The Line Up (17 page)

The importance of Nottingham to the Resnick books should not be underestimated. In the simplest of terms, I chose it as the setting for the novels as, certain areas of London aside, it was the city I knew best. I had lived there for quite long stretches of time, initially as a teacher, then as a student, and latterly as a writer. Situated in the less-than-fashionable East Midlands and some 120 miles north of London, it is only medium size as British cities go (the current population is just in excess of a quarter of a million) and so representative in its mix of income, class, and race that it is often chosen by market researchers as one of the key places to try out their wares. That very mix, with low-rent and high-income residences often cheek by jowl, makes it also a good test ground for a writer. All human life, as a popular British newspaper used to boast of its pages, is here.

When I first moved to Nottingham in the mid-’60s, the area was still a center for industry—coal mining, textiles and hosiery, Raleigh bicycles, Players cigarettes. Now most of that industry has either disappeared or downsized to unrecognizable proportions, and it is unclear what, if anything, has taken its place. Nevertheless, in the midst of some severe poverty, poor living conditions, and a struggling education system, pockets of wealth and creativity survive and prosper.

Writers have generally portrayed the city as a rumbustious, lively place with a good kicking about as close as the nearest pint of Shippo’s, and the area as a whole has nurtured a reputation for roughness and violence. Think of Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, or, further back, the early short stories of D. H. Lawrence, set in the small mining communities to the west of the city (where I began my teaching), in which it was normal for the wives and children to hide under the kitchen tables when the colliers were on their way home from the pub after getting paid.

More recently, Nottingham has acquired an unwanted and to some degree unwarranted reputation as the murder capital of Britain, thanks to a number of high-profile murders occurring within a short period, overstretching the resources of the local constabulary, and too many well-publicized instances of gun crime fueled both by the drug trade and by rivalries between young residents of various inner-city housing estates.

Rightly or wrongly, I felt that in writing about Nottingham, I was giving the Resnick novels a setting that I could portray with a degree of knowledge and conviction and that Resnick himself could be seen to know and understand. And love. Warts, as they say, and all.

art

There’s one last question about Resnick I have to address, one I’m often asked: how much, if any, of him is me?

If we acknowledge the fact that, like each of my characters, he comes from some mixture, peculiar to me, of observation and imagination, then the answer is very little. In simple terms, I don’t live off sandwiches or have four cats; I am not childless and rarely spill food down my tie. Not that, Detection Club dinners aside, I ever even wear a tie.

But his Nottingham is, or has been, mine. For years I walked across the city center, midmorning, to take my place at the same coffee stall.

My first real experience of listening to Billie Holiday came when shuffling through a pile of old vinyl 78s belonging to a school friend’s uncle—“I Cried for You” by Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra, with Billie Holiday, vocal refrain. There among the Earl Bostic and early Duke Ellington and Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. For Resnick, in Cutting Edge (1991), this became an occasion when, as a boy, he visited the house of an uncle who worked as a tailor—with thumbs like sheet metal and fingers like silk—who had visited America and returned with a bundle of recordings that the young Resnick pored over and listened to with wonder.

Resnick had sat in hushed silence with black tea and dry cake while his uncle hand-sewed buttonholes and hems and his cousin swayed her legs softly to the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, four voices and a guitar. After a while, his uncle would tap his thimble on the table and wink at Resnick and then they would listen to Mildred Bailey, Billie Holiday, Luis Russell’s “Call of the Freaks,” Fats Waller and his Rhythm, “The Joint Is Jumpin’.”

What helped to make Resnick was a patchwork of things, memories that, as will happen, came back to me in the course of writing and that, where suitable, became in some altered state a part of his past. Other incidents, like the one described below, also from Cutting Edge, although slight, could be dovetailed into the story to give a sense of the kind of man Resnick is and the world he inhabits.

