…

t’s a little like being told, “Well, that Katzenbach fellow, the writer, he’s in favor of clean energy, hot lunches for orphans, against genocide and frequently helps little old ladies cross busy intersections and best of all, he really understands the criminal mind.”

Actually, when you think about it, it’s a little problematic.

In my books I am eager to describe characters that are unpredictable and predictable, both, which may seem like a contradiction to many people, but any writer of fiction knows is not. We know them, and yet, we do not know them. We anticipate what they will do with all the certainty that our own experience brings to the equation, while at the same moment discover twists that take us in unexpected directions. Curiously, this is precisely the way we look at ourselves.

And, less everyone think I am only speaking about thrillers, I would direct your attention to – say The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal, and re-imagine the battle of Waterloo through young Fabrizio’s eyes. Or perhaps the moment when Boo Radley saves Jem and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Spend some time considering the emotional pit that Raskolnikov discovers in Crime and Punishment. It isn’t hard to see how every sliver of guilt slices into his psyche. As readers, caught up in the story, we instinctively know every direction Dostoyevsky will take us – and yet, at the very same time they ring unique. Emotions are clichés – we fall in love, we have our hearts broken, we are nailed by tidal waves of emotional conflicts. But when these most ordinary and familiar of stresses are placed in the context of a story – with characters, a developing plot, twists and turns and uncertainty – that is where they shed their clichés and become original.

Of course – it helps if you have a handy 9 mm Glock semi-automatic or two around to assist matters.

Now — if you’re going to write books populated by remorseless psychopaths, it generally helps if you have a dollop of their traits reverberating around inside of you, to call upon when necessary.

Not all their traits, mind you. Just a selective few. One’s that the writer can summon up when needed, like a necromancer stirring a boiling cauldron of spells. A little bit of cruelty. A dollop of sadism. A taste of psychosis.

You see, what I believe is critical in creating character is far less an understanding of what the person does, than it is an unsettled feeling about what they might do.

Usually, when called upon to speak about my craft, I almost invariably tell stories from my days as a newspaper reporter. The implication is that witnessing varieties of really awful realities on a daily basis is all the education one needs to become a novelist.

In my career as a reporter, I sat across from serial killers, interviewed numerous multiple murderers, watched almost every type of violent criminal in trial or on the street. I went to innumerable crime scenes, flipped through dozens of glossy photographs, carefully perused detailed reports, spoke with survivors of horrendous moments, listened to people re-tell incidents that seemed surreal in their depravity. Guns, knives, razors, hatchets, various body parts, bombs, bricks and even once a sword. All sorts of adventures in what, for lack of a better way, one can call the dark side of human existence.Suffice it to say, that I have had an education in evil.

But that doesn’t make one into a writer.

It just lends itself to nightmares.

Similarly, being a member of a dysfunctional family won’t turn one into Tolstoy. Witnessing a revolution won’t render one into Paternack. Even getting through Harvard Law School won’t necessarily allow one to become Scott Turow.

The great Jazz musician, Miles Davis, when asked a question more or less on the subject of his craft replied: “Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.”

Intriguing comment.

And, damn difficult, too, if you think about it in concrete terms.

But a sentiment that I think is applicable to the world of writing.

So – I am going to tell a story I call The Bucket of Revenge.

It predates my time as a reporter and comes from my teenage years that I spent in a maximum-security prison in New Hampshire which more customarily goes by the name of the Phillips Exeter Academy. My wife often argues that I learned much about the everyday uses and abuses of psychopathology in those four really freezing cold, bitter years, but I don’t want to dignify them with that sort of observation. I like to think that as far as the school is concerned, I managed to avoid learning just about anything. Certainly, anything academic. Like algebra or Latin or American History or the periodic table of elements. Useful stuff. I do not think the alumni office considers me in a totally positive light. In fact, my major contribution to the social life of the school was this: When I arrived there, there were eight rules that a student could be kicked out for. I was directly responsible for the ninth rule.

I take considerable pride in that.

If anyone is overcome by curiosity as to what that 9th rule was, please see me later. I will say this: It was the 60s: long hair, anti-war marches, rock and roll. Let your imaginations fill in the rest of that scenario.

I lived, in those years, in a dormitory named after a distinguished former principal named Harlan Page Amen, whose stern, Calvinist visage was immortalized in a portrait that hung in the common room. Amen Hall – it has a slightly evangelical sound to it, doesn’t it? – had several design features which were notable. One of these was that all the doors to the rooms opened inwardly.

And, with enough time, it is not hard to imagine all sorts of mischief that can be created out of that single, notable point of architecture. For example, if one discovered the night a fire drill was scheduled, a clever student might just take some piano wire and traveling quietly from door handle to door handle zig-zagging up and down the corridor, manage to make it impossible for anyone on that floor to open their door. Thus, when the fire alarm drill was sounded, accompanied by a single yell of This is not a drill! Well, one can imagine the chaos. But that is another tale, for some other location.

But remember that inward swinging door.

We had, in Amen Hall, one truly obnoxious, extraordinarily mean spirited and bullying fellow. I believe he went on to a career high in the Wall Street world. Anyway, this guy did not get along with my friend David, who was an artsy type, given to incomprehensible French symbolist poetry and mournful Chicago blues. And so, one evening, when David was down the corridor studying, this irritating fellow set a trap. A bucket of water, carefully balanced in the space between the inward opening door and the lintel, so that when David returned back to his room, history paper and notes and library books in arms, and stepped inside, the bucket delivered it’s entire wet message all over him and all over his due the next day’s work. Insulting and ruinous.

