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I began to have second thoughts; it’s 528 pages long, and
the back cover claims that “Rebecca’s tale is just beginning.” Hmm. I may
already know enough about Rebecca. I decided to follow the writing teachers’
tips, and check the first line to see if it “hooked” me. Uh, oh. The first
line: “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.” Not only tedious,
but repetitive. I put Rebecca’s Tale down. Maybe another day, but
maybe not.
As I thought more about “hooks,” I realized I never look at
the opening line before I buy a book, or before I check it out of the
library. I’m always searching for an interesting plot, and to find the kind
of books I like, I buy the latest work by an author I’ve read and enjoyed,
or get a recommendation from a friend, or read a review by someone I
respect, or read the text on the book jacket.
But I’m a pushover for what I think is the greatest
possible hook: a sequel or a continuation of a book I know and love. I own
about fifty continuations, sequels, and other fiction relating to Jane
Austen’s novels. I acquired them because I adore the original novels, and
long to know what happened next, and more about Austen’s characters. In
fact, I buy just about any sequel or book related in some way to a novel I
enjoyed. That’s how I happened to buy Rebecca’s Tale.
Another type of related book—not a sequel, but equally
hooking—is the book that develops a minor character in an old favorite—like
Jane Fairfax in Emma—into a major character with a plot of her own.
Another favorite type of related book is a retelling of an old favorite from
another character’s point of view. I saw and enjoyed Wicked, the wonderful
Oz-related musical based on Gregory Maguire’s book, Wicked: The Life and
Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. After I saw it, I bought and read
the book (another way of being hooked—I see the show or the film, and like
it so much I buy the book). I didn’t remember the opening line, but I looked
at it today, and it’s a good one—“A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the
wind’s forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung
up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air.” But it didn’t entice me
into reading the book—I’d already read it, and hadn’t even noticed the first
line. (I might have noticed if I thought it bad). I recently bought
Wicked’s sequel, Son of a Witch. I’m sure I’ll read it, too, and
I don’t care what the first line is.
On October 5, Geraldine McCaughrean will publish a sequel
to Peter Pan, entitled Peter Pan in Scarlet. In this case, a sequel to Peter
Pan in itself is a hook, but so is the title. I think a good title can be a
great hook. (Someday I’m going to write a long list of books I’d buy on
title alone: The Secret Garden Revisited; More Adventures With the
Little White Horse; Harry Potter’s Birth and Babyhood; and
Jane Marple at Twenty: Her First Investigation, just to mention a few.)
I can picture Peter, the green-clad elfin boy I know so
well, costumed in vivid red, and I want to know why he’s dressed that way.
I’m thrilled that those who chose McCaughrean to write the official sequel
stipulated that the book must feature all my friends—Peter, Wendy,
Tinkerbell, the Darlings and the hookiest of hooks, Captain Hook. I’ll buy
the book without a prior assessment of the opening line.
Mind you, some sequels are disappointing. I loved Gone
With The Wind, although I wasn’t ‘hooked’ by its opening line: “Scarlett
O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her
charm as the Tarleton twins were.” Boring. I read Gone With The Wind
after I saw the film because it was a great love story. I longed to know
what became of all the characters, and rushed out to buy Scarlett,
Alexandra Ripley’s sequel to Gone With The Wind. I didn’t like it.
But I keep buying sequels.
I agree with the writing teachers that the “essence” or
“theme” or “premise” of a book should be brought to the attention of the
reader early. I like to see that theme or premise at least suggested in the
title; and see it reinforced somewhere in the first 50 pages. I hope that
the title of my mystery novel Greed, Masks and Murder expresses the
theme, but I also have a character emphasize it, saying: “I don’t like
what’s happening in the print world: Heyward Bain comes to town, and starts
throwing money around, and print price records soar. I’m afraid all that
money is going to open Pandora’s box, and let greed out to ruin everything.”
As for making the first sentence all important, and expect
it to hook the reader—I don’t think so. But editors and agents insist that
more and more of the action take place in the first 25-50 pages of a book,
and in response, some novelists manage to hook the reader in a prologue. A
prologue is used frequently these days, often to present the reader with a
corpse before the action begins, so that the true business of the book—the
solving of the mystery of who did it and why—can move ahead.
Occasionally I run across a very unusual hook, one worth
bringing to the attention of others. Consider the preface to Dead Man’s
Chest: The Sequel to Treasure Island by Roger L. Johnson. With the
author’s permission, I’ve printed it below:
Preface
They say that the salt content of
seawater is identical to that contained in our blood. Maybe that explains
why so many of us are drawn to the sea and the wonderful stories it has
spawned over the centuries. One of those stories fascinated most of us as
children and still holds a special place in our hearts. If you share my
love of adventure, then perhaps, like me, you've wondered after that
classic threesome; the lice-infested maroon, Ben Gunn, the courageous
Bristol lad, Jim Hawkins, and that most famous of all pirates, the
softhearted cutthroat, Long John Silver. Did they really exist, and if so,
what happened to them after their legendary eighteenth century adventure?
I believe I found the answer to those questions during the summer of 1982,
when I chanced upon the hand-written transcript of a 1777 Royal Navy
Admiralty investigation that dealt with the attack and near-sinking of
H.M.S King James, a fourth-rate British man-of-war near Andros Island in
the Bahamas. There were dozens of similar investigations made by the Royal
Navy, but none with the significance of the questioning of Lieutenant
Desmond R. Roberts.
I was in London that summer to attend
a NATO-sponsored leadership symposium for command-grade military officers.
