How to Write Action Adventure Novels
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Sometimes the officers would throw you under the treads of a tank if they thought you might desert. Afghanistan was where you died horribly.
We don’t know where this fellow is, but he’s seen worse. And, by implication, his present posting is no bed of roses, either.
In Flight 741 (Gold Eagle, 1986), the scene is set for a traumatic skyjack when the routine movements of an airport cleaning crew are examined:
The weapons came aboard in Munich with the cleanup crew. Although security precautions in the terminal were stiff, no one detected their presence before they reached the plane. And for the personnel involved with terminal security, the members of the cleanup crew did not exist.
The scrubbers went about their jobs unnoticed, unsupervised. Their uniforms and ID cards rendered them invisible, except in an emergency. If some unfortunate lost his breakfast on the concourse, or if the toilets overflowed, an urgent summons brought the men and women up “from maintenance,” a kind of limbo somewhere out of sight and out of mind. But in the absence of a crisis, they were faceless and forgotten, worker ants who scoured the terminal and picked the grounded aircraft clean. If these cleaners had private lives and secret dreams, nobody paused to give the matter any thought.
Introducing Characters
If you employ your hook to introduce a character, you have two major angles of attack. A narrative approach is the more common, and you have your options: you can play God here, or let the character speak for himself, as Carroll Daly did in “Knights of the Open Palm”:
Race Williams, Private Investigator, that’s what the gilt letters spell across the door of my office. It don’t mean nothing, but the police have been looking me over so much lately that I really need a place to receive them. You see I don’t want them coming to my home; not that I’m overparticular, but a fellow must draw the line somewheres.
As for my business, I’m what you might call a middleman—just a halfway house between the dicks and the crooks. Oh, there ain’t no doubt that both the cops and crooks take me for a gun, but I ain’t—not rightly speaking. I do a little honest shooting once in a while—just in the way of business.
If you opt for third-person, as most action writers are prone to do these days, there are various ways for a character intro to kick off your story. You don’t need descriptions, per se, but your hook ought to capture a character’s essence as quickly as possible. Note how veteran Robert Daley sets up his heroine on the first page of Hands of a Stranger (Signet, 1985):
The first rape victim that morning was a nineteen-year-old black girl. The second was a thirty-eight-year-old white housewife. Assistant District Attorney Judith Adler could not do much for either.
Shane Stevens, in By Reason of Insanity (Dell, 1979), leads off with a bizarre and chilling introduction to his villain, Thomas Bishop:
The flames ate at the body ravenously, searing, tearing through flesh and muscle. First flaking, then blackening and charring, the skin disintegrating swiftly. Soon arms, legs and trunk would become flame-flushed down to whitened bone. And in due time the head, stripped of facial features, would come to resemble a skull.
Silent now but for a gurgling singsong moan from somewhere deep in his throat, his eyes maniacal in the red glow of the fire, the boy watched his mother’s body burn and burn and burn… .
You know that kid has problems, and the odds are fair that mama’s death was not an accident. Before the author’s done, we’ll have an opportunity to watch his grim creation grow before our eyes, becoming one of the more frightening protagonists in recent fiction.
Mike McCray takes a different tack in Contract: White Lady (Dell, 1984), opening with his character in motion:
It took Beeker a block and a half to realize he was being followed. He knew it from the vague uneasiness in his gut—a gnawing feeling too faint to register. Anyone else would’ve ignored it. Anyone, that is, who hadn’t survived five long years in the deadly jungles between Vietnam and Laos. One thing Beeker learned early in Nam: If you wanted to stay alive five senses weren’t enough. The others were the ones that mattered—the ones most people weren’t even aware of. If your gut says someone’s following you, you damn well better listen. Beeker listened.
Again, as with the Hill House passage, we have edged into a capsule history without a lot of excess verbiage making it a painful exercise. We know that Beeker is a veteran of sorts, with more than average combat time, and if we had to we could probably approximate his age. We have an inkling of his skills, and now we share his knowledge that he’s being followed—possibly by someone who may wish him harm—thus setting up the mood for confrontation.
