Dan Simmons - Drood

But the disaster of The Red Vial did nothing to dissuade me from my decided course of simultaneously disturbing, fascinating, and repelling my fellow countrymen. Shortly after the wild success of The Woman in White, I was asked the secret of my success and I modestly told my interlocutor—

1. Find a central idea

2. Find the characters

3. Let the characters develop the incidents

4. Begin the story at the beginning

Compare, if you will, this almost scientific artistic principle with the haphazard way that Charles Dickens had thrown his novels together over the decades: pulling characters out of the air (often based willy-nilly on people in his own life) without a thought as to how they might serve the central purpose, mixing in a plethora of random ideas, having characters wander off into incidental occurrences and unimportant side-plots having nothing to do with the overriding idea, and often beginning his story in mid-flight, as it were, violating the important Collins principle of first-things-first.

It was a miracle that we had been able to collaborate the number of times we had. I prided myself not a small bit on bringing some coherence to the plays, stories, travel accounts, and longer works we had outlined or worked on together.

So why, I wondered on this unseasonably cool and rainy May evening in Birmingham, was I here watching Dickens as he was entering the last legs of what sounded to be an amazingly successful reading tour of England and Scotland? Critics incessantly criticised my flair for what they called “melodrama,” but what on earth should one call this new and bizarre combination of literature and rampant theatricals that Dickens was pursuing on the stage this very night? No one in our profession had ever seen anything like it before. No one in the world had ever seen or heard anything like it before. It demeaned the role of author and turned literature into a half-shilling carnival. Dickens was pandering to the masses like an onstage clown with a dog.

These were the thoughts that were in my mind at the time I walked down a dismal, windowless street—more alley than lane if truth be told—as I turned back towards my hotel, only to find two men barring my path.

“Excuse me, please,” I said brusquely, waving my gold-headed cane to get them out of the way.

They did not budge.

I walked to the right in the narrow lane, but they moved to their left. I stopped and began walking to my left, and they shifted to their right.

“What is this?” I demanded. Their only answer was to begin moving towards me. Both men put their hands in their tattered jacket pockets and when those calloused, filthy hands emerged, it was with short knives.

I turned quickly and began hurrying towards the main thoroughfare, only to see a third man step into the lane and block it, his bulky form a threatening silhouette against the brighter evening light beyond him. He also held something in his right hand. Something that glinted in that failing light.

I confess here, Dear Reader, that my heart began to pound wildly and I felt an urgent liquidity in the region of my bowels. I do not like to think of myself as a coward—what man does? — but I am a small man, and a peaceful one, and though I might write fiction from time to time about violence, fisticuffs, mayhem, and murder, these are not things that I had then personally experienced, nor wanted to.

At that moment I wanted to run. I had the absurd but real compulsion to call out for my mother, although Harriet was hundreds of miles away.

Even though none of the three men said a word, I reached into my jacket and removed my long wallet. Many of my friends and acquain-tances—certainly Dickens—thought me a shade too reluctant to part with money. Actually, Dickens and his friends, all having been gifted with money for many years, ignored my need for pecuniary discipline and thought me cheap, a penny-pinching miser in the mode of pre-revelation Ebenezer Scrooge.

But at that moment I would have given up every pound and shilling I had on me—and even my not-gold but quite serviceable watch—if these ruffians would only let me pass.

As I said, they did not demand money. Perhaps that is what frightened me most. Or perhaps it was the terribly serious and inhuman looks on their bewhiskered faces—especially the alert deadness combined with something like anticipatory joy in the grey eyes of the largest man, who approached me now with knife raised.

“Wait!” I said weakly. And again, “Wait… wait…”

The big man in the shabby clothes raised the knife until it was almost touching my chest and neck.

“Wait!” shouted a much louder and much more commanding voice from behind the four of us, towards the thoroughfare, where there was still light and hope.

My assailants and I all turned to look.

A small man in a brown suit was standing there. Despite the commanding voice, the figure was no taller than I. He was hatless, and I could see short, curly grey hair plastered to his head by the light rain that was falling.

“Go away, friend,” growled the man holding the knife to my throat. “You don’t want no part of this.”

“Oh, but I do,” said the short man and ran towards us.

All three of my assailants turned in his direction, but my legs felt too unsteady to allow me to bolt. I was sure that within seconds both I and my would-be rescuer would be lying dead on the filthy paving stones in that unnamed, lightless lane.

The brown-suited man, whom I had first thought to be as portly as I but who I now saw to be compact but as muscled as a diminutive acrobat, reached into his tweedy suit jacket and quickly brought out a short, obviously weighted piece of wood that looked like a cross between a sailor’s marlin spike and a policeman’s club. This club had a dull, heavy head and appeared to be cored with lead or something as heavy.

Two of my assailants leaped at him. The brown-suited stranger broke the wrist and ribs of the first thug with two quick swings and then cracked the second one over the head with a sound such as I had never heard before. The burliest of my attackers—the whiskered and deadly-eyed man who had, only a second before, been holding the knife to my throat—extended the blade with his thumb atop it and feinted and whirled and lunged and swung at my rescuer from a poised, catlike crouch, all dance-like motions which, I am sure, had been honed in a thousand back-alley knife fights.

The brown-suited man jumped back as his attacker’s blade swung first right and then back left in vicious arcs that would have disemboweled him if not for his agility. Then—much more quickly than one could ever imagine judging from his stolid appearance—my saviour leaped in, broke our mutual assailant’s right forearm with a downward swing of his small cudgel, broke the thug’s jaw with the backhand return of the same swing, and—as the big man fell—struck him a third time in the groin with such violence that I winced and cried out myself, and then hit him a final time in the back of the head as the thug went first to his knees and then to his face in the mud.

Only the first assailant, the one with the broken ribs and wrist, remained conscious. He was staggering towards the darkness deeper in the alley.

The brown-suited man ran him down, spun him, struck him twice in the face with the short but deadly weapon, kicked his legs out from under him, and then struck him a final savage blow to the head as he lay there moaning. Then there were no more moans.

The compact man in brown turned towards me.

I admit that I backed away with my hands up, palms open imploringly towards the short, deadly figure that approached. I had come very, very close to soiling my linen. Only the incredible—I would say impossible —speed of the violence I had just witnessed had prevented my full and total reaction of fear.