Earl Staggs earned a long list of five star reviews for his novels Memory of a Murder and Justified Action and has twice received
a Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year. He served as Managing
Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction
Society, is a contributing blog member of Murderous Musings and Make MineMystery and a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars. Learn more
about Earl and his books at his website.
Old Fashioned Action
I grew up on cowboy movies. Roy
Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, and all the others. As kids, my brothers
and I spent all day on Saturday at the local theater. Getting in cost a
quarter, a quarter more bought enough candy to snack on for hours, and we’d sit
through each movie at least three times.
We cheered after every six-gun showdown because our heroes were faster
on the draw than the bad guys. We’d cheer during every saloon brawl when an
uppercut sent a bad guy crashing through a door or window. And nothing was more
exciting than when our hero chased a bad guy on horseback, caught up with him
on a hillside, jumped from horse to horse, and the two of them rolled down the
hill so they could duke it out in a rough and tumble fistfight.
I never thought about it then, but
there was never any blood. No matter how many times a hero delivered the old
one-two punch to the bad guy, we never saw a bloody nose or even a black eye. Even
after a shootout and the bad guys all went down with a slug from a forty-five,
you didn’t see any blood or guts. It was not real violence, but good, clean
action. It was fun and exciting to watch.
As I grew older, cowboy movies
changed. The heroes had names like John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Jimmy
Stewart and weren’t interchangeable like the original cowboy stars. These guys
had different personalities and styles. The movies were more mature and
complicated with stories, something I would later learn to call plots. They
gave us more about the heroes, where they came from and what they were made of,
something I would later think of as depth and characterization. Still, the
movies had a lot of the action I loved. Six-gun shootouts, fistfights, rough
and tumble saloon brawls. And very little blood.
Then along came movies with tough
PI’s named Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Mike Hammer. Actors named Humphrey
Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Alan Ladd still delivered the one-two punch, threw
hot lead, and we saw blood oozing from noses and bullet holes. Not too much. It wasn’t until the
gangster movies came along that we began to see limbs blown off and innards
hanging out. This was realistic violence, not the kind of fun action I enjoyed
as a kid.
I missed the old days.
I suppose that’s why, when I started
writing mystery stories, I tossed in some action scenes. Not the blood and guts
kind, mind you. My action scenes were more along the lines of the old Roy
Rogers and John Wayne movies.
In my first published novel, Memory of a Murder, Adam Kingston is
chasing the bad guy, Eric Richards, on foot through the streets of Ocean City,
a resort town in Maryland:
Adam dug in and ran after him. He'd only gone a few strides before the
slap of shoe leather on asphalt was drowned out by war whoops raining down from
above. From the balconies of tall wood-frame rooming houses on both sides of
the street, clusters of young tank-topped revelers hoisted their drinks and
yelled encouragement to both runners.
Halfway down the block, Richards veered out of the street and ran between
two houses. Adam reached the narrow opening in time to see him straddling a
board fence six feet high at the end of a back yard, then sliding down the
other side and out of sight.
Adam ran through the tunnel-like breezeway and across the backyard. He
gauged his strides and leaped onto a trashcan by the fence, grabbed the top of
the fence with both hands, and vaulted over. He landed in a crouch in a dark
alley that ran the length of the block. He looked right, then left. Eric was
nowhere in sight.
He swept both ways again. On the left, he saw the back end of a pink
minivan parked by the fence. A topless green Jeep sat ten feet up on the right.
Eric had to be hiding behind one of them.
Adam stepped cautiously toward the minivan and knew he'd guessed wrong
when he was hit from behind. A pair of arms encircled his chest, lifted him
nearly off his feet, and shoved him forward, straight at the minivan. He
struggled to keep his feet beneath him and managed to plant one foot and twist
his body at the last second so that Eric hit the minivan first with a loud
grunt and gush of air.
Adam felt the arms around him go limp and threw his left elbow back,
striking Eric's midsection. He pivoted and swung his right fist into the side
of Eric's face, then stepped back to let the man who'd jumped him crumple to
the ground gasping for air.”
In my second novel, a Mystery/Thriller called Justified Action, the action gets more serious at times with a lot
of bullets flying and some explosions. Blood is shed, although it doesn’t get
gory or gruesome. There’s even a chase, but in cars not on foot or horseback. In
the following scene, Tall Chambers, the protagonist, and a fellow op, Ben
Goldberg, realize they’re being tailed by bad guys in a gray car:
When
houses became scarce and the landscape changed to farmland and pastures on both
sides, the gray car sped up and closed the gap. Tall spotted a dense pine
forest ahead. When he reached it, he looked for a cutoff road. When one
suddenly appeared on the left, partially hidden by rambling brush, he hit his
brakes and made a sharp skidding turn into it. He was now on a gravel service
road only wide enough for one vehicle with a deep drainage ditch on each side.
A thick canopy of pine branches overhead turned the narrow road into a shady
tunnel.
When they
were a hundred yards in, Ben Goldman looked back. “They’re still with us.”
“Good.”
“What’s
the plan?”
“Don’t
have one yet.”
“Shit.”
Tall
increased his speed. He had no idea where the road would lead. After another
minute, the road curved to the right. When it straightened again, they were out
of the forested area and in a wide grassy clearing. Directly ahead, the road
ended at a ten-foot-high chain link fence. Tall braked to a stop in a small
gravel parking area just short of the fence and glanced in his rear view
mirror. The gray car was fifty yards back and coming fast.
“Come up
with a plan yet?” Ben asked.
Tall
shifted into reverse. “Yeah. Let’s see what these boys are made of.” He draped
his right arm over the seat back, twisted his upper body so he could see out
the rear window and pushed the accelerator down hard. The car leapt backward,
spewing gravel in every direction.
Ben
Goldman raised his gun and racked it. “I love it when you improvise.”
The two
cars raced toward each other at high speed, one moving forward, one backward.
When the distance between them was down to twenty yards, the front end of the
gray car dipped down and the squealing of its brakes rose above the crunching
of gravel. The car fishtailed and slid to its right toward the wide drainage
ditch alongside the road. Momentum carried it forward until the front end fell
sharply downward at the edge of the road and the rear end rose up and over in a
flip. The car landed on its top on the loose dirt at the bottom of the ditch,
then slid forward ten feet until the rear end imbedded itself in the far bank
and stopped, upside down, with its tires still spinning and its engine still
racing.
Tall hit
his brakes and his car stopped twenty feet beyond the gray one. He released his
seat belt, opened his door and yelled, “Go!” He swung out of the car and landed
in a crouch with his gun out. He heard Ben moving on the other side of the car
toward the rear fender. “Cover me,” he shouted.
The
action this time involves four-wheeled vehicles instead of four-legged steeds, but
this is a different genre and a different time. The days of two-fisted cowboys
on fast horses is gone. Still, I miss the kind of action and excitement I enjoyed
back in the day and can’t resist building a similar kind of action into my
current stories.
Am I the
only one, or are there others who miss those days?
Justified Action
Tall Chambers uses his wits and weapons to stop terrorists before they
kill innocent people, but when someone close to him is murdered, he devotes his
skills to only one purpose – find the person responsible. His pursuit is more
difficult when he learns he is also marked for death. He fights to stay alive
long enough to find the killer, even when it means striking a deal with the
worst terrorist of them all.
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