It was raining again: a fine, sweeping drizzle that seeped, finally, into the bones, chilling you as only English rain could. On a makeshift stage at the center of the Old Market Square, the Burton Youth Band were playing a selection from the shows to a scattering of casual listeners and a few sodden relatives who had made the journey over on the band coach. Off to one side of the stage, in a row of their own, a boy and a girl, eleven or twelve and not in uniform like the rest, sat behind a single music stand, mouths moving as they counted the bars. Resnick watched them—the lad with spectacles and cow-licked hair, the girl thin-faced and skimpily dressed, legs purple-patched from rain and wind—nervously fingering the valves of their cornets as they waited to come in.

It was close to where Resnick was standing that Paul Groves had sat, staring off, and talked about his friendship with Karl Dougherty. “I touched him one time and you’d have thought I’d stuck a knife right in his back.” Once, while he and Elaine were still sharing the same house, truth spilling like stains everywhere between them, they had passed close together near the foot of the stairs and Resnick, unthinking, had reached to touch the soft skin inside her arm. He could picture now the hostility that had fired her eyes: the already instinctive recoiling.

The band hit the last note of “Some Enchanted Evening” more or less together and Resnick clapped, startling a few dazed pigeons. An elderly lady wheeling her shopping trolley across in front of the stage dropped a coin into the bass drum case that was collecting puddles and contributions towards the band’s winter tour of Germany and the conductor announced the final number. Time to go, Resnick thought, but he stayed on as the two beginners lifted their instruments towards their lips. The conductor waved a hand encouragingly in their direction, the wind lifted their sheet music from its stand and their chance was lost. Without hesitation, the boy retrieved it and Resnick watched the girl’s pinched serious face as, biting the inside of her mouth, she struggled to find her place in time for the next chorus. Only when they had played their sixteen bars and sat back, did Resnick turn away, tears, daft sod, pricking at his eyes.

STEPHEN HUNTER

Stephen Hunter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1946, and graduated from Northwestern University in 1968. He worked for the Baltimore Sun starting in 1971 as a copy reader, feature writer, and book review editor, and eventually became its movie critic, a position he held until 1996, when he assumed the same role for the Washington Post. His film criticism was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize on several occasions, and he was a finalist in 1995 and again in 1996; he won the coveted award in 2003. Two volumes of his criticism have been published: Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem (1995) and Now Playing at the Valencia: Pulitzer Prize–Winning Essays on Movies (2005).

His first novel was The Master Sniper (1980), which was followed by The Second Saladin (1982), The Spanish Gambit (1985), and The Day Before Midnight (1989). Point of Impact (1993) introduced Bob Lee Swagger, also known as the Nailer. This was followed by Dirty White Boys (1994). Bob Lee’s father, Earl, starred in three novels: Hot Springs (2000), Pale Horse Coming (2001), and Havana (2003).

Point of Impact was filmed as Shooter in 2007, starring Mark Wahlberg as Bob Lee Swagger. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, with a screenplay by Jonathan Lemkin, it also starred Kate Mara and Danny Glover.

Hunter is married and lives in Baltimore.

BOB LEE SWAGGER

BY STEPHEN HUNTER

Bob Lee Swagger first dropped in on me sometime in 1990, possibly ’91. I was sitting, as I reconstruct it, at the kitchen table, playing with plot ideas, of which I had exactly two, only one of which was technically mine. I had the second book due on a two-book contract for Bantam, and—all writers will know what I am talking about—there wasn’t a lot of fuel in the tank.

It was night; the young family (I think I was young also) was asleep. Bob’s arrival wasn’t abrupt. I heard no voice, I saw no face, I read no body language. It’s just that both plots involved somebody who knew a little something about shooting a rifle and watching someone drop.

The first plot was stolen—coldly and treacherously—from a book called Death of a Thin-Skinned Animal, which I never read, because if I did, I knew I’d steal more than the premise. Some Britisher wrote it and no other book, and the premise was brilliant—contained, resonant, full of fun things like retribution and righteous violence. A British army sniper is given a mission in Africa to take out a particularly nasty, obnoxious dictator. After he is dispatched and unrecallable, Whitehall affects a rapprochement with the nasty politician. Since nothing can be done to retrieve the sniper, he is betrayed. He is captured and disappears into the cruelty of the small dictatorship’s prison system, for presumably appalling treatment unto execution. So it goes in the realpolitik of the world.

