The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

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.

The facts on Carlos Hathcock were straightforward: career Marine NCO from Arkansas, two tours in ’ Nam, the first as an MP. It was during the second, after he had won the Wimbledon Cup (that is, the national thousand-yard shooting match), that he became a sniper and achieved ninety-three kills. He became known as the leading sniper in Vietnam (it turned out, much later, that he wasn’t); he also, at least according to Henderson, pulled off some special-ops missions, such as taking out a VC general and, on one occasion, ambushing a VC platoon and killing everyone in it, both brilliant feats of arms. But he suffered two grievous wounds during his year of hunting men. The first was psychological: he lost one of his most gifted spotters, a young man named Johnny Burke. Then he himself was burned seriously when a vehicle he was in detonated a mine. Heroically, he helped get men out of the wrecked and blazing thing even though he was hurt. Later-and why later? another story-he was granted a Silver Star for the effort.

So there was Bob Lee: from Arkansas, professional Marine NCO, a supremely brave and efficient sniper with a couple of spectacular feats of arms that became legendary, then seriously wounded in mind-his lost spotter-and body-the burns. I saw him in a bitter exile, alone and aloof, a recovered drunk, and I knew the emotional trajectory of the book would be his eventual reentry into society, his discovery of love, his engagement, his realization that there were still things worth fighting for. All that was in the first aimless, tortured draft.

And it was awful.

Bob was not alive.

The problem, I realized eventually, had to do with what artists call the “living line” as opposed to the “dead line.” A “dead line” is a tracing. It renders a reasonable facsimile of the shape of a thing, but it represents no engagement of the imagination of the artist. It is not spontaneous, surprising, independent. It’s just dumbly there; that’s all. And that’s what I had, this crude tracing of Carlos Hathcock laboriously inserted into an unruly thousand pages of manuscript. (I am sparing you the tales of my technical tribulations and the disk I managed to embalm in jelly as I struggled through my first book written on computer, so there is some mercy in the world.) Bob Lee had all of the Carlos benchmarks, but he was as cold and dull as a stone.

People say to me: “Bob Lee Swagger? Carlos Hathcock, right?” Well, yes and no. The key to Bob Lee Swagger turned out to be not all the places he intersected with Carlos Hathcock, but all the places he deviated from him. It was in the act of breaking away from Carlos Hathcock that he became a freestanding portrait of a complex man, worthy and capable of sustaining an elaborate narrative.

As I reimagined him, I came up with a figure that I suspect the actual Carlos Hathcock wouldn’t recognize. I saw him as a kind of Faustian intellectual of war. He had seen things and done things and learned things that no man before ever had. But it was at great cost: his self-removal from society, his self-inflected deadness of soul. I gave him outward manifestations of these turmoils: he became an ex-drunk, and his drunkenness (I know a little about this) had not been the merry, charming kind full of bon mots and toasts and scintillating wit; no, it was dark, surly, violent, self-lacerating, maybe even killing. And thus his greatest victory hadn’t been over the North Vietnamese (I gave him a score of 87, because I wanted it clear to people who knew these things that I wasn’t offering him as “better” than Carlos), but over himself, in putting that behind him.

I also wanted him to have processesed what had happened to him, to have thought rigorously about it, to have tried to make some sense of it. So I had him essentially reinvent himself through vigorous reading. Up in his trailer in the Ouachitas, he started reading about Vietnam and from that he expanded to reading about war in general and took himself through Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, all the way to Hemingway, Mailer, and the writers of our time. He was hungry for context, and he saved himself from the self-destructive impulses of the darkest parts of his soul by putting the thoughts and experiences of other warriors between him and those black dogs of depression, self-doubt, anger, and loneliness.

Then there was Arkansas. I knew nothing about it, absolutely nothing, except that as I was writing, some politician from down there was trying to become president. I had never heard of him, hardly heard of it.

I originally sited Swagger in and around Berryville, in northeastern Arkansas, not far from Branson in Missouri and the Ozarks. I chose Berryville because the only thing I knew about Arkansas was that a gunsmith-visionary named Bill Wilson had founded a customized.45 automatic shop there, so in some ways Berryville was a kind of capital of gun culture. So I took a trip down there, and no man has ever traveled to Arkansas more full of romantic possibility and hope. But when I arrived, I have to say, I was disappointed. Berryville was fine, but it was set in the middle of something far worse than nowhere: somewhere. The somewhere was called country musicville. It was all twangy and cornpone; the Arkansas I encountered had been trivialized and sentimentalized and, worst of all, made quaint and cute. I just couldn’t see it as a warrior’s birthplace.

