“David Who?” My friend asked.
“Morrell,” I answered. “How can you love thriller fiction and not know who David Morrell is. He’s like the
...” I think I began spluttering at this point and couldn’t come up with a suitable comparison.
“First Blood,’ I eventually managed to say. “He’s the guy who wrote First Blood.”
I was rewarded with a stare into the distance, some memory gazing and then, “Nope. Don’t know him.”
“Rambo,” I gave him the most obvious clue I could think of.
“Riiiight,” he stuck his lower lip out like a shelf. I resisted the urge to grab it and yank him over towards my bookcase. “So, Rambo wasn’t Stallone’s creation?”
“Haw, fannybaws,” I said. “Call yourself a booklover?”
“I cannae possibly know every feckin’ writer in the world,” he holds his hands out by his side.
‘But he’s David Morrell. He’s ...”
Anywho, enough of my fascinating dialogue with my bookloving chump of a friend. For anyone reading this who is also going, David Who ... David Morrell published First Blood in 1972 (the movie Rambo was released in 1982) and has gone on to publish a further 28 novels (according to Wikipedia). He’s quite simply a fantastic writer, who is still producing quality work all these years later.
So, this kinda ticked me off on a couple of levels. First, how can someone this good stay under my friend’s reading radar – given some of the sub-standard stuff I know he reads (I’m not going to name names. OK, James Patterson. There. I said it. I’ll now hang my head in shame.) And second, the movie gets all the awareness while the source material gets ignored. This REALLY pisses me off.
Anyway - - back to David Morrell... he was the first writer I developed a fan-crush on. He has been called the father of the modern action thriller and is quite simply THE master of intrigue and tension. His books are hugely entertaining and “hypnotically readable” (borrowed that wee quote from Stephen King). If you enjoy this kind of novel and you haven’t read him, then you really must do yourself a favour and buy (or borrow from your local library) one of his books.
You can also approach him on facebook to become one of his FB buds. He is very active on that forum and often posts informative and thought-provoking comments on movies and books.
What about you? Are there any masters flying under the radar that you’d want to champion?
