More recently, Nottingham has acquired an unwanted and to some degree unwarranted reputation as the murder capital of Britain, thanks to a number of high-profile murders occurring within a short period, overstretching the resources of the local constabulary, and too many well-publicized instances of gun crime fueled both by the drug trade and by rivalries between young residents of various inner-city housing estates.
Rightly or wrongly, I felt that in writing about Nottingham, I was giving the Resnick novels a setting that I could portray with a degree of knowledge and conviction and that Resnick himself could be seen to know and understand. And love. Warts, as they say, and all.
There’s one last question about Resnick I have to address, one I’m often asked: how much, if any, of him is me?
If we acknowledge the fact that, like each of my characters, he comes from some mixture, peculiar to me, of observation and imagination, then the answer is very little. In simple terms, I don’t live off sandwiches or have four cats; I am not childless and rarely spill food down my tie. Not that, Detection Club dinners aside, I ever even wear a tie.
But his Nottingham is, or has been, mine. For years I walked across the city center, midmorning, to take my place at the same coffee stall.
My first real experience of listening to Billie Holiday came when shuffling through a pile of old vinyl 78s belonging to a school friend’s uncle-“I Cried for You” by Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra, with Billie Holiday, vocal refrain. There among the Earl Bostic and early Duke Ellington and Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. For Resnick, in Cutting Edge (1991), this became an occasion when, as a boy, he visited the house of an uncle who worked as a tailor-with thumbs like sheet metal and fingers like silk-who had visited America and returned with a bundle of recordings that the young Resnick pored over and listened to with wonder.
Resnick had sat in hushed silence with black tea and dry cake while his uncle hand-sewed buttonholes and hems and his cousin swayed her legs softly to the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, four voices and a guitar. After a while, his uncle would tap his thimble on the table and wink at Resnick and then they would listen to Mildred Bailey, Billie Holiday, Luis Russell’s “Call of the Freaks,” Fats Waller and his Rhythm, “The Joint Is Jumpin’.”
What helped to make Resnick was a patchwork of things, memories that, as will happen, came back to me in the course of writing and that, where suitable, became in some altered state a part of his past. Other incidents, like the one described below, also from Cutting Edge, although slight, could be dovetailed into the story to give a sense of the kind of man Resnick is and the world he inhabits.
It was raining again: a fine, sweeping drizzle that seeped, finally, into the bones, chilling you as only English rain could. On a makeshift stage at the center of the Old Market Square, the Burton Youth Band were playing a selection from the shows to a scattering of casual listeners and a few sodden relatives who had made the journey over on the band coach. Off to one side of the stage, in a row of their own, a boy and a girl, eleven or twelve and not in uniform like the rest, sat behind a single music stand, mouths moving as they counted the bars. Resnick watched them-the lad with spectacles and cow-licked hair, the girl thin-faced and skimpily dressed, legs purple-patched from rain and wind-nervously fingering the valves of their cornets as they waited to come in.
It was close to where Resnick was standing that Paul Groves had sat, staring off, and talked about his friendship with Karl Dougherty. “I touched him one time and you’d have thought I’d stuck a knife right in his back.” Once, while he and Elaine were still sharing the same house, truth spilling like stains everywhere between them, they had passed close together near the foot of the stairs and Resnick, unthinking, had reached to touch the soft skin inside her arm. He could picture now the hostility that had fired her eyes: the already instinctive recoiling.
The band hit the last note of “Some Enchanted Evening” more or less together and Resnick clapped, startling a few dazed pigeons. An elderly lady wheeling her shopping trolley across in front of the stage dropped a coin into the bass drum case that was collecting puddles and contributions towards the band’s winter tour of Germany and the conductor announced the final number. Time to go, Resnick thought, but he stayed on as the two beginners lifted their instruments towards their lips. The conductor waved a hand encouragingly in their direction, the wind lifted their sheet music from its stand and their chance was lost. Without hesitation, the boy retrieved it and Resnick watched the girl’s pinched serious face as, biting the inside of her mouth, she struggled to find her place in time for the next chorus. Only when they had played their sixteen bars and sat back, did Resnick turn away, tears, daft sod, pricking at his eyes.
STEPHEN HUNTER
Stephen Hunter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1946, and graduated from Northwestern University in 1968. He worked for the Baltimore Sun starting in 1971 as a copy reader, feature writer, and book review editor, and eventually became its movie critic, a position he held until 1996, when he assumed the same role for the Washington Post. His film criticism was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize on several occasions, and he was a finalist in 1995 and again in 1996; he won the coveted award in 2003. Two volumes of his criticism have been published: Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem (1995) and Now Playing at the Valencia: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Essays on Movies (2005).
His first novel was The Master Sniper (1980), which was followed by The Second Saladin (1982), The Spanish Gambit (1985), and The Day Before Midnight (1989). Point of Impact (1993) introduced Bob Lee Swagger, also known as the Nailer. This was followed by Dirty White Boys (1994). Bob Lee’s father, Earl, starred in three novels: Hot Springs (2000), Pale Horse Coming (2001), and Havana (2003).
Point of Impact was filmed as Shooter in 2007, starring Mark Wahlberg as Bob Lee Swagger. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, with a screenplay by Jonathan Lemkin, it also starred Kate Mara and Danny Glover.
Hunter is married and lives in Baltimore.
BOB LEE SWAGGER
BY STEPHEN HUNTER
Bob Lee Swagger first dropped in on me sometime in 1990, possibly ’91. I was sitting, as I reconstruct it, at the kitchen table, playing with plot ideas, of which I had exactly two, only one of which was technically mine. I had the second book due on a two-book contract for Bantam, and-all writers will know what I am talking about-there wasn’t a lot of fuel in the tank.
It was night; the young family (I think I was young also) was asleep. Bob’s arrival wasn’t abrupt. I heard no voice, I saw no face, I read no body language. It’s just that both plots involved somebody who knew a little something about shooting a rifle and watching someone drop.