Dejected, I drove down 71. My destination was Dallas, where I meant to do some JFK research, as at that point, the JFK assassination was part of the book. I suddenly came upon, totally unexpected and unanticipated, the Ouachitas, a magnificent splurge of mountains roaming east and west across Polk County and Oklahoma. I didn’t know it was in those mountains that Charles Portis had set his magnificent True Grit, but here at last was landscape to match my man. Once I’d found that, I knew I’d found something.

Two other elements I should mention here.

As discreetly as possible, I should point out that on this trip I was not alone. I was with a woman who would later become my wife, and the theme of a man being drawn out of disappointment and solitude and despair by the love of a good woman was something I truly felt and that filled me with hope and joy and pleasures I never thought I’d have. I tried to get that into the book too, in the relationship between Bob and his savior, Julie.

Now, embarrassed, I leave that paragraph to stand alone and move on to another love: rifles. I wanted this to be a rifle book. I was-and always have been, as readers surely all know by now-a gun crank. Gun nut? Is that what you want to call it? Gun buff, gun guy, gunnie, gunner, shooter, Mr. Saturday Night Special, something or other. Well, call it what you wish, but the truth is, the firearm has always, always been a reliable provocateur of my imagination. I even remember when it started. I think it was 1954; I was staying up late, illegally, watching Dragnet. My father was out doing something stupid and ugly and drunken, no doubt. My mother was fretting and feeling sorry for herself, and I was watching Joe Friday and Ben Smith hunt down some kind of killer in the San Fernando Valley. Or maybe it wasn’t the valley; I don’t know: some tract house in a dreary far-flung LA burg. But I do remember when Joe and Ben located the suspect, and under Joe’s instructions, Ben called it in to HQ. Joe told Ben, “And tell ’em to bring plenty of.45s for the machine guns. It looks like he wants to go all the way.”

He did want to go all the way. He came out of the house pistols blazing, there to run into Sergeant Friday, that icon of ’50s righteousness, with his Thompson submachine gun, and Joe spoke for civilization when he blew the guy out of his socks. In any event, the next day I sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil and applied myself and in an hour had drawn a respectable silhouette of a “Fifty Caliber Thompson Submachinegun,” as I labeled it, making it, at.50, bigger than Joe’s! At that point, firearms entered my imagination formally, and I began to read about them, to notice them on TV and in movies, to dream about them-and to draw them. All my schoolbooks were inscribed with detailed side views, copiously labeled: “Thompson submachine gun M-1928,.45 caliber” or “M-1 Carbine” or “.45 automatic.” I conspicuously sought out cap guns that were accurate in their representation, and if I found a cap gun that seemed accurate but whose typology I did not recognize, I tracked it down. In 1956, at the age of ten, I became a subscriber to Guns magazine and drank up every word.

Of course today such behavior would get me a daily Ritalin cocktail (or stronger), a permanent appointment with a shrink, and entry onto the school district’s watch list, but nobody then thought it was particularly weird, and I must say this: it was fun. God, it was a pleasure to lose myself among the sweeps and curves and struts and screws of the various creations, to puzzle over the subtlety of line. It was so strange. In time I became a passingly good draftsman of the firearm from the 90-degree perspective, and even occasionally tilted them to 45 degrees, to suggest weight and solidity. I could draw anything except-true to this day-a Colt Peacemaker. For some reason, Colonel Colt’s genius eluded me: I could never capture the nuance of the curves, the subtle orchestration of the variation between the grip curve, the receiver curve, and the trigger guard curve.

Regardless, that love of guns stayed with me, except for a brief, delusional period in the early ’70s when I called myself a liberal and held myself superior to gun culture. But it always beckoned and I always knew it was my true faith, and one of the things that let me progress from wanting to write to writing was acknowledgment of guns’ deep import to me and their power to stir my imagination to its most expressive. Still, I really had never shot much and hadn’t actually bought a gun until just a few years previous, when I was working on The Day Before Midnight, a gun-rich commando novel.

I knew that to make a sniper real I had to make the rifle real, and to make the rifle real I had to shoot it, clean it, take it apart, carry it, make it a part of my life. So I bought as near as I could get to a Marine sniper rifle. It was a Remington 700 in.308, the police model with a heavy bull barrel, plain-Jane it its bluntness and simplicity, with no aspirations toward style or beauty. (This was also a part of my conspicuous separation from Carlos Hathcock, as he’d done all his shooting in Vietnam with a Winchester Model 70.) I mounted a Leupold 10X scope on it, as had the Marines in Vietnam (though theirs were Redfields, but still 10Xs). And I went out to the Marriottsville Road shooting range about five miles north of my house in Columbia, and I shot… and I shot… and I shot. I learned immediately that everything I’d seen in the movies was fake. I learned, first of all, how hard it was. I learned how subtle it was, how you had to find the strength and yet the suppleness to turn your body to structure, to be tight in some places and loose in others, and you had to take command of your breathing. You had to master your heart and mind, in other words, and if you couldn’t, you’d never be any good at it.

