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 18th 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.)
