Guest Blogger Joe Abercrombie, Author of Best Served Cold, on Actor Lee Marvin and Exploring the Seedy Underbelly of a Fantasy World
Joe Abercrombie, a 2008 finalist for the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer, has seen his popular the First Law trilogy published in 13 countries. His most recent novel, Best Served Cold, is a standalone book set in the same world. He and his family live in North London.
When I set out bright-eyed and innocent to write my fantasy trilogy, the First Law, actually completing three big books, let alone getting published, seemed like such a ludicrously distant goal that--perhaps a bit like Frodo setting jauntily out from his front door to carry the One Ring to Mount Doom--I didn’t think very much about what might happen afterwards.
But once the third book was well underway I had a hideous epiphany--perhaps a bit like Sam carrying his master up the blasted slopes and suddenly wondering whether the mountain might be a volcano--that if I was going to take this whole writing thing seriously I’d need to write a book every couple of years for the rest of my life. Worse yet, I’d used up any half-decent ideas I’d had during the last thirty years in writing my trilogy. I needed to steal some new ones, and fast. That is to say, I needed to pay homage to something.
Having written a big-ass fantasy trilogy I thought it might be nice to turn my hand to a standalone story, so seeking inspiration for a more focused narrative I thought about some of my favourite films. One face in particular could not be avoided. The lovely big face of Lee Marvin. You might say I’m a big Lee Marvin fan, and I’m a particular fan of John Boorman’s sharp, surprising, yet surreal revenge thriller, Point Blank.
For those unfortunate few of you unfamiliar, Lee Marvin is Walker, an implacable anti-hero apparently without a first name, a man who never opens a door if he can kick it down, bent on revenge after being cheated out of his $93,000 and left for dead, and there’s a neat twist in the tale as he works his way gradually up the ladder to the corporate types running the mob. It’s also a film with some very sharp and interesting editing. There’s one famous sequence of Lee Marvin striding unstoppably down an echoing tunnel, the relentless clicking of his boot heels ushering in the edits to other strands of action, the sound building to the moment when he bursts through a doorway, gun in hand, which works to perfection. As does the final scene when, instead of picking up his money, his lovely big face simply melts away into the shadows...
So I thought about Point Blank and I thought, hmmm. Mixing thriller elements with fantasy elements could be interesting. The seedy underbelly of society. The tough choices, the ruthlessness, the greed and the moral ambiguity. The drama of the heist and the double-cross. A sharp, simple story with some twists along the way. And I thought, hmmmm. Revenge. It’s simple, it’s universal, it’s easy to understand. The highest of stakes. Emotions at their darkest and most intense. Plus, of course, an awful lot of blood. It seemed ideal for my purposes. So pausing briefly to swap implacable anti-hero for implacable anti-heroine, I took Point Blank, and revenge, as my starting point for plot... - Joe Abercrombie
Next time...Machiavelli...
JimO on August 09, 2009 at 09:56 PM
Joe,
Just finished Best Served Cold. Liked it but did not love it like the trilogy. The plot and characters did not pop as much, a bit surprised how many characters were left standing, Vitari and Friendly were my favorites.
I will say that Last Argument of Kings is a tremendous books. Several major characters are flipped in the last chapters and the whole series changes.
I think of you, China Mieville and Scott Lynch as the "New Brutes" with very unsentimental characters and plot twists.
--JimOsmer