William Nolan’s introduction to a killer, in “A Real Nice Guy,” approaches poetry in its simplicity and structure, but it tells us everything we need to know and hooks us in the bargain:
Warm sun.
A summer afternoon.
The sniper emerged from the roof door, walking easily, carrying a custom-leather guncase.
Opened the case. Assembled the weapon. Loaded it.
Sighted the street below. Adjusted the focus. Waited.
There was no hurry. No hurry at all.
The gunman could be any age or race, a giant or a dwarf, but I would wager every reader of that opening can see him in the mind’s eye, crystal clear. The structure of the sentences define his thoughts, meticulous and sharp, dissecting life with surgical precision. This is one bad dude, he’s scary—and we can’t afford to look away.
Eternal Triangle (Gold Eagle, 1987) opens with a rather different portrait of a villain, whose identity is not revealed until the book is more than half finished:
The basement bore a musty scent of long disuse. It was several days since he had ventured down into his secret place, and now the hunter flared his nostrils, picking out the separate, familiar smells of dust and mildew, age and slow decay. He knew what lay below. The darkness held no secrets from him; it inspired no apprehension in the hunter’s heart or mind. The darkness was an old and trusted friend.
Another nifty way of using characters to bait your hook is via dialogue. With this technique, we eavesdrop on a private conversation, gleaning bits of information on the individuals, their problems/and their setting in the process.
The Trial (Gold Eagle, 1986) uses an opening with dialogue to introduce the heavies in the midst of plotting a conspiracy:
“You’re sure it’s gonna work?”
The rancher spent a moment firing up his fat cigar before he answered. The stogie lit, he blew a cloud of smoke toward the veranda ceiling. “I’m sure. If everybody does their part, it’s in the bag.”
“You better see they do their part.”
The threat was thinly veiled, but the rancher ignored it, drawing deeply on the fine Havana leaf. His companion was obviously nervous, and it gave the rancher all the edge that he would ever need. “I’ve got it covered. Trust me.”
The hook for Time to Kill (Gold Eagle, 1987) is ominous in different ways, but the same technique is employed to put the characters in place:
“C’mon, then, lass. It’s nae much farther.”
Rebecca Rafferty glanced back in the direction of Cairnaben, where the scattered lights looked warm and welcoming. Too far, she thought, but kept it to herself and reached for Tommy Cullen’s hand. He helped her up the slope and led her toward the hulking shadow of the castle, still a hundred meters distant.
“Are you sure nobody’s there?” she asked again.
“Of course I’m sure,” he told her reassuringly. “The laird’s gone inta Glasgow, as I told ye. D’ye think I’d bring ye up here for a public show?”
In Run to Ground (Gold Eagle, 1987), dialogue lulls the reader—and characters—into a fatal sense of false security:
“I’m getting too damned old for this.”
‘You’re twenty-eight.”
“That’s too damned old.”
And he was right. At twenty-eight, with six years on the job, Roy Jessup was already sick of staring at
the border, waiting for the wets to make their way across by moonlight. He had not expected high adventure when he joined the Border Patrol straight out of college…not exactly. Still, there had been all those movies: Charlie Bronson, Kris Kristofferson, Jack Nicholson, all fighting major-league corruption in the desert sunshine, running up their score against the smugglers and top coyotes, but it only went to prove that he bore no relationship to Hollywood. With six long years in uniform, Roy Jessup had not seen a gram of coke outside of parties, never fired his gun in anger, never stumbled into an adventure ripe and waiting for a tough young stud to bring the house down.
“Hell, you’re just a kid,” his partner growled.
As seen in this example, openings with dialogue leave room for more traditional descriptive passages if they are handled carefully. One method need not necessarily exclude the other. Mix and match until you’re comfortable with the results.
Enter Shooting
The favorite hook for many genre writers is an action scene with solid punch behind it, guaranteed to catch the reader’s interest on page one. Immediate involvement is the prime advantage of an action opener, but there are other benefits as well. A hot beginning lets the writer pace himself, down-range, incorporating flashbacks to provide more background on his characters, their problems and relationships.
Don Pendleton did not invent the action hook, by any means, but he refined it to a modern art form in the early Bolan novels like Chicago Wipeout (Pinnacle, 1971):
In a matter of seconds, Bolan knew, the Chicago War would be on. The face in his crosshairs was the one he had been patiently waiting for two hours on this crisp winter afternoon beside Lake Michigan. Faces had come and gone through the hairs of the 20-power, but this was the one he wanted. Once it might have been handsome, or at least it might have possessed a potential for comeliness. Now it showed the indelible tracings of an inner rot, of power and greed too long unrestrained—a face that had seen death and brutality and atrocity far too many times to remain comely in the mirror of humanity—and, yes, this was a face to launch the War for Chicago.
In Vegas Vendetta (Pinnacle, 1971), we find the Executioner geared up for action in a desert wasteland:
The task was simple, and yet tinglingly complex. All he had to do was halt two powerful vehicles, overcome the natural resistance of at least ten heavily-armed Mafia gunners, liberate an awesome shipment of illicit gambling profits, and withdraw along a narrow route of retreat before the base camp reserves could get into the act.
And he had to do it in fifty seconds.
Pendleton establishes his story’s mood by giving the hero a time limit, right up front. It’s the equivalent of time bombs ticking down to Doomsday in the movies, and it works, unless it’s overused.
If the moments prior to combat don’t provide you with the necessary tension for a scene, you might consider picking up your story with the battle underway. In Hatchet Man (Warner Books, 1982), Dane Hartman brings the action home to San Francisco for a tour of the town with Dirty Harry Callahan:
By all rights, Jay Kuong Chien should have died with the rest of them. When the Japanese kid came into his uncle’s store and pulled the VZ61 machine pistol out from under his coat, Jay should have been sitting on the stack of Chinese comic books next to the curtained door on the back wall. If he had, it was certain that he would have been killed with his uncle and the one store patron in the first sweep of the gun’s ten 7.65mm bullets.
Of course, Jay isn’t killed, and thereby hangs the tale.
And while we’re talking guns, it would be difficult to find a hook with greater impact than the one devised by William Nolan for “The White Cad Cross-Up.”
The Marshal’s big automatic crashed twice, and two .45 slugs whacked into my chest. At close range, the force of the bullets drove me back like a boxer’s fists, and I landed on the rug, gasping and plenty nervous.
Which, I suspect, may be the classic understatement of the decade.
Once upon a time, Gold Eagle’s editors prepared a set of writer’s guidelines for prospective members of the Bolan team, requiring that each book should open with the Executioner in action, squaring off against the enemy. This was the “Pendleton formula,” demonstrably successful, but it soon proved too restrictive for a group of writers turning out a dozen books per year. The rule was scrapped, but there is still a great deal to be said for opening an action yarn with good old-fashioned action. Anyway, it couldn’t hurt.
The Lethal Cameo
I often like to lead with action scenes involving “throwaway” characters, whose death or close proximity to lethal violence will set the story rolling well before my hero shows his face. In Rogue Force (Gold Eagle, 1987), the novel opens with a military exercise as viewed from the perspective of a character with only moments left to live:
The night patrol had been a practice run, but it was turning into something else. The soldier had no fear of darkness, or the forest, but he didn’t like the way his three companions had been acting. There had been none of the hilarity that usually accompanied their jungle milk runs, no suggestion that they ought to take it easy for an hour or two, then head on back to give their customary all-clear signal. Everybody knew the night patrols were basic drills that any trooper worth his salt had mastered long ago. The enemy was miles away—assuming that there was an enemy—and it would be a frosty day in hell before they got this far.
He didn’t mind the night patrols … until this one. All day long the others had been looking through him as if he wasn’t there, responding to his questions curtly, if at all. He wondered whether he had unwittingly stepped on someone’s toes, or if he had begun to snore in barracks after lights-out. Anything, make it anything, as long as no one knew.
Another “throwaway” is used to bait the hook for an Assault on Rome (Gold Eagle, 1987):
The runner dared not pause for breath, although his lungs were burning, starved for oxygen as he raced through the musty catacombs. Behind him, death was closing rapidly, intent on running him to earth before he could escape.
As if escape were possible.
The same technique was also useful as a springboard for The Fiery Cross (Gold Eagle, 1988):
The young man stumbled, lost his stride and nearly fell. A sapling saved him, kept him on his feet, although the rough bark flayed his palms. The pain was nothing. Less than nothing. He had suffered worse, and he was running for his life.
Behind him, voices in the darkness. Cursing. Calling after him. Demanding that he stop and take his medicine. He could not hear the dogs yammering—not yet—but they were sometimes trained to hunt in silence, and they might be closing on him even now.
None of these characters survives for more than half a dozen pages, but their passing sets the stage for subsequent events and gives my hero something to investigate, avenge—whatever.
One-Liners
We’ve already stressed economy of language as a crucial part of writing decent hooks, and savvy authors sometimes take that concept to its logical conclusion. Several of the cleanest openings I’ve seen deliver all they need to in a single line.
The line can be simplicity itself, as in Douglas Fairbairn’s brilliant novel, Shoot:
This is what happened.
Okay, and what more do we need? Stephen King liked Fairbairn’s hook so much he lifted it, intact, to launch “The Mist,” and I admire his choice. The terse one-liner puts us instantly in mind of tales around a campfire—or around a table in your favorite bar—and adds a ring of authenticity to everything that follows.
Short beginnings may appear innocuous, as in “The Dust,” by Al Sarrantonio:
There was more of the dust.
Oh, really? Which dust is that, may we ask? And why, oh why, do we suspect immediately that we’re dealing with a problem so much worse than shoddy housekeeping?
Simple hooks may pose a question, as in Stephen King’s short work, “The Woman in the Room”:
The question is: Can he do it?
Or they can pose a pretty problem, as in “The Body Politic,” from Clive Barker:
Whenever he woke, Charlie George’s hands stood still.
Stretching our imaginations, William Nolan drops this bombshell at the opening of “Dead Call.”
Len had been dead a month when the phone rang.
And stretching still further, for Alan Ryan’s “Onawa.”
Yesterday—almost three hundred years ago now—I bit off the head of a bird.
Perhaps the ultimate one-liner was delivered in Killer, the autobiography of a retired hit man known simply as “Joey.”
Fuck The Godfather.
I don’t know about you, but he’s got my attention, and if the subsequent chapters sound much like a tired rehash of The Valachi Papers … well, I’m almost ready to forgive him that. Because he baits a damn fine hook.
Back to the Future
Retrospective prologues used to be the rage in action series, filling in some background on the major characters and spelling out their “cause.” The early Executioners, from Pinnacle, used retrospectives to acquaint new readers with the series and provide a sense of continuity. The method has its pros and cons; it can be repetitious—i.e., boring—for established fans, and there are other ways of sketching in your hero’s past. With better than a hundred episodes in print, the publishers of Bolan novels have abandoned retrospective prologues as a formulaic waste of time and space that can be used to tell a brand-new story. Still, the method sometimes has a place in single titles like Confessional, The Choirboys, Triangle, and Child of Blood.
Reeling In the Catch
Your story, to a large extent, should dictate the selection of a hook. If you concern yourself with cops and robbers, you may want to open with the crime. A private eye? Why not an introduction to his latest client, or some incident that will compel him to accept a deadly case? If you are comfortable with counter-terrorism, you may wish to open from the viewpoint of your villains, plotting dastardly conspiracies and thereby setting up your hero’s entrance in a later scene. If all else fails, there is that tested standby: the assassination of a victim who turns out to be the hero’s partner/lover/brother/closest friend from college or the army … well, you get the drift. Mechanics of the murder set your story rolling, and the hook will leave a host of questions to be answered by your hero, somewhere down the line.