Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Yet another masterful ploy. But not the last in Hank's repertoire; he has one more, which he attempts to spring when he finishes dictating the confession. "Like a leering mummy in his bandages, rocking with uncontrollable and awful laughter," he tells Peter that he won't sign the paper and what he swallowed was not poison but a dab of talcum powder. And it is Peter who will be dead in thirty seconds, with a confession in his own handwriting in his hand.

  This does not happen, however. Jean suddenly knocks Peter's pen to the floor, an act that enrages Hank and requires Peter to subdue him again. The reason for Jean's action is that she tumbled to Hank's final trick an instant before it would have been too late for Peter: Hank, knowing Peter always bites the top of his fountain pen when he's thinking hard, had loaded the pen with enough prussic acid to kill the proverbial horse.

  In total defeat now, Hank strikes a bargain with Peter. If Peter will give him the poisoned pen, allowing him therewith to cheat the hangman, he'll tell Peter how to shut off the electrical current on the doors. Peter agrees. And the final curtain comes down as Jean and Peter leave to summon the police and Hank makes a fatal snack of the pen.

  The thrillers of the forties, fifties, and sixties tend to resemble those of the earlier years in format and style, utilizing the same basic elements. But during the past dozen years or so, the suspense novel has begun to evolve in a somewhat different direction. At times, today's thriller is indistinguishable from the straight or "mainstream" novel and has sometimes been, in fact, a roman a clef. It still has the "copious effusion of blood" and the "forlorn hopes, narrow shaves, last-minute rescues, and 'tense' situations" of its ancestors, but more often than not, it also contains varying amounts of scientific extrapolation, current events, cautionary advice, and overtones of the psychological and the sociological. High-level kidnappings, terrorist attacks on public conveyances and public officials, murder in the White House, earthquakes and other natural disasters, disease epidemics, occult manifestations, doomsday conspiracies—all these and many more are the stuff of the modern thriller.

  Not that contemporary writers have altogether abandoned such old standbys as the supervillain. Bestselling thrillers of recent vintage—Lawrence Sanders's The First Deadly Sin is one example—still focus on head-to-head match-ups between masters of venality and their opposites, the guardians of justice. Yet supervillains need not be human in today's tale of suspense, as Peter Benchley proved with Jaws. Since the publication of that novel, dozens of others have come along to chronicle the activities of other predatory "monsters" of the animal and insect kingdoms—everything from giant whales (Leviathan) to bugs (The Hephaestus Plague).

  Perhaps the most popular of these "evil creatures" of fiction, aside from the venerable shark, has been that symbol of evil, the snake. A great many people are afraid of these crawling reptiles, particularly those of the poisonous variety; their physical appearance and their biblical history make them a natural as villains to instill fear in the hearts of readers—as John Godey's The Snake and a number of other books have done quite nicely, thank you.

  But in no other reptilian thriller will you find a more deadly, wicked, monstrous, cunning, all-around nasty snake than the taipan of Michael Maryk and Brent Monahan's Death Bite (1979). The taipan, we are told, is an ugly, black-brown snake indigenous to Australia and New Zealand that grows to between eight and eleven feet in length at maturity, contains enough venom to kill 173,912 mice (and any human being in three minutes), and is the most aggressive and intelligent of all species. The villain of Death Bite is no ordinary taipan, however. It is "a giant taipan, twice as large, twice as vicious, and three times as deadly as the normal Australian taipan," and its native habitat is "some obscure, uninhabited island" off the coast of New Guinea.

  The name of this island is Naraka-Pintu, and the monster taipan is hunted down and captured thereon by a group of native snake catchers, after which it is smuggled into the United States to be displayed at a Miami serpentarium. In San Diego, awaiting transshipment, it escapes, kills a couple of people, and then goes looking for a topography similar to its natural habitat. This quest leads it, intelligent reptile that it is, to a biology extension campus near San Diego, in which vicinity it piles up more corpses, chases a cat inside a house, and with "eyes glistening with rage," attacks a girl while she's taking a shower by trying to climb up over the shower door. (Not only is this taipan the deadliest of all snakes, it is beyond any doubt the horniest.)