Since I had arrived early at Whitehall, three days before the first
session, I had the entire weekend to collect gifts and keepsakes for my
wife and three children. My eldest son, Stephen, had asked that I do some
research for a term paper he was writing, so a few minutes before three in
the afternoon, on Friday, I signed into the search room of the House of
Lords Record Office in the southern section of old London.
Stephen was writing a term paper on
relations between the United States and England following World War I, and
had become frustrated at the lack of information contained in our local
libraries. My search for the raw material he needed began with
Parliamentary proceedings of December 1918: the month following the allied
and central powers signing of the armistice.
The transcript of Lieutenant Roberts'
testimony measured seventy pages and was misfiled between the February and
March, 1919 Parliamentary records. The cover page was embossed with the
Royal Navy seal and dated 5 April 1777. The knot in the thin blue ribbon
which bound the neat stack of parchment was crushed in such a way that it
was very probable that the transcript had not been disturbed since its
writing. Naturally I became curious, but it wasn't until the fifth page
that I began to realize what I had discovered. In his defense, Lieutenant
Roberts had requested that a seaman's ballad be entered into evidence. The
name of the song was "Fifteen Men on the Dead Man's Chest."
In the two hours available to me
before the search room closed, I managed to read the entire document and
make notes of the major events it described. The chief witness in the case
was one Desmond R. Roberts, a Lieutenant and mid-grade officer on the
ill-fated man-of-war H.M.S. King James. Although many of his fellow crew
members survived the attack, Lieutenant Roberts was the only man able to
identify the pirate captain who had attacked his warship.
What was most amazing about the
document was that in a short section near the beginning, Lieutenant
Roberts described a series of events which matched in nearly every detail,
a pirate story I had read as a child. The transcript also provided a
concise record of a great American naval hero's movements during a
hitherto unknown twenty months of his life, and explained how he overcame
several tremendous obstacles to obtain one of the very first Colonial Navy
commissions. The man was John Paul Jones; a Scotsman and fugitive from
King George III.
After comparing the dates, places and
events Lieutenant Roberts had described, I became convinced that he was
the very Jim Hawkins of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, Treasure Island.
This conclusion, however, was not based entirely upon the transcript. In
my subsequent research, I discovered that retired Commander Desmond R.
Roberts had married one Christiana Osbourne of Edinburgh, Scotland, the
same town where Frances Osbourne was born nearly a hundred years later. In
1880, while Robert Louis Stevenson was in San Francisco, California, he
met and married Frances. It was shortly after their marriage that he began
writing his novel, Treasure Island.
As I checked out of the search room
that Friday evening, I told the Clerk of the Records, a Mister Cobb, about
the misfiled transcript and asked if I might borrow it for the weekend,
promising to return it the following Monday after my first NATO session.
He said that if it were up to him, he would be glad to oblige, but “…the
'67 Public Records Act only allows for the reading of these older
documents, not their removal or copying." He did, however, agree to hold
the transcript aside for me. When I returned Monday afternoon, there was
only a note from the clerk informing me that the transcript “…had been
collected by two gentlemen from the Admiralty."
I can only speculate as to why the
transcript was taken. It may have been the Royal Navy's desire to keep a
certain questionable incident aboard the King James from becoming public.
According to Lieutenant Roberts' testimony, two weeks prior to the attack
on his ship, one of the midshipmen lost his life during some horseplay
with several of his mates. The ship's Captain singled out two of the
Ensigns who had been hazing the cadet and accused them of murder. After a
quicker than-normal court martial, they were hanged. Not only did this
action violate Admiralty Law, but there was compelling evidence in
Lieutenant Robert's testimony that the Captain had a personal vendetta
against the two along with several of the other officers.
I have not seen the transcript since
that Friday afternoon in London, and my letters of inquiry continue to
elicit the same response. “The document you cite in your letter of 29
January 1983 is not available at this office, nor is there any record of
it having been held by the Royal Navy at any time."
Unless I have been duped by a cleverly
conceived hoax -- and I sincerely doubt that I have -- I present to you
what I believe is the entire story of Long John Silver, and the only true
account of John Paul Jones' movements during that missing twenty months;
and this from the Royal Navy Lieutenant who walked the deck of the
Scotsman's treasure ship and learned the tale from three of the pirates
who manned it during it's final voyage.
I have included from memory a portion
of the Admiralty transcript as my first and last chapters. Except for the
historical persons involved, none of Mister Stevenson's characters were
named in the transcript. I have, of course, changed their names as
appropriate in my story so that they coincide with the characters in his
novel, Treasure Island.
It is a complicated story of piracy,
politics, greed, and lost love; and of how one man was able to manipulate
the lives of hundreds of patriots and pirates in his attempt to attain a
King's ransom in buried treasure. You may notice, as I did, that
Lieutenant Roberts' testimony contains a great deal of coincidence. This
disturbed me until I realized that the world was much smaller back in
1775, just prior to the American Revolution. Merchants knew every other
merchant of stature, just as statesmen and sea captains knew their
important counterparts. Stories of the famous and infamous spread
throughout the world as quickly as the winds push a brigantine to a far
shore or a horse gallops across the countryside.
As you set your sails and cast off
your last line for this complicated armchair adventure, my hope is that
you sail before fair winds and following seas. If I have stretched or
compressed the truth slightly, I beg your indulgence. I was only in
possession of the transcript for a very short time. And besides, without a
certain degree of journalistic elasticity, my story would simply be a dry
expansion of Desmond Robert's testimony.
To order a signed copy of Roger L. Johnson’s Dead Man’s
Chest: The Sequel to Treasure Island, email the author at
hiouchi@centurytel.net.
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