Tonkin’s post-Killer life wasn’t all misery and bad luck. He met his future wife, got married, and the couple moved into the flat he’d bought with his Killer windfall. And, after The Dead, he spent about eighteen months assuming a new position at one of the Haberdasher Schools, taking on the English Department and organizing poetry competitions and dramatics, and even a school opera, with his students.
After he’d settled into this routine, Tonkin got back to writing. Some American expats hired him to come up with a plot outline for a novel about a mission to rescue American POWs still trapped in Vietnam, but nothing ever came of it. In fact, nothing caught fire until around 1983 when he heard about the Salem, a supertanker carrying 200,000 tons of crude oil that disappeared off the charts, secretly sold its oil to South Africa in violation of an international embargo, then got scuttled by the crew to cover up their crime. It resulted in a massive trial, and Tonkin started doing interviews, and then more research, and then he began to write. The book became The Coffin Ship (1990), and returning to the sea reinvigorated him – it spawned a series of 30 books in his Richard Mariner series, all of them seafaring thrillers. Today, he’s even turned his love of Elizabethan England into a series of detective novels about a sword master solving crimes in the 16th century.
So why are we returning to his first book, Killer, released all the way back in 1979? Well, as Tonkin himself says of its longevity, “It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” With its relentlessly murderous black-and-white mammal murdering a crew of marine biologists one by one, Killer is 100% horror, but it’s also an action novel and those aren’t easy to do. After all, hundreds of men’s adventure thrillers come out every year, clicking mechanically through their clockwork plots, sometimes selling a grand idea (What if an AI went mad?) or an exotic setting (It’s Die Hard on a crashing plane!) They get printed once, readers enjoy them, turn the final page, then promptly never think about them again. So why has Killer survived?
Character is key. As Tonkin says about what made Killer sail where The Action failed, “I’d been reading Alastair MacLean and I knew it’s actually the characters you’ve got to work on. The situation doesn’t function as effectively as it should if you don’t have people involved that you care about.”
Easy to say, difficult to execute. A book clocking in at Killer’s relatively lean 250 pages doesn’t have the time to deliver everyone’s backstory, to describe the color of everyone’s eyes, to move several characters through meaningful growth and change. You have to speak in a shorthand with a book like this, and Tonkin speaks it well. He bases his characters on resonant types (Colin, for instance, is based on Charlton Heston, large and forceful) and once he’s seeing them in his head he’s conveying them through his fingertips.
After fuel-efficient characters, you need a ticking clock, something inexorably tightening the screws, something that keeps the characters on their toes. Tonkin supplies severaclass="underline" the ever-shrinking ice floe, people’s slowly accumulating injuries, the creeping, strength-sapping cold, all of it slowly lowering the probability of survival with every turn of the page. Ticking clocks are valuable because they force more and more extreme decisions to be made by our characters.
Conventional wisdom says a story is only as good as its bad guy, and with the unnamed killer whale we have a great bad guy. Not only because he’s enormous, and hungry, has a rockin’ scar on his face, and hates arms – he’s a great bad guy because he doesn’t think he’s a bad guy. The book opens with the whale believing he’s doing something good, and when it earns him bullets instead of praise, he flees for the open sea, scared, hurt, and vulnerable. His murderous rage comes from a misunderstanding, not a conscious act of evil, making him totally menacing but completely understandable.
Well-sketched characters forced to make choices by a ticking clock, beset by a bad guy with sympathetic motives who’s murdering them one by one – sure it’s a formula, but executing a formula well is harder than it looks. If it was easy, everyone would do it.
1979 saw several big important books dominate the bestseller list, like Hanta Yo and The Establishment, both grand, sweeping American sagas. It saw Richard Bach plumb the depths of the human soul in There’s No Such Place As Far Away. Even Peter Benchley scored another hit with The Island. But no one much remembers those books today. Instead, we’re celebrating Killer. Maybe because we instinctively crave stories that thrill us with primal human dramas: the tale of the hunt, the saga of sheer survival. Maybe that’s what brought us out of the dark, all those millennia ago, gathering around the fire, waiting to be told another of these tales that thrill us and horrify us in equal measure. It doesn’t matter what year it’s from or whether it’s about a killer whale, a killer shark, a cannibalistic serial killer, or a killer number one fan. We recognize a true storyteller the second we read them, and we put ourselves in their hands, and we keep asking that age-old question: what happens next?
Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix is the New York Times-bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and many more. His history of the horror paperback boom of the ’70s and ’80s, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award, and his latest nonfiction book, These Fists Break Bricks, is a heavily illustrated history of the kung fu boom in America during the ’70s and ’80s. You can learn more useless facts about him at www.gradyhendrix.com
For
all the family and friends,
without whom . . .
especially for my parents,
Simon, Michael and Carolyn
Jill, Joy and Richard
and all the staff and girls
of Collingwood school
with thanks.
THE LURE OF THE DOLPHIN, FIRST BROADCAST ON BRITISH T.V. 1975
Showed film of experiments performed by the U.S. Navy concerning the training of dolphins, narwhals and killer-whales in techniques of underwater recovery.
Various authorities on the behaviour and training of these creatures revealed they were also being trained in antipersonnel work, and being taught to kill divers.
DAILY MAIL, NOVEMBER 1977
[Wild dolphins have been] trained by the U.S. Navy to patrol Vietnam’s ports against enemy frogmen despatching them with bayonets strapped to their blunt noses.