The Dark City (Coronet Books) [Paperback]

Writing DEADLOCK was hardly a lonely job
Unlikely as it now seems, I was staying a few days in an almond tree on the coast of Kenya south of Mombasa when the O.J. Simpson thing came over the BBC World Service. Short-wave snippets about the murder led me to wonder about the trial, and because I was as far away from the "facts" as humanly possible, my wonderings focused on how this case could get any screwier. In that tree I found a way: a celebrated murder like the Simpson thing in which the judge learns on the opening day of the trial that the real murderer is one of the twelve jurors. If that didn't grab readers by their eyesockets (and doesn't make the best legal thriller of 1998), I thought, I should stay up in this almond tree forever. With my readers hooked, I wondered, what story will reel them in? Growing up in California, my parents once drove me up to San Francisco for a vacation at an age when I was terrified even of Bambi. My father and I wandered through Chinatown, which was a child's galaxy of total weirdness -- I mean, orange gutted suckling pigs in windows, thousand-year-old duck's eggs, a sing-song language that tricked the ear? We hired the services of a Chinese barber with a long wispy beard, a black coat with frog buttons, and fingernails like Fu-Manchu's. I held my breath in terror through the entire snip. And I never forgot Chinatown as a place of immense scariness and mystery. And now I wanted to put its complexities, confusions, and foreignness where they belonged. (I won't spoil the fun.) In these days of rampant gore-inflation, it was not easy to find a novel crime, but that was what I needed next. While still in my African tree, I dredged up a conversation I once had with Dr. Arthur Janov, the creator of the Primal Scream and an old friend from my days as a Newsweek correspondent. Art and I had been sitting around his place in St. Tropez doing not much of anything, and I asked him his thoughts. In his professional life, he had treated some seriously deranged victims. He was a good one to ask about the most heinous of crimes. Without hesitation, he said, "Incest," and explained why in great psychological detail. He had also provided me with my story's ultimate monster. Now I was out of the woods, if not yet out of that tree. Before I leaped down, I asked myself, who should tell this story? It was not a question that answered itself, because of the choices -- the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the chief of police, the mother of the victim? Once more, a friend came along, this time from Israel. The writer Ze'ev Chafets heard the facts of the fiction over liberal pourings of bourbon and said, as if he had thought of nothing else for months, "The Judge, of course." And in the silence that followed, I could almost hear him utter, "Dummy." As for legal niceties -- first and foremost I was writing a legal thriller that I knew could beat Grisham at his game -- I felt reassurred by the humdrum lives of most lawyers. In other words, who needs a law degree to write legal fiction when there already are too many lawyers with nothing more useful to do than to sue you and me? Indeed, legions of them fell all over themselves, thankfully, to suggest what would/could be done in the courtroom I was creating in my mind. By the end of the day, they had showered me with enough legal advice to earn me a degree. The last thing I'll mention is the book's title. Down on the ground once more, thinking it was time to start writing, I flew home from Kenya via the Philippines, where I joined a friend who by chance was directing a film, shooting that day on Manila's huge and hugely odiferous garbage mountain. Sam Fuller ("Big Red One," "The Crimson Kimono," "Steel Helmet," etc.) was gagging on the stench while cueing hapless extras with an army Browning .45 automatic. I told Sam my story line. He stared at me as hard as a petrified egg, then wagged the .45 at my person, and I thought surely he was going to cue me in a role I wasn't yet ready for, and he shouted, "DEADLOCK, Malcolm. That's your title. DEADLOCK!" And to think, some people think of writing fiction as a lonely job. (Malcolm MacPherson/Deadlock.) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.