Meltzer’s Beecher is an ordinary hero
He has written Batman comics, loves Superman and creates children’s books about real-life icons. Still, author Brad Meltzer looked inward to craft his signature literary hero, Beecher White.
Beecher is the adventurous young staff member at the present-day National Archives who’s at the center of Meltzer’s bestselling Culper Ring series. Just published is the third book, The President’s Shadow (Grand Central), which sends White — leader of the Culper Ring, a secret group founded by George Washington to protect the presidency — on a quest after a severed arm is found on the White House grounds and information bubbles up about the father Beecher never knew.
“It used to be that we wanted the guy who was the strongest, that Arnold Schwarzenegger archetype,” says Meltzer, 45. “I don’t have an interest in that because that archetype is not me. I’m the small little guy. I’m always going to be a skinny bald man, and I’m much more interested in a guy who has no muscles or physical strength but is still willing to take the punch for you.”
Certain traits mark the men who readers have adored over the years: the debonair nature of Ian Fleming ’s James Bond, the ace deductions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or the good heart of J.K. Rowling ’s Harry Potter. Beecher White is no different. Meltzer discusses the DNA of his modern literary hero.
A ‘LOVE FOR THE ARCANE’ Washington’s 200-year-old dictionary in 2011’s The Inner Circle and the deadly connection among presidential killers in 2013’s The Fifth Assassin have led to big cases for Beecher to solve. But before Meltzer even hit a keyboard for the books, he started building the character after meeting his first archivist. “They had all the nerdy goodness I wanted to give Beecher,” says the author, who writes books about figures such as Lucille Ball and Jackie Robinson in his kids’ series Ordinary People Change the World. “Going to the National Archives, there’s a beautiful type there: bookish introverts with an obsessive love for the arcane. In that, I found the archivist and I found myself.”
SUPREME INTELLIGENCE Instead of having a series character who was a skilled secret agent, Meltzer wanted to take a regular person and then turn him into that type: “He wasn’t going to be perfect, he wasn’t going to be the daring hero that you knew and saw in so many overdone movies, but he was going to be something really different.” Where some might see a murder scene, Beecher’s the kind of guy who sees a re-creation of Lincoln’s assassination. “The real goal was, can I build this hero whose real power was just his brain?” Meltzer says. “He couldn’t fight, he couldn’t fire a gun. But he was smarter than all of us and didn’t feel the need to show you.”
UNWAVERING INTEGRITY Everyone has a defining characteristic, and Beecher’s is that he will always do what’s right. Not that it’s always going to be easy, as the character has discovered through three books. “I don’t care if you’re 10 years old or 45 years old, sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing. But someone has to,” Meltzer says, adding that’s the kind of guy society needs in 2015. “These days, people, sadly, have stopped believing in the American dream. We lost our faith in the dream and the game feels rigged. People do things for money, for fame, for pure selfishness — man, I want somebody to do what’s right.”
FAMILY TIES Beecher’s past has a tendency to catch up with him — a childhood crush and an old friend come back to play major roles in his adult life, not always in positive ways. In The President’s Shadow, he gets the chance to find out more about his father, a man he doesn’t understand or know. It’s a familiar situation in literature, Meltzer says, but “Beecher was learning that he was better than his father, and that’s not the usual trope. When you go looking for your dead parent … what you’re looking for is yourself.”
There also is a personal connection for Meltzer: As Beecher tries to get over his late dad, the author was dealing with the loss of his own parents. “It’s finally dawned on me, and it surprised me, that you’re not supposed to get over it,” he says. “When your parents die, you have to transform. You must. You fill the holes you’re left with and you become a new person. That was Beecher’s quest, and for four years now, it’s been mine.”
TOTAL MOXIE It’s one thing to have villains in your life; Beecher’s archnemesis happens to be the leader of the free world, President Orson Wallace. They hate each other and yet know each other’s secrets, so there is tension there. But Beecher has the chutzpah to take him on and not think twice about it. And whereas danger followed him around in the first two books, Beecher is more in control of his fate in The President’s Shadow.
“This guy is driving every scene — the scenes aren’t driving him,” Meltzer says. “He may have obvious boulders thrown down from the mountain at his head, but he’s always very quickly making a new plan. Our heroes are always wish fulfillment, and we want someone who can take all that chaos and actually try and ride that hurricane.”