Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 53

The Symon Myles Mysteries

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text and includes references to The Great Gatsby, which had been made into a
popular film in 1974. In addition, the title itself (as with the other titles in the Big
series) suggests a basic indebtedness to two classics of hard-boiled detective fic
tion: Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and Spillane’s The Big Kill (1951). In a
scene reminiscent of the greenhouse encounter between General Sternwood and
Phillip Marlowe in Chandler’s novel, Follett’s Carstairs confronts an elderly Lord
Dath, who clutches a dressing gown around his waist, is asthmatic, and whose
‘loose-living’ daughter is also being blackmailed by an unscrupulous photogra
pher (106). As with Mike Hammer’s conflicts with a series of gangsters in The Big
Kill, Carstairs must enter the sanctum of ‘Mr. Big.’ Consequently, the violence is
sometimes Spillane-esque as well, with Carstairs flicking “on the switch of the
lamp” and hearing “a howl of pain as 250 volts jabbed through the body of the man
who was opening the door” (128).
Although certain suspense scenes in the novel seem much more fully
developed than comparable scenes in The Big Needle, with reflection, expansion
upon a moment, and a more leisurely pacing to heighten the tension, Follett has
admitted that “my early books were all too brisk and things happened too quickly”
(“on keye’” 2). In addition, the burden of writing a series and working with mul
tiple plot strands may have also diminished the effectiveness of such scenes. Be
cause incidents from the first novel, rather than forming adventures slyly alluded
to by a Dr. Watson, instead become character motivation, the writer sometimes has
to stop the story in order to re-narrate:
“And remember what happened before...” Once before the two
of us had left Babs at home while we galloped off to indulge in
battle, murder and sudden death. She had been kidnaped and
tortured...I dismissed the thought from my mind. (68)
Moreover, because the writer wants to work in the inherited form of the hardboiled detective series, with all its complications of plot, its murkiness and its
general obfuscation, scenes that might otherwise have been dramatic become con
fusing because the reader forgets what’s at stake. Later, Follett learned that a story
needs “a big dramatic question that [engages] the reader from beginning to end”
(Blockbuster 3), but for now, as a character in The Big Black puts it, the action has
been over “manipulating the London underworld, Fleet Street, Scotland Yard,
Interpol and the international stock market” (102). Scenes seem separable and
dispensable. It is almost as if Follett were trying to write different kinds of novels
within the general framework of crime/suspense.
This latent interest in writing different kinds of novels is an indication
that Follett was in essence rebelling against the confines of the form. The Big