Death in the Face

by Craig McDonald

  The boy smiled uncertainly at Haven—a new front tooth was just coming in to fill a gap. He asked her, “You don’t, do you?”

  The accent threw Hector: it was a strange hybrid of Haven’s English accent with an overlay of Japanese distortions of a couple of key consonants. More travel might ground that out, though. Hector hoped that would be the case.

  “It doesn’t really matter so much exactly how we’re related,” Hector said, finding himself trying hard not to let his sprawling Texas pronunciations to bleed through too strongly, then deciding, No, this might serve as a counterbalance.

  Hector said in a baritone drawl, “It’s a confusin’ family tree and I don’t want to bore you. But blue eyes like ours do run in the family, especially among the men.” He pointed at one of the fishing poles. “You do this a lot, kiddo?”

  “Never. Mommy said you’ll teach me. She says you know all about how to fish, Mr. Devlin.”

  Hector smiled. “Beau. You call me Beau. And, yes, I’ve caught a few fish in my time. Maybe even a lake’s worth. Let’s go see what we can land here.” He rested a big hand on the boy’s shoulder and they walked toward the ocean for a lesson in casting.

  ***

  For more than two hours, Hector fished with his son.

  They didn’t catch anything worth keeping, but they talked about baseball, which the kid loved and Hector had to fake a zeal for this one time.

  They talked about dogs—Heath wanted one, quite badly, but Haven’s travels were an obstacle to that.

  They also talked a little about writing. Heath posed a child’s questions about the craft.

  Hector kept the advice simple and easy to remember on that front: “Two rules for success,” he said. “Write the story only you can write, son. And you strive to write one true sentence, then you write another and another and just keep on like that.”

  Hector tried to remember himself at age seven or eight. He couldn’t, not really, but he was convinced that even then, he was already aiming to be a writer. He couldn’t honestly remember a time when that wasn’t his goal.

  But if he was candid with himself, he wasn’t sure he could remember any of Beau’s many homilies thrown at Hector about life and such when he was Heath’s age.

  Still, maybe those few lines of key writing advice would somehow stick if Heath really kept his foot on that particular creative path.

  As the sun began to fail—as the Big Island’s November rains freshly threatened—Haven at last returned to them.

  They said their goodbyes, reluctantly so—at least that was the case from Hector’s end. There was a lingering embrace for the mother and a firm handshake for their boy.

  Hector watched them walk off together, headed back to their lives apart from him.

  Somehow he knew he’d never see either of them again.

  At the same time, Hector sensed somehow their luck would always hold. There would be no terrible disease or stupid car accident that would ever send that boy running back to the old man with the palest blue eyes. Hector instinctively knew that would prove so.

  When the latest rain came, it did so suddenly, in wind-driven, billowing sheets.

  Hector was far enough away from his car that running wouldn’t spare him a profound soaking. So, hands in his pockets and head down, Hector walked on through the driving rain, thinking hard about separate lives and second chances.

  There are no second acts in American lives, his old Parisian drinking buddy F. Scott Fitzgerald had famously said. Those had proven prophetic enough words, at least for Scott.

  But Hector really had learned from Ernest’s dire example, and from Ian’s, too. Through both of his fellow authors’ troubled eyes, in a very real sense, Hector had looked death in the face and chosen a second shot at life.

  Eventually—but determinedly—Hector had simply turned his back on that “old whore” death. He turned his back not just on death, but importantly, on himself, in the most crucial sense.

  Hector had embraced an ultimate and radical reinvention of self whose concept had been bequeathed him by Brinke in one of the last and most important lessons she’d had to teach him.

  Mishima had long ago written, “The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.”

  Long before James Bond’s creator had scribbled down his famous lines in an errant attempt at a haiku, Brinke Devlin had known and proven if one was coldly willing to sacrifice oneself after a fashion, then conceivably one could in a sense live twice.

  Smiling to himself, Hector slid behind the wheel. He dragged an arm across his damp forehead, then turned over the engine and flipped on the windshield wipers.

  The rain, he thought, was like a kind of baptism, and the thought of this blue-eyed, Japan-dwelling little boy who carried his blood and who shared Hector’s storytelling drives was like another incarnation of himself—one to be celebrated and even venerated, after a fashion.

  Palming the wheel, Hector veered onto the main road and drove home through the pounding rain thinking of Heath, thinking of the life that might lie ahead for this errant son.

  He recalled another line from Basho, something that Haven had whispered in his ear, perhaps the very night they’d conceived Heath:

  “To live poetry, is better than to write it.”

  Quite alone, yet somehow quite happy, Hector drove on through the sweet-smelling autumn rain, back to his home and family.

  HECTOR LASSITER

  WILL RETURN

  IN

  THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH

  (The final Hector Lassiter novel)

  AFTERWORD

  About the same time this novel is scheduled to debut in autumn 2015, a new James Bond film will appear—one dubbed Spectre. It’s a film promising to return to the series’ 1960s roots and once again giving us Daniel Craig’s brooding, appropriately melancholic 007.

  Blessedly, Craig’s is an interpretation more in keeping with the spirit of the original Ian Fleming novels, now so very many decades old.

  Sitting here on a sultry June evening, I’ll confess to hoping that come November and Spectre’s premier, I’ll be profoundly shaken and stirred, once more, by 007.

  For some of us guys, it’s still frankly James Bond’s world. The rest of us, particularly we men of a certain age, simply consider ourselves lucky enough to vicariously live in it from time to time.

  I was born in July 1962. Around October of that year, my parents apparently felt we at last needed time apart. I was left with my grandparents when my folks decided to take in a drive-in movie.

  They had no clue what this flick Dr. No was about, but they came, they saw, and they fell in love with James Bond (and my mother with Sean Connery) upon first viewing.

  This is, of course, all received memory.

  Flash forward: I made my formal, first-person acquaintance with James Bond, in a grand old Columbus Ohio theater, in 1967.

  We three went there to see Sean Connery’s (first) swan song as 007, You Only Live Twice. I remember the broader, set-piece elements of that movie: its Japanese setting, the volcano lair and the car lifted by a giant magnet and dropped into the sea. And I remember being chilled by the spooky murder of a woman by trickling poison down a string and onto her lips while she slept.

  From that point forward, in that pre-video, pre-cable and pre-TNT Bond marathon era, we’d anticipate twice-yearly showings of a James Bond movie on ABC on very special Sunday nights.

  I watched every one of those films with my father.

  Anyone who has actually read the original James Bond novels and then seen the resulting films knows Bond on the page and Bond on film are most often two very different beasts.

  Having grown up in the 1960s, in retrospect, I see my own image of masculinity was shaped by three men: Ernest Hemingway, who died in 1961 but continued to publish books at
a steady pace into the middle 1980s; James Bond (largely in the person of the swaggeringly Scottish Connery) and my grandfather, Bill Sipe, who was a structural steel worker who wore sports jackets in all weather, smoked Pall Malls and carried a Zippo with a little plastic loader filled with flints for quick re-juices. I dedicated my first-published novel to my granddad.

  My grandfather also kept a basement full of pulp literature, including Signet paperback editions of many of the James Bond titles. I’d pick up those Signets from time to time and then put them back down unread. The cover art was muddy and not compelling when measured against the memory of John Barry 007 soundtracks with all their bombast and horns, or against the sexy and vivid film poster images of Connery-Bond and his striking women as painted by Eric Pulford, Robert McGinnis and Frank McCarthy.

  My grandfather died in the fall of 1980. He left me his ’65 Ford Galaxie and boxes of books and men’s stag magazines. Over the course of a mournful winter, I at last read every James Bond book by Ian Fleming, in publication sequence.

  Those intense first few weeks living so potently in the head of Fleming remain a favorite reading memory, all these years later. I’ve revisited every Bond book countless times since, chasing that elusive dragon.

  The experience was like a (vodka &) tonic during the long, dreary period of Roger Moore’s reign as a flippant and rather fey English Bond.

  Fleming’s Bond was a neurotically subdued and melancholy WWII vet who drifted from affair to affair and expensive bottle to bottle of this and that between assignments.

  Ian’s Bond was aging in something like real-time and running up against a 35-year-age termination limit for all 00-status agents.

  It was pretty clear this was a man who knew there would be no second act in his storied life once stripped of his agency-coveted License to Kill.

  When Fleming’s Bond murdered someone, he didn’t make a quick quip afterward. Goldfinger, the novel, opens with Bond in an airport in Miami, getting drunk and contemplating his injured hand, thinking about how it got that way from brutally murdering some luckless, would-be Mexican assassin a short time before.

  Thrillers to the core, Fleming’s literary Bonds were still far more grounded to reality than their film counterparts.

  The film version of The Spy Who Loved Me is a nakedly overt and globe-trotting remake of You Only Live Twice with Roger Moore dragging the series firmly over the sorry line into self-parody and mockery that Pierce Brosnan would also lamentably cross, time and again, in the 1990s.

  Appealing and charming as Brosnan and Moore are as personalities, they were mostly lamentable Bonds.

  Fleming’s Spy is narrated by a Canadian woman who agrees to play caretaker to an out-of-season roadside motel which the owners secretly plan to torch for insurance purposes, fingering our comely narrator as accidental arsonist. All very noir; all decidedly not cinema James Bond.

  There are no nuclear submarines, no web-fingered villains living in impossible underwater lairs or giants with steel teeth.

  Instead, we get Bond, two thuggish torch-artists for hire, a vampy Canadian, and some raw sex and bloody violence.

  It’s page-turning pulp noir, really.

  We’re also granted a revelatory look into the persona of James Bond from the perspective of one of his myriad, nubile bedmates.

  When our heroine narrator, about to be murdered—after likely sexual assault—opens a door to find James Bond standing there, blinking back the chilly rain, her first reaction upon seeing this latest stranger at her door is that Bond must be another murderer for hire who’s simply arrived late to the scene of her coming slaughter.

  Call it death in the face.

  Fleming’s Bond, taken in concentrated form, can pretty much ruin one for much of Albert Broccoli and Company’s Bond, at least for a while.

  After reading the original novels, the vintage Bond films that resonate most are the first two Connery flicks and the still under-appreciated, but brilliant, On Her Majesty’s Secret, all three of which hew fairly closely to their source material and to something approaching Fleming’s singular conception of James Bond.

  In the middle 1980s, when a then sixty-something Moore (cannily self-described at that point as “an occasional stand-in for the stunt men”) finally put down his Walther PPK, we got Timothy Dalton, who went into his two films having read all the novels and pushing hard to invest his Bond with the subtext, at least, of the Fleming originals.

  Dalton’s Bond is truly an assassin, one not particularly in love with his job; at last the Byronic hero his creator envisioned, and not the gadget-reliant quipster who unleashed waves of imitators in the personas of Dean Martin, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn and even Robert Conrad’s James West.

  When I conceived of Hector Lassiter and his arc over a series of a dozen or so novels, the Fleming Bonds were my central model and primary inspiration.

  We’re late in the game now, most of the critics have had their say, and so now I’ll confess that key influence for the first time.

  Precisely one person has ever caught the connection to my knowledge:

  A few years back, I appeared at a reading with fellow-novelist Brian Freeman in Ann Arbor’s downtown public library.

  Our moderator, Robin Agnew of Aunt Agatha’s Mysteries—Michigan’s finest book store—compared my Lassiter novels to Fleming’s Bond novels. Then Robin deftly explained her reasoning for that assertion.

  Her thesis was impeccable. I thought sitting there, At last. . .found out!

  So here we are, almost at series end. Nearly all has been revealed.

  This is the penultimate Hector Lassiter novel.

  Not by accident, it is also my tribute and heart-felt love letter to Ian Fleming and his darkly seductive, idiosyncratic world.

  This installment is also the deliberate table-setter for my series’ swan-song, which, not so accidentally, occurs in the same decade that gave birth to Mr. James Bond of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

  —CM

  June, 2015

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Craig McDonald is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hector Lassiter series has been published to international acclaim in numerous languages. McDonald’s debut novel was nominated for Edgar, Anthony and Gumshoe awards in the U.S. and the 2011 Sélection du prix polar Saint-Maur en Poche in France.

  The Lassiter series has been enthusiastically endorsed by a who’s who of crime fiction authors including: Michael Connelly, Laura Lippmann, Daniel Woodrell, James Crumley, James Sallis, Diana Gabaldon, and Ken Bruen, among many others.

  Craig McDonald is also the author of two highly praised non-fiction volumes on the subject of mystery and crime fiction writing, Art in the Blood and Rogue Males, nominated for the Macavity Award.

  To learn more about Craig, visit www.craigmcdonaldbooks.com and www.betimesbooks.com

  Follow Craig McDonald on Twitter @HECTORLASSITER and on FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/craigmcdonaldnovelist