Writing to script key for Clancy

SOME would argue it’s drawing a long bow to start mentioning American playwright Tennessee Williams and bestselling novelist Tom Clancy in the same sentence.

But there is a link, however tenuous.

Both writers were in their own ways experienced with what would be described nowadays as factory or conveyorbelt literature.

On the one hand Williams, the great playwright best known for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, was his own man when it came to pumping out the words.

Lyle Leverich, in his 1995 biography Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, wrote how poetry professor Clark Mills and Williams – then just 26 – worked out of a “literary factory” in a basement in St Louis in 1937.

Williams would pound away at a typewriter, “operating as if blindly” according to Mills and never sure if he knew where he was going and then, if he was unhappy with a passage he’d written, would toss it aside and start again.

“It would go in a different direction. It was if he was throwing dice – as if he was working toward a combination of some kind of result and he wouldn’t have any idea what the result might be but he would recognise it when he got there,” Mills had said, adding that even with the discarded work left lying on the floor there was a magic quality to the dialogue that put it in the realm of poetry.

A poetic quality is not a description that fits easily with any Tom Clancy work, but without doubt the man knew what the punters wanted and developed a successful formula for his tales of espionage and military action that flowed out of the Cold War and into America’s modern relations with the Middle East and China.

Much like other authors in the thriller sphere, Clancy developed before his death in 2013 a style of his own that was turned into a guide for “co-authors” to emulate.

Several works churned out a year would fit the bill, be popular with readers rushing to find something to read in the airport bookstore before catching their flight, and be deemed worthy of carrying the fantastically successful author’s name in a large point size, with the other writer’s name in smaller type down page.

Any similarity between the work of Williams the playwright and American thriller writers of today stops abruptly once the volume of words smashed out at the keyboard has been considered.

Whereas Williams’ plays will live on through that magical grasp of what is beautiful in our language, arrived at through a feverish process of trial and error, it is unlikely the books churned out by the alternative conveyor-belt approach of modern authors will be held up in future centuries as the literary gems of our age.

That said, author Grant Blackwood is a talented writer in his own right, having created his own Briggs Tanner series of books. But there’s a demand for talented co-authors and a writer has to eat.

In this instance though, Blackwood stands alone as author, trusted with producing something Clancy fans want.

There is no doubt what this book will be like, since the title cannot be any clearer: Tom Clancy’s Under Fire.

Jack Ryan Jr, offspring of Clancy’s favourite character Jack Ryan – the academic turned special agent who becomes US President – returns, this time on a routine intelligence-gathering mission in Tehran that quickly goes pearshaped with the disappearance of an old friend.

Ryan is warned off getting involved but there would be no show without Punch. Ryan, much to the reader’s joy, ignores the advice and finds himself in the proverbial.

He is saved by a mystery woman in a fast car, and away he goes on an adventure that will take him across Iran, through the Caucasus and into territory targeted by Russia.

It’s no Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, but there’s plenty of action to keep the pages turning and in the world of reading on the run, that’s apparently what matters. Author: Grant Blackwood Publisher: Penguin/Michael Joseph. RRP: $32.99