The Impeccable Timing of a Political Thriller
The success of a political thriller in print or film depends on something more than good writing — great timing. Take one of best screen thrillers of all time, Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sidney Pollack. Robert Redford...
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The success of a political thriller in print or film depends on something more than good writing — great timing. Take one of best screen thrillers of all time, Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sidney Pollack. Robert Redford stars as a CIA desk clerk who finds himself the prey of a deadly conspiracy and doesn’t know who to trust, especially his colleagues. Condor came out in the thick of the post-Watergate fog which suggested CIA involvement in the infamous burglary via the participation of former, or perhaps not, Langley operative Howard Hunt.
But as a conservative journalist in 2022, I had a major advantage over my liberal peers — an awareness of reality.
With Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford then President, most people in 1975 assumed a domestically intrusive CIA would be taking orders from the White House. Yet few would have suspected the intelligence branch might be working against the White House and may have brought down the previous Republican President. The widespread uncertainty and suspicion of the era was a feast for talented cinematic liberals like Pollack and Redford, inspiring Redford’s most chilling line in the picture, “Maybe there’s a CIA inside the CIA.”
The movie is a masterpiece unlike the lesser-known novel that inspired it. The clever concept is the same — about a CIA employee tasked with reading thriller novels then imputing their smarter ideas for the agency. “Who’d invent a job like that?” Redford’s character self-reflectively asks. But the title change from Six Days of the Condor to Three Days of the Condor signals the improvement.
It takes three extra days for author James Grady to tell the original story. And his denouement — the government assassins were running drugs from Laos — was anticlimactic and already cliched. Pollack and ace screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Batman the TV series, Never Say Never Again) knew exactly what to slash and what to update. With the long gas lines of 1973 fresh in the public’s mind, Redford’s confrontation with the villain had an extra relevance. “Oil … That’s it, isn’t it? This whole damn thing was about oil.”
Seventies producers knew how to improve on source material, not despoil it pushing a woke agenda like today’s Hollywood witches (see Kathleen Kennedy — Star Wars, Barbara Broccoli — James Bond). Men turned the decade’s bestselling books into classic films — Love Story, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, All the President’s Men. Condor perfectly fit the bill being not only exceptionally suspenseful but incredibly timely.
Bad timing was the risk I took two years ago when I decided to make my new novel a political thriller. I had gambled once before and lost. As a young punk USA Today reporter in 1989, I began writing the ultimate Cold War spy thriller. After all, I thought, who has long been America’s archenemy and would be for the foreseeable future — the Soviet Union of course. Then, just as I finished the book in 1991, the USSR collapsed like a house of cards. I blamed my hero, Ronald Reagan, for ruining my fiction career.
Two decades later, bolstered by three well-received novels (Jake for Mayor, Paper Tigers, The Christmas Spirit), I chose to reenter the thriller arena. I had a professional reason. For ten years, I’d critically assailed the mainstream arts’ erasure of the tough guy action hero and the sultry femme-fatale in favor of a constantly rejected feminist fantasy — the asexual macho heroine. In my very first article for this publication from 2018, “The Hollywood Compliance Decree,” I stated that even a basic movie thriller like Taken was already beyond Hollywoke’s creative capability.
The final wimpification of James Bond by Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig in the ghastly No Time to Die (2021) was the last straw for me (see my review of it). I love the Ian Fleming novels and the seven Sean Connery pictures plus On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Seeing the ultimate male hero turned into an asexual mope was a personal affront.
Ironically, Ian Fleming once felt the same. Fleming created James Bond as a hard-boiled alternative to more patrician British detectives such as Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and John Creasey’s the Toff, entertaining as they are. He channeled his idols, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, into Bond. I planned to do the same to the endless parade of woke male pretenders, by bringing cool men and hot women back to the page. Introducing young DC private-eyes Mark Slade and Neil Cork in The Washington Trail.
A Thriller for Our Time
I realized the book would come out in 2024 (August 13th to be exact) amid a volatile election year. Consequently, I had to predict the state of the presidential race two years in advance. A wrong call would have meant another two years of writing down the drain. But as a conservative journalist in 2022, I had a major advantage over my liberal peers — an awareness of reality. I knew Joe Biden was already falling apart (see my 2020 piece “The Star Trek Election“) and anticipated he’d be badly trailing the Republican candidate, most likely Donald Trump, this year.
And that’s just what happened. My book takes place last January with the vegetative incumbent president losing to his predecessor, whom the deep state conspired to oust. Elements in the intelligence communities fear the former chief executive will exact revenge on them, and they’ll do anything to stop him — including murder.
Today, things are happening faster than the fall of the Soviet Union, such as the assassination attempt on Trump a week ago. And as I write this, Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race. Only this time, I was ready for it. What if the events now taking place are the result of the secrets uncovered by Slade and Cork on The Washington Trail? I hope you’ll read it and find out.
Where have all the cool men, hot women, and non-woke storytelling gone? For one place my timely new political thriller novel, The Washington Trail, about two DC private eyes, a femme-fatale, and a plot to end America in a volatile election year. Pre-order today, get it next month, and let me know what you think.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
The Curtains Are Drawn on Biden and Europe’s Rulers
The post The Impeccable Timing of a Political Thriller appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.