Five years later, the dictator, now a proud British ally, arrives for a state visit in London. One night at British Intelligence HQ, a message arrives in code five years old. Deciphered, it appears to be from the betrayed sniper. I will complete my mission, he advises. Complications ensue.

I would move the story to America, to Washington, with an old ’Nam sniper, USMC to the hilt, as the fall guy. I saw it exactly: a reluctant colleague has to hunt him down, but at every turn the old guy is smarter, faster, more creative. In fact, it’s so good I may yet do it, though this time the older Bob will be the pursuer, not the shooter, and the shooter will be some young man out of three tours in Iraq, two with the Marines and another with private contractors. Only this time, I hope to have the moral strength to offer to pay royalties on the stolen bit of genius.

The other plot I was thinking about was vaguer, but at least it was my own. It was inspired by a story that had appeared in the Baltimore Sun magazine, by an old-boy reporter named Ralph Reppert, on a new theory of the Kennedy assassination. Like many—in fact like all—such theories, it was wrong, but the article had an arresting image. A rifleman stands on a platform in desolate, empty country (as had happened to Rep’s subject at the H. B. White Ballistics Laboratory in Maryland). Before him, on a certain angle at a certain distance, is a convertible automobile, traveling at a precise speed. In the backseat are four dummies in a certain arrangement, signifying human targets. He must fire three shots in 6.3 seconds and hit the target in the rear right of the head. Rep’s subject knew of course that he was replicating the behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald, but my imagination took off from the idea that the shooter had been conned into the tower and only by recognizing the angles and the speed and the nature of the shooting problem that confronted him did he realize he had been cast in the Oswald role and that the whole thing was meant to gull him into certain predictable behaviors.

In the end, I chose that, if only because it was mine, and began without much more of an idea. I just started typing and whenever I reached a stalling point, I invented a gunfight or a new major character. I had no idea I was changing my life forever, and for the next few years it seemed like the biggest mistake I ever made.

Point of Impact was a bitch to write—so many cuckoos to hide, and they had to pop out at just the right time. The book just got worse and worse. I wrote a two-hundred-page sequence set in the bayous of Louisiana and realized it had nothing to do with anything. I junked it. Ugh. Since I am congenitally lazy, seeing all that work disappear was a particularly crushing experience. I don’t know where Nick Memphis came from; he was on no outline or note-to-self before the moment he appeared in the book. I don’t even know where the name came from, and I have no idea what the derivation of “Memphis” would be. Is he an Egyptian or a Tennessean? I have no idea. He just showed up on a particularly desperate evening and kicked his way into the book and wouldn’t leave. A good thing too.

The book’s editor, a brilliant pro at Bantam named Ann Harris, later confided to me that she’d been really unimpressed with the first hundred or so pages of manuscript, until Nick arrived. Then, she observed, it picked up considerably, became more pointed, more incisive, more vigorous in its writing. Everywhere Nick appeared, the book worked; everywhere he didn’t, ZZZZZZ.

And I know why ZZZZZZ was the appropriate response. It was all Bob Lee Swagger’s fault.

Bob Lee, of course, drifted in from Charles Henderson’s Marine Sniper, which told the story of the great Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock. Henderson’s book is well written and gripping, of course, but it is more than that: it somehow communicates the psychological weight—you might even say spiritual weight—that a sniper carries everywhere. He is, after all, not the designated marksman but the designated killer. He is the one who sees through a 10-power magnifier the impact of 168 grains of metal going at 2,000 feet per second, the tiny hole it drills as it enters, the dam it breaks as it exits, followed by the slow, graceless tumble to earth. I was fascinated by that act, and I was horrified by it, but most of all I was horrified by my fascination with that act.