Jake's literary forebears

 The real antecedents for Jake Gibbs: Patriot Spy are oral: the stories and tall tales I heard from various people when I was growing up and later in the Hudson Valley. Oral storytellers learn very quickly what “works” with their audiences; it’s no accident that their tales often combine humor and surprise with actual history, all unfolding in a way that keeps an audience hanging on the next word. But books are longer works, and every writer relies to some degree on models that have come before. And when I was starting to write Silver Bullet, three writers especially showed me the way.

One was James Fennimore Cooper. Cooper’s prose style is now very much out of fashion, which unfortunately makes his work difficult for most contemporary readers to get through. But he was the Dan Brown of his day, an immensely popular writer who entertained a large audience with a mix of adventure and deeper themes. As his career went on, he fell out of favor for reasons of politics and, some say, his habit of shameless self-promotion before this was fashionable. Still, his characters captured and defined the American spirit, and can still be seen as legitimate action heroes. Jack Ryan and Mitch Rapp have nothing on Natty Bumpo.

The Last of the Mohicans is generally considered Cooper’s best work, but my inspiration for the Jake Gibbs stories was actually another Cooper work, The Spy. Not coincidentally, the novel is supposedly based on several real spies, most especially Enoch Crosby – who in turn was a model for Jake Gibbs.

I can’t leave Cooper without mentioning another of my favorite American writers, Mark Twain, whose essay, “Fennimore Cooper’s Literary Sins,” is great fun, exactly right, mandatory reading for anyone interested in literature or Twain - and decidedly irrelevant when it comes to enjoying Cooper.

Nearly as important an influence to me as Cooper were the works of the 18^th century British novelist Henry Fielding. Fielding, too, is not much in vogue these days, unless you’re suffering through a class on the rise of the British novel. (Suffer, though; it’s worth the effort.) Fielding’s mixture of humor, fun, and adventure were very much a model. Today, Tom Jones is considered his signature work; for me, the earlier Joseph Andrews seemed more immediate and in many ways for fun.

There are many models for the role of a comic sidekick in a novel. At the time I was working on Patriot Spy, Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) and his priest, Don Abbondio, were very much in my mind. Sposi is an Italian novel; I’m not sure if anyone reads the English translation these days, let alone the original (unless you’re Italian, of course), but it’s everything an historical novel should be: entertaining first and foremost, historical, and often thought-provoking.

There are scattered references to all of these books and many more in the series, but getting them is not important. Frankly, I’m not sure if I would any more. The point isn’t literary history, or even American history, really – it’s entertainment.

(The Iron Chain, book two in the series, is available as a Kindle ebook here.)