David, of course, instantly knew who had done this. We all did, despite many insincere denials issued with appropriate giggles and smirks. But David resisted the temptation to take a swing at the odious young guy.

Like any good Sicilian, he waited. He let days go past.

A secondary design element in Amen Hall was the Butt Room. The school, in an effort to discourage smoking (this being an earlier, more innocent era, when Marlboro Men ruled the airwaves) only allowed smoking in a dingy basement room next to the heating system. Few windows. A couple of stiff wooden chairs and a scarred table. A coke machine that dispensed dime bottles. A constant smell of oil and sweat. Too hot. Too cold. Filthy. A place that any adult would instantly have recognized did nothing except fester disease and anarchy.

Why? Asks us.

I will sneak in and dump water on his head, says David.

It took us all of two seconds to agree. We saw justice. We saw equal treatment under the law. An almost constitutional sense of fair play. All would be made even. The world restored to equilibrium.

And, after all, this guy had been tormenting all of us for months…

We did as we were asked. Not hard. The boy in question liked poker and getting him into the right chair, concentrating on his cards at 5 pm was a relatively simple matter. The only thing that might have made it perfect would have been Marty dealing him Aces and eights – that was, in case you don’t know, the hand that Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was shot in the back of the head.

Anyway – our guy hardly noticed that we kept checking our wristwatches.

At the stroke of 5 pm, David pounced. I can still recall the flash of David’s arrival. He was barefoot, to muffle his approach, and he wore an ankle-length yellow rain slicker to ward off the inevitable back splash and a black ski mask pulled down over his face like any self-respecting bank robber or Ninja assassin. He swept in like a bird of prey, bucket in hand, and delivered it in one single dramatic motion, slamming it down on the tormentor’s head, as Marty and I jumped back to avoid the spillage.

All to plan.

Perfection.

Except for one critical detail.

The bucket was not filled with water.

Let me leave to your imaginations what was in the bucket. Suffice it to say, it was stuffs readily available to any 17 year old prep school student.

So, why is this tale relevant?

First: The law of unintended consequences.

All novels work on a few basic principles. As a writer, you take these characters that have stewed and fermented in your imagination – people that you have come to know and appreciate to the point that when you sit down at your computer they are seated right beside you – and you place them into circumstances where who they are, who they imagined themselves to be, and who they hoped they were are all elements that are immediately called into question. The good author sets all sorts of different forces – some physical, some psychological, some political – all to work, so that a concoction of conflict is created. Out of this volcanic mix comes something unexpected.

It can be a revelation about heart or soul. It can be a discovery about the real capacities one did not know they possessed. It can be about the limits of existence, or the depths we are willing to travel. It can be about the adventure that fear presents to us. Many possible things.

Let us return then to The Bucket of Revenge.

There are many novelistic forces at work in this little tale. Obviously, one is revenge, which always seems like such a reasonable course of action until it actually manifests itself, at which point we discover that it says far more about who we are than the person against whom we are seeking retribution. We always imagine that revenge – as the Sicilians said, a dish best served cold – will be satisfying. But I would suggest that its appeal is more sharply limited than we anticipate. But the element of the story of the bucket and David and the obnoxious fellow that I would draw attention to is not the simple act of revenge. What really fueled that moment? Many powerful themes. Certainly there was the first fairly puerile act by the obnoxious guy –– but ultimately, that was mere hijinks. But it was preceded by all sorts of behaviors that were far more profound in their implications and violated many of the unwritten rules of prep school behavior, including the Cardinal Rule: Don’t get others into trouble unnecessarily because they are generally capable of getting themselves into trouble without any assistance from any outside source.

So, the bad guy here arrived at that moment with his own flaws intact.

But David, who right up the moment he swooped in was the good guy, enlisted his two friends in that nearly nuclear response. And therein lies the real impact in the act. He betrayed us. He counted upon our assuming that what he was going to do was commensurate with what had been done to him. He played upon our teenage senses of justice and fair play to set up his target. He relied on our past experience with this fellow to compensate for his escalation of slime and humiliation.

In other words: We were the one’s being lied to.

And in the end what do you suppose the outcome of The Bucket of Revenge was? The obnoxious target was the recipient of all sorts of sympathy from his dorm mates – even many whom he had teased, baited and tormented in the past – because he’d been subjected to a shock that outweighed his past transgressions. Regardless of how great a jerk he had been (and trust me, he was a real jerk) his status and reputation actually improved. He made new friends. His life became less isolated. He never had a problem finding people to sit with in the dining hall from that point onwards. Additionally – much of his obnoxious behavior dissipated. He became a much more reasonable fellow. Still awful – but noticeably less so. And David? Well, he didn’t exactly lose Marty and I as friends, but he diminished our relationship. We never fully trusted him again in any context – especially that critical one where it was clear that to survive in that school one really needed people to share all the torments and turmoil that went along with being there.

So, the real victim of The Bucket of Revenge was our friendship.

And, here is a truth: In my latest novel, The Dead Student — every moment, every element that took place all those years earlier in that smelly butt room finds its’ way into some aspect of every page I have written. Friendship. Torment. Obsession. Revenge and Unintended Results – just to name a few. Just transformed by the writer’s imagination.

The only thing missing – naturally – is a bucket.

But… that’s not to say there aren’t a bunch of

metaphorical buckets waiting on those pages