Episode 78: First Blood by David Morrell

SPEAKERS
Sarah Harrison, Carolyn Daughters, David Morrell

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

OUR SPONSOR
Today’s sponsor is Grace Sigma, a boutique process engineering consultancy run by our own Sarah Harrison. Grace Sigma works nationally in such industries as finance, telecom and government. Grace Sigma uses lean methods to assist in data, dashboarding, storytelling, training, process, visualization and project management, whether you’re a small business looking to scale, or a large company whose processes have become dangled, Grace Sigma can help. You can learn more at GraceSigma.com.

Sarah, we have a great episode today. We’ll be talking with David Morrell about his novel First Blood, which introduces Rambo. I know it’s gonna be really cool. Today’s sponsor is Grace Sigma, a boutique process engineering consultancy run by our own Sarah Harrison. Grace Sigma works nationally in such industries as finance, telecom and government. Grace Sigma uses lean methods to assist in data, dashboarding, storytelling, training, process, visualization and project management, whether you’re a small business looking to scale, or a large company whose processes have become dangled, Grace Sigma can help. You can learn more at GraceSigma.com. Sarah we have David Morrell back again.

Sarah Harrison  01:43
We’re back with David Morrell, and it’s going to be another great episode.

Carolyn Daughters  01:46
I am so excited before we get too deep, because we have a lot to discuss with him. We have a listener of the episode. She’s a wonderful listener. She is, and I think you sent her a bunch of fun swag. Her name is Dorothy Young from Newberry, South Carolina, and she’s a supporter on our Buzzsprout page.

Sarah Harrison  02:07
It might be a little confusing. Listeners, you just see links to click on, like, when is that one? There’s two ways to support us if you are so inclined. One actually goes to directly funding Buzzsprout. That is our hosting platform, and that’s what Dorothy supported us on. And then most recently, we started a Patreon, which we will be publishing those links as well, and if they’ve been on social media. So if you there’s lots of wonderful ways to support the podcast, just liking, subscribing, rating us are all so helpful. If you are inclined to financially support it, those are currently the two ways to do so. So thank you so much, Dorothy.

Carolyn Daughters  02:48
Thank you very much. That’s amazing. So, Sarah, what are we doing today?

Sarah Harrison  02:53
My goodness. So I told my stupid story last time about how I discovered David Morrell through looking to Geoffrey Household fans, and realized that I had stumbled upon the author of First Blood. And so he was gracious enough to stay and talk to us a little bit more transitioning into his work there. So I get to read to you a little summary of First Blood, published in 1972 it is the award winning novel that inspired the legendary Rambo film series starring Sylvester Stallone. Maybe you’ve heard of him. First came the man, a young wanderer in a fatigue coat and long hair. Then came the legend, as John Rambo sprang from the pages of First Blood to take his place in the American cultural landscape. This remarkable novel pits a young Vietnam veteran against a small town cop who doesn’t know whom he’s dealing with or how far Rambo will take him into a life and death struggle through the woods, hills and caves of rural Kentucky. Millions saw the Rambo movies, but those who haven’t read First Blood, the book that started it all are in for a surprise, a critically acclaimed story of character, action and compassion. We are so excited to have David with us today.

Carolyn Daughters  04:09
David Morrell is an Edgar Award, an Anthony Award finalist and Nero McCavity winner and recipient of a prestigious career achievement, the thriller master award from the International thriller writers. He has written more than 30 works of fiction, including First Blood, and they have been translated into 30 languages. He’s a former literature professor at the University of Iowa and received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University. Welcome, David, on our second episode. Thanks for being here for two episodes. Thanks for coming back.

David Morrell  04:43
Well again, you said the magic words, Geoffrey Household go together, so it seemed. And frankly, it’s in the other episode, I hope you got the idea that. I mean, I’ve been fortunate to have. About created a character that has international recognition. But we don’t worship at our house. You know that? I mean, I mentioned luck, talent and determination, and determination being very critical. But luck is, of course, something else. It’s important. So anyhow, it’s, it was, it was fun to be able to talk about an author who, really, I wouldn’t be talking to you if I hadn’t read Rogue Male and Geoffrey Household.

Sarah Harrison  05:31
I love that. And you mentioned you had actually several Geoffrey Household books that were super influential on you. I’d love for you to talk about that breadth of the influence right now, especially on your book First Blood.

David Morrell  05:43
When we were talking about Rogue Male in our last episode, one of the things that I emphasize that I thought was so amazing is the hunter-hunter relationship, which can get very cliched. We see a lot of it in contemporary movies, and most of the time there