A Newsvine Interview With Stephen Hunter About His New Book, "I, Sniper," And His Career As A Novelist and Film Critic

I come late to Stephen Hunter, who has been publishing novels for almost 30 years now. I have heard his name over the years mentioned as both a good writer of thrillers but more often I came across his name as a pulitzer-prize film critic, working for the Washington Post and, before that, the Baltimore Sun. I consider myself a student of film as I talked about in my interviews with his former colleagues David Denby and Roger Ebert.
But I am a sucker for a good thriller. In this interview with Patrick Anderson, the thriller book reviewer for the Washington Post, we compare notes on some of our favorite thriller writers, so if you want to get turned on to some great writers check out Anderson's book.
I'm two-thirds of the way through Hunter's book and am ready (unless he totally does a Stephen King - aka a bad, weak ending) to add him to my list of good thriller writers.
I'll let you know how I felt about the ending when I publish part two.
Now let's get to the interview.
Why did you leave a career as a newspaper journalist, particularly film criticism? I am asking as not just a reader but also a former journalist
I think it was when I was driving madly across Maryland one Saturday morning to reach a screening of "Alvin and the Chipmunks" that I said to myself, "Steve, you're 61. Is this really how you want to spend your life?" From that insight, I realized, I didn't HAVE to be the movie critic any more. It so happened that the Washington Post chipped in with a very good buyout offer at exactly that moment and that if I took it, not only would there be no more chipmunk movies in my life but also no more New York avenue fatigue.
Moreover, the Post was reinventing itself as a smaller, tighter, younger outfit, and the Post I had loved no longer existed. So all those factors created a perfect storm of opportunity, I seized it, haven't looked back and am quite happy. Now and then I'll write a film piece for COMMENTARY, but I'm definitely done with the chipmunk lifestyle.
I noticed in reading past interviews that you said you were the child of a murder victim. How did that affect you as a writer? If I read right your comments from past interviews you have suggested that it is that violence which is why your books are not only violent but you can't imagine writing a book without violence - is that accurate?
What I learned from my father's death was that a violent death leaves ripples in society that go on and on, even through subsequent generations. Somehow the movies never get that and books seldom do either. So I tried to get that reality into the books--"Black Light," particularly--though now and then I yield to temptation and do some big scene where lots of anonymous folks get whacked. They're not anonymous to their spouses and children, believe me.
I wish I could make the melodramatic claim that my father's death profoundly affected my life and work--something akin to Hemingway's Big Wound in WWI--but it's probably not true. I was always attracted to melodrama and particularly gun drama. By always I mean since about age 2. So it always plays out in my books, though of late I've learned to keep the body count down somewhat and try not to wipe out battalions of extras. And no, I can't imagine writing a book without violence, particularly gun violence. I mean, that's my Yaknawpatawpha; I'd be cut off from the material that most profoundly stimulates my imagination.
Did you find movies with violence more interesting than those without?
Not necessarily. There is a certain reptile-brain part of me that grooves on the melodramatic trope of the "cool" gunfight or the "righteous death" of the villain, and in weaker moments I'll partake of that pleasure. But really it's the execution and the ideas more than the gunfights that consign a movie to thumbs up and thumbs down in my mind. Just saw, for example, "Avatar," which is full of violence, and found it extremely dull, to say nothing of obvious and insulting to its audience.
The next day I saw "Red Cliff," the John Woo movie about an ancient Chinese battle. Loved it; Woo had thought hard and rigorously about new ways of portraying an old movie tradition of big battles and he continuously came up with vivid images, newly framed constructions, clever takes on old problems, and he kept the whole thing witty and alive. I found Cameron's violence annoyingly generic; I mean even with giant red birds knocking down gunships, the imagery lacked wit and never overcame the threshold of disbelief.
So it's not so much violence per se as it is the director's ability to conceive of the cinematically banal in new ways and give it freshness. That's something Coppola did in "The Godfather," probably the 8,455th gangster movie ever made. I try to do that to in the books: find new ways to construct the problem and new ways to solve it and give it a visual distinction it might not have otherwise had.
Do you think there is a correlation between violence in books and in life? What about between violence in movies and real life?
Yes. l live in fear that some maniac will take a Rem 700 into a steeple and kill 25 people and they'll find "Point of Impact" in his knapsack. On the other hand, I think what's missing from this issue is the other side of that argument: all the times some disturbed, angry fellow has been close to acting out, but he's instead been soothed and released by the magic of narrative and instead of doing the bad thing has done the good thing,i.e, gone to bed early. I've always thought stories, in whatever form, had their highest social use as a kind of pre-chemistry Prozac or anti-depressant. A story takes you outside your head, gets you into others, teaches you empathy, shows you things, calms you down, civilizes you. You never hear about THAT, but since all societies have invented a narrative tradition over the past 4,000 years, clearly it's effective. It's that tradition into which I would insert myself, and I believe that my violent stories, over the long run, do far more good than ill.