  Three people set out either to capture or kill the taipan, Scott Miller, the owner of the Miami serpentarium; his Asian girl friend loka, who thinks tangerines are called tambourines; and a biology professor named Wrightson, who helped smuggle the snake into the country. The taipan leads them a grisly chase. It goes to a punk-rock concert given by a group calling itself Sudden Death, eventually causes a panic, and murders the pet boa constrictor of lead singer Rex Flint. (" 'Bruce!' he cried in a pathetic tone, cradling the mangled body tenderly in his arms, letting the real blood ooze across his two-thousand-dollar costume. Rex looked up at the shocked revelers, still cowering on the tabletops. 'Animals!!!' he roared at the top of his lungs, tossing back his tawny mane. 'You animals!!!") Then it heads into the Mission Ridge Mountains, where it knocks off a weekend horseback rider and one member of the search party that goes in after it.

  Finally, Miller, Wrightson, and Ioka catchup with the taipan. Miller confronts it singlehanded, catches it, and there is a final death struggle in which Miller strangles the snake while it spits venom into his face. Some of the venom gets into facial wounds he sustained while scrambling down the face of a cliff, and "he knew then what caused the bubbly, dizzy feeling just under his hairline. A minute amount of the liquid death had worked its way into . . . his nervous system." But before he expires, he manages to finish off the taipan, and "with a final, superhuman effort, he sat up, pulled the snake into a convoluted mass, and hurled it down to the base of the mound." Finis. And not a moment too soon, either.

  At an earlier point in the novel, while discussing death bites, Wrightson says to Miller, "What melodrama! What unadulterated bullshit!" An apt description of Death Bite itself, perhaps, although not a negative one.

  What, after all, makes a good thriller but melodrama? And what helps make an alternative classic but a dollop of two of the aforementioned unadulterated substance?

  10. The Idiot Heroine in

  the Attic

  As their steps died away upstairs I shivered in spite of the fire. The great hail seemed so gloomy, the empty House around me treasured only its past, the only young person in it had gone off on his own business. Was I a fool to have landed myself here?

  —Ray Dorien,

  The House of Dread

  I know now that there must have been a touch of madness in me that raw October night I went to Cemetery Key and the house of horror known as Stormhaven.

  —Jennifer Hale,

  Stormhaven

  "A gothic," Donald Westlake once said, "is a story about a girl who gets a house."

  And so it is. Since the first Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis, written in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the two primary ingredients of the form have been an imperiled woman and a sinister house. In the early days, gloomy old castles and dark monasteries or convents were the staple structures; and the beautiful heroine possessed an unblemished virtue, fainted at least a half-dozen times (especially when that unblemished virtue was threatened), and faced all sorts of natural and supernatural evil: abduction, seduction, lechery, treachery; wicked barons, monks, nuns, outlaws, and bogus lovers; ghosts, vampires, werewolves, shaggy gorillas, and other beasts.

  But despite all her misadventures, the heroine almost always emerged with two things: her maidenhead intact and, through marriage or rightful inheritance, the deed to the castle. The only exceptions were those stories laid in monasteries or nunneries, which were of course purged of their venal monks and nuns and left in the hands of the righteo
us. The women in these Stories, however, unfailingly retained their virginity; the stories themselves were all that were ever laid in a monastery.

  The Gothic formula, as established by Walpole and his contemporaries and nurtured through countless shilling shockers, story papers, penny dreadfuls, dime novels, hardcover romances, pulps, and paperback originals, has remained remarkably unchanged for close to two hundred years. Gothic women are still pure and still being menaced by all manner of dreadful things, though the emphasis on the supernatural is much less today than it used to be. Despite the best efforts of the feminist movement, they still faint at moments of high melodrama and are still prone to what Lee Wright, former mystery editor at Random House, characterizes as "the idiot heroine in the attic" syndrome; that is, when they encounter a hidden room, or a locked door "that must never be opened, my dear," or some other plot device that common sense tells them is fraught with danger, they invariably enter the room, or unlock the door, or do whatever else is contrary to logic, intelligence, and the basic rules of story plotting.