I was never any good at it, though in time I became close to adequate. However, the excitement of learning somehow alchemized my writing into something truer. I was aware that the process had never been accurately portrayed in a book, and I thought if I could get that right, I’d have something different, at least.

Finally, there was courage. Bob, I knew, would be brave. He would be one of those rare men (wholly, wildly unlike me, I hasten to add) who could face enemy fire stoically, figure it out as a problem in higher calculus, and work swiftly and efficiently to counter it. It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid; it was that he had learned to deal with his fear, or that he had a motive so overpowering that it vanquished his fear. And what would that motive be?

I studied the biographies of war heroes to determine what made them so brave. In the case of officers (that is, leaders), it was a belief in cause and system, a fear of not letting others down, a sense of responsibility. But that’s not what would drive a sniper. He’s alone, on his own, out there in Indian country. No one knows if he’s brave or not; he really answers only to himself. What drives him? I had to find out, because I was determined to create the whole man, and I didn’t want to just declare him brave and let it go at that, as happens routinely in B movies and novels.

Ultimately, I hit upon another creature of tremendous will and attainment, who was nevertheless thorny, difficult, even repulsive. I hit upon Tyrus Raymond Cobb. It’s part of my attraction to difficult men that I like Ty Cobb. Yes, I know: racist, sexist, violent, outsider to the end, vicious, vengeful, tough as brass bushings, relentless, unpleasant, ultimately spurned by everyone. But his backstory is very interesting. When he was nineteen years old and had just signed his first professional-baseball contract, his mother murdered his father in her bedroom with a shotgun. Her lover was in bed with her. Ty Cobb loved his father, a prominent Georgia lawyer, seen by all as a fair, kind, brilliant, just man. He felt immensely cheated by the fact that his father never saw him play ball professionally, and he was shattered at the squalid circumstances of his father’s death, so small in comparison to the attainments of the man himself. Nevertheless, he paid for his mother’s defense and saw her get off as not guilty, pleading that she thought it was an intruder at the window.

I decided to give Bob a similar dynamic-a brilliant father, snatched from him early in squalid circumstances that were no match for the accomplishments of the man, so that the haunted son would miss his father greatly and spend his life trying to live up to the man’s brilliance. He would be a man who idealized his father, never having learned that his father was just a man, with his own foibles and flaws.

I remember one night, sitting in the Columbia house, just typing out a paragraph without a lot of thought. I have no idea where it came from. I wrote of-hmm, what’s a good Southern-sounding name?-oh yeah, Earl, yeah, that’s it, Earl. Let’s make Earl a Marine too, and, oh, I know, this’ll be cool, let’s have him win the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima; in fact, let’s have him fight his way across the Pacific, island to bloody island, killer, hero, Marine, a man of legend. Oh, then he comes back and becomes a state policeman. Now let’s have him killed ten years later in a squalid cornfield by two white-trash skanks with those dog-of-the-South names, I know, we’ll call them Jimmy and Bub Pye; there you go. Achilles slain by two Yocums, or Snopeses. Yeah.

I typed it up and forgot all about it.

And yet, when I was finished-years later, it seemed-that’s what stayed with me. Achilles felled in the corn, two worthless punks crowing. It was so sad; I just had to know more, and the only way to learn it was to write it. And that’s what I did. As for Bob Lee and Point of Impact, there’s not much more to tell. Once I had him, I had the book. Everything else more or less happened in the time it should have happened. There was a last, desperate rewrite, where I solved another narrative problem by breaking a single villain into two, one Colonel Ray Shreck, ex-Green Beret, and the other Hugh Meachum, CIA executive and espionage entrepreneur extraordinaire. (Somehow they became Danny Glover and Ned Beatty in the movie. Go figure!)

Yet, when it was done, published to good reviews but disappointing sales, I found that Bob and his father, Earl, would not go away. I tried to banish them, for until then I had taken craftsman’s pride in not repeating myself. But they wouldn’t go away, and I had to write another book. And then another. And then… My life’s work had arrived, and I was the last to know it.