Followup question: If the portrayal of violence was more realistically portrayed in TV and movies do you think there would be less violence on TV and movies and would change peoples attitude toward violence and eventually lead to a less violent world?
Not really. I mean each year, the film industry ratchets up the threshold of what can be shown. Splatter, gore, beheadings, savage depictions of arterial spray, limb removal and whatever are quite commonplace by now. Has that made the world more violent? Hmm, murder rates seem to be going down, not up for now. It's hard to establish a connection between what is shown and what is done, other than in "think pieces" that argue by anecdote, not data. As an interesting side note, did you know that in the late 19th Century when multi-color lithographs became available, many believed it would drastically cut crime, because works of inspirational art could be widely reproduced in all their glory and that would soothe the savage breast of the common man. How'd that work out, I wonder?
The larger point is that by far, most people are aware of the difference between the imagined and the real and can live with the difference. They see a movie in which a vengeful hero guns down his antagonists, crying revenge all the while; they're unfairly dissed by their boss at work the next day and they usually don't haul out the .357 and begin blasting. They understand that the celebration of revenge in the story is cathartic but metaphorical just as they understand hosing down the supervisor would be a very bad idea. Now and then, VERY now and then, some freako doesn't get the memo, but it happens so rarely it's probably not reachable by policy.
Was it frustrating as a reporter and staff writer to hear people make ignorant comments about guns? Did you set them straight or is this a delayed way of doing so?
Less so by far on the paper than in movies, TV and other books. One of my early ambitions was to get the gun stuff right in a way it was almost never gotten right. I thought I could build a readership of people who knew and cared about such stuff. In the first book, "The Master Sniper," I went out of my way to identify the M1A1 Thompson with the bolt handle on the side and not the top and no Cutts Compensator, and of course the copyreader scratched all that out and replaced it with something like "automatic gun." Duh! So I re-corrected that in proofs as well as inserting the decimal in the .45 caliber construction she had so helpfully edited and took out the decimal she had inserted before the 9 in 9 millimeter, and in the end got something that a lot of people appreciated for its technical accuracy. That has remained a value and even though I have made mistakes I've taken shoemaker's pride in getting the small stuff right. People say, why don't you cut out the gun crap, I don't care about that. But the gun crap isn't incidental, it's elemental. The gun crap is where the books start in my mind and it's where my imagination is most deeply provoked and I need that electricity to find the stamina to write the 400,000 words.
Have you ruled out ever resuming doing any film criticism?
As a "job" pretty much. I'm tired of the CGI; I really don't care for this genre of "really big machines invade earth" that seems to be commonplace now days. Give me tommyguns and Garand rifles and I'm happy.
How do you feel about getting early raves for this new book?
Very pleased. It's the first time I've gone 4-for-4 from the pre-pub reviewing services and I guess once Kirkus gave me a rave, they figured there was nothing left so they went out of business. Seriously, the signs are better for this one than they've ever been, so I hope it's my turn at last. If not, I still wrote the book I wanted and not one about a spunky gal detective and her avuncular black mentor going after assassins from the tobacco industry, so I'll take some comfort in that until the bourbon kicks in!
I have read you hate the blurbing part of the book business. Can you tell me about that?
I'm not an asker, a networker, a professional association joiner and politician, a favor doer. I don't join claques or coups or committees. I don't sign petitions. I can't work a room or seduce someone who's never heard of me into liking me. All those skills are beyond my rather crude, thorny personality. If I try, I screw it up, say the wrong thing, laugh inappropriately, let boredom show in my eyes or get caught up in a lie about how much I love someone's book that of course I've never read. I'm hopeless in this regard. (I just write, shoot and drink.) So I've kind of withdrawn from the blurb business and the books go out into the world unblurbed. I don't know if that hurts or not; probably doesn't really matter. Understand, I don't disparage those who blurb and counterblurb, it's just not a thing I'm comfortable with. I'm not suggesting blurbers and blurbees be executed or anything; I think waterboarding or toenail removal would be sufficient.
Will the characters from Dirty White Boys be making an appearance in any of your next books?
Doubtful. That book came out of a very dysfunctional period in my life (details to be omitted) and expressed a certain existential bleakness I no longer feel. To write something like it, I'd have to get back to that dark place again, and I don't particularly feel like going there, thank you very much.
What are you working on next?
I've got another grand sniper novel in mind, with some important family revelations for the Swagger clan as part of the DNA of the thing. It'll be fun to write and I think my fans will like it. It'll look at, as technical background, another sophisticated technology for sniping which I think will be quite interesting and which hasn't been handled in a book before. I've written the first sentence and the last word. I only have 400,000 words to go.