  In the architectural sense, the Gothic-novel house is different today from those of the nineteenth century. Monasteries and nunneries have fallen into disfavor; castles are still permissible, but only in special European settings. The gloomy old country house, of the type popularized by the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen, continues to be a favorite, particularly if it is situated on a barren cliff overlooking the sea. Houses on islands, in swamps, on mountaintops, in jungles, or perched forbiddingly on crags high above isolated valleys are also acceptable.

  The rest of the formula is de rigueur. The woman goes to the house as a servant or tutor, or because she is summoned by a relative, or because she marries or becomes betrothed to its owner. She faces her peril and does her "idiot heroine in the attic" number. She escapes all attempts on her life and sexual charms. She lives happily ever after with the handsome man of her dreams (not necessarily her husband or betrothed, who may turn out to be the villain of the piece). And, most important of all, she gets the house.

  The Gothic novel has been popular in this country for most of its two-hundred-year history, but never more so, perhaps, than in the past three decades. The paperback boom of the sixties and seventies, when half of all soft-cover novels seemed to carry such titles as Bride of Menace, The Secret of Devil's Cave, and Brooding Mansion and had cover illustrations depicting a dark house with one lighted window and a woman fleeing from it in the foreground (also de rigueur), brought thousands of neoGothics to a predominantly female and evidently insatiable readership. Some of these rose above the average—those of Phyllis Whitney, Victoria Holt, Dorothy Eden, and Willo Davis Roberts, for instance. Most, however, were contemporary pastiches of The Miseries of Miranda; or, The Cavern of Horror and other shilling shockers of the early 1800s.

  There is an infallible method for separating the classic from the median Gothic suspense novel. This is known as the first-paragraph test. Not all bad Gothics have commensurate opening paragraphs, but those that do are always and without fail bad Gothics.

  Some examples:

  Through all that queer business at Shadow Lodge, those days of accumulating excitement and terror, I was kept as much as possible in the dark. It seems to me now, looking back on it all, that if they hadn't treated me like a Peeping Tom, I would not have been half so curious, so intent on finding out the meaning of it all. I could have helped Dad more, I am sure, if he had told me of his suspicions and his fears, of his dealings with Eudora the medium, with Squint the spy, and the other complications of that summer. . .

  Authors, I suppose, must hover for a trying yet fascinating period on the brink of their books, deciding just where to jump in. I'd hice ft1aIe time To aress up my adventures and make myself out the fearless and efficient heroine of this story, but the real truth is I've lived through such strange things that I can't write in cold blood about them. (Gertrude Knevels, Out of the Dark)

  Two murders would probably have gone unsuspected during the last year if Eunice Hale had not eaten a chicken croquette of questionable virtue. . . . (Jean Lilly, Death Thumbs a Ride)

  The old woman's breasts were balanced over her folded hands like the loaded scales of justice waiting for her final judgment. (Leslie Paige, Queen of Hearts)

  Does the ghost of that thing we fear most hang with us always, peering over our shoulder like an omnipotent, though fallen, guardian angel? (Grace Corren, Mansion of Deadly Dreams)

  It had always frightened her to be in the woods at night alone. But now she was not alone, and it was this realization that sent little shivers of fear dancing up and down the back of her neck. (Jan Alexander, The Wolves of Craywood)

  Catkins shivered in the cold spring wind that blew bitter round Camilla Forest's ankles. Shivering too, she pulled her light shawl more closely round her and wished for the warm pelisse that lay in her box. (Jane Aiken Hodge, Marry in Haste)

  The silver light of the storm shifted perceptibly as though a black velvet curtain had fallen over the mountains, enclosing the girl in the small car into a cube of impersonal aloneness without destination. The morning's May sunshine, which had turned the sea to azured splendor, might have been a dream or one of those glazed picture postcards which traveling friends and relatives send from Cannes or Venice or, for that matter, Santa Barbara in California. (Ruth McCarthy Sears, Wind in the Cypress)

  Anne Gunther stopped her Volkswagen after a particularly bad pothole had jarred her against the car's roof for the third time since she had left the village of Allen's Grove. . . . Anne rubbed the top of her head, surprised to not find on it her own mountain range of lumps. She reached out and patted the instrument panel of the little car.

  "Patience, old car," she said aloud. "We'll make it yet, if we both have to walk." (Grace Corren, The Darkest Room)

  The house talked. (Barbara Michaels, The Dark on the Other Side)

  Other Gothics must be dipped into a bit to uncover their true colors. The way to do this is to look for descriptive passages of the following sort:

  She nodded and they relapsed into a long silence, as though the immense soundlessness of the place muffled them under a pall. She began searching the sky for a bird flying, anything to take the curse off the emptiness, and for this reason missed the first sight of Drachensgrab—dense dark boxwood hedges rearing up seven or eight feet. When she came to, they were running over the abrupt thunder of a short bridge that spanned the remains of a moat, and approaching the most sinister medieval gateway she had ever seen in her life. Awful, cruel and menacing, it bulked astoundingly before them. . . . In the pale hot sunlight its ancient stones had a splotched silvery cast, leprous. . . . (Evelyn Berckman, The Evil of Time)

  A lightning blast awoke her. She lay in bed, drenched with sweat, the sheets tangled about her body, one corner twisted completely around her pillows was over her head.

  A nightmare? A dream?

  Selina could taste the scream in her throat, its afterlife still raw across her vocal tissues. (Grace Corren, A Place on Dark Island)

  Wrapped in a clean cloth and covered neatly with a branch of white spirea, she found a chicken sandwich and one small, cold sausage beside a vial of milk. 0 ambrosia! 0 manna from heaven! The sweet remains of the dear old man's lunch, which he had saved to share with her. God bless him! Trembling with hunger and felicity at the joy to come, she buried the food under her arm and shrank into the shadows of the grape arbor out of sight, wolfing the food like a starved alley cat. (Ruth McCarthy Sears, Wind in the Cypress)

  One can also examine passages of dialogue. Curiously enough, those beginning with the word "no" seem the most fruitful:

  "No," she said in full retreat, reviling herself for her weak surrender to the joys of premature tongue-wagging. (Evelyn Berckman, The Evil of Time)

  "No," I replied coldly, as I glimpsed through the broad windows out over the back drive, the white panel truck driving up, with Bockstein '5 written in fancy script on the side. I said firmly, "Dolly will lay the table,
if you've finished with the silver and crystal." (Ann Forman Barron, Bride of Menace)

  "No!" If he felt less angry, his young vis-à-vis looked more antagonistic than ever, if that was possible. (Charlotte Hunt, The Cup of Chanatos)

  Yet another way to separate the chaff from the wheat, as it were, is to carefully read the publisher's jacket or cover blurbs. The choice items will almost always be advertised in the fashion of Jeanne Hines' Bride of Terror (1976):

  Her Honeymoon Heaven Turned Into a Flaming Hell

  From the moment Devon saw the Casa del Cielothe "House of the Sky"—she fell in love with it. This ancient Spanish-built castle, high on an almost inaccessible Mexican mountain, was to be her new home as she began her life as wife to Drake Jane-way . . . Already she felt as if she had loved Drake forever, and that the Casa del Cielo had been made for them alone.

  Little did Devon realize that but a few nights later she would stand beside her husband and watch flames licking around the towers. Little did she suspect the truth about this man who had captured her heart. Little did she dream how soon after her wedding night her nightmare would begin…

  Bride of Terror is an interesting specimen—an alternative giant of the Gothic genre that also, heretically, breaks many of the form's cardinal rules. But it does start off typically enough: