How He Dunnit or How I Wrote Secret Agent Gals.
A few years ago I wrote an art heist thriller adapting the grifter formula to my purposes. It was called Strangers in my Mind (but now is Mystery at the Guggenheim or The Mystery of the Guggenheim. One or the other.)
There were a lot of things going on in that story, maybe too many. This girl, beautiful (of course she’s beautiful – hey, she’s a character in a suspense novel, so she’s beautiful) arrives on the scene in New York and quickly gets friendly, maybe too friendly, with the family you’d have met if you’d read, which you should, my first novel, The Mystery of the Trinity.
What was supposed to be the story of Guggenheim (for short) was that this girl, named Hilla Rebay, was actually casing the joint, that is, casing the joints of wealthy New York art collectors, with a plan to substitute forgeries for their “priceless” – but everything has a price, so not really priceless – paintings and make off with the originals. She called herself “Hilla Rebay” the niece (actually great niece) of the G-Gal we meet in Secret Agent Gals. But she isn’t really Hilla Rebay or anything close to that. She’s a crook, a grifter, and, despite the warnings of editors – who are basically dedicated to turning good writing into something they would give an “A” to in the English composition courses they teach at community colleges, not that there is anything wrong with community colleges which have their place, but this isn’t the place (they’d say, “Can’t use the same word in the same paragraph let alone in the same sentence”) to say what that place is (“and certainly not three times, asshole”) – listen, I can keep writing “place” until you or that editor cries, “Lay off, Macduff.
Where was I before I started getting edited? Right. One of the things going on in Guggenheim was that the son of the rich family from Mystery of the Trinity whose mom owned the most valuable painting “Hilla” was after, was writing a novel himself. Now – I’m beginning to wonder why I started this – and as he, the son, who’s sleeping with Hilla as well as his previous – and still current – girlfriend) goes on wild goose chases with Hilla (and the sex in Guggenheim is certainly well within the fevered imagination of the average filthy-minded reader, although maybe out of his range of experience, but who knows?) – is this sentence ever going to end? – if you go back to the beginning or middle of the sentence I was going to tell you what this guy was doing besides enjoying a lot of threesome sex and chasing wild geese. Okay, goddammit, he was writing a novel. There.
Let’s hope this new paragraph makes more sense. Out of all the stupid suggestions the editor I mentioned above, who will be and should be nameless as well as unwept, unhonored and unsung, was one good piece of advice, which was that in a thriller you can’t keep interrupting by sticking in chapters of the thing this guy was typing away at. At this point Guggenheim was 95,000 words, just right for a novel (much longer than that and the perfect binding in a paperback doesn’t open up comfortably, has to be printed on bible paper, but let’s not get into that). So what I did was pull out the 25,000 words that were Joe’s (that’s his name) novel and turned it into the 98,000 story that is Secret Agent Gals. What about Guggenheim? It is waiting for me to develop it back into a 95,000 novel, but don’t hold our breath.
So, and this is about as deep as a lead can be buried, what this thing you’re reading now, I mean this essay, not one of those books, is all about is how sometimes a writer, or reader, will realize that a peripheral character is more interesting than the main characters and will spin that character off into a novel of his or her own.
And this isn’t unheard of. You’ve heard this happening. One is James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which, by the time he got finished, was a set of five (very) long novels. It went like this.
Cooper decided to write a fairly conventional boy-meets girl story set in his ancestral town, before it was a town, of Cooperstown, New York. Someone sort of like Cooper’s own father or grandfather, anyway an ancestor, migrates from downstate New York upstate to found a town of his own. He is a “pioneer,” which gave the book its name The Pioneers.
Squire Templeton, I think that was his name, was bringing law and order to the old west, in this case the new west, a basic theme of westerns, of which The Pioneers was the prototype, although some have called the Leatherstocking Tales “Easterns,” not “Westerns,” but let’s leave that to someone else to hash out.
Well, one of the things you have to have if you’re gonna have a civilization safe for the insufferable women characters in Westerns (or Easterns) is, as suggested above, law and order, or else said women will fall prey to drunks, rustlers, or, let’s face it, what all guys would be like if we were able to actualize our potential for unbridled lust. (Read the “Ring of Gerges” section in Plato’s Republic to get my drift.)
Back to Cooper. This Squire Templeton decides that he, or we, can’t have people just killing deer whenever they feel like it or pretty soon there won’t be any more deer. So he establishes game laws, with a deer season and an out-of-season when you can’t shoot deer. Now all of this is about as boring as it sounds, except for one thing.
There is an oldest settler, actually the oldest settler, living in the woods. In a log cabin. With a faithful Indian companion. He’s been living there since the days when he (and that Indian) were the only people, white or red, anywhere around. So they could do whatever they pleased. They get hungry, they shoot a deer. And eat it. Cooked it first, duh.
And so, despite the New Cooperstown Order, which they know nothing about, they shoot a deer out of season. Well, that JUST WON’T DO! and the Judge (maybe he’s Judge Templeton, not Squire: Doesn’t matter) has the guy (and the Indian) arrested and thrown in the clink. Like Hawthorne’s Boston, where a jail and a gallows were the first things the Puritans built.
The old-timer’s name was Natty Bumpo, and his Indian sidekick was Chingachgook, whom Mark Twain (who thought Cooper was about the worst writer he ever read) persisted in calling “Chicago.”
Almost immediately readers and reviewers dismissed Cooper’s just plain awful main characters and focused on Natty Bump and Chingachgook. “These two guys are really interesting. – to paraphrase what they wrote – Let’s have some more about them.”
And that’s what they got, following a sort of natural progression:
What was he like as a young man? The Last of the Mohicans.
How does he die? The Prairie.
Does he ever fall in love? The Pathfinder.
His first warpath, Bumpo as a “yout.'” The Deerslayer.
(The title of this last novel, one of Bumpo’s many aliases, brings back memories of The Pioneers.
The point of all this is that a writer sometimes extracts incidental characters from one book and runs with them through a series of prequels and sequels. Exactly what George Lucas did with the nine Star Wars episodes (not counting the “stand alones”), forward, then back, then forward again. And Wagner with the Ring, also written out of sequence.
So now we have Secret Agent Gals, characters plucked from another novel. Where does that leave us? Hard to believe these gals are going to sit at home with Hillary Clinton and bake cookies. My guess is that they were born for trouble, and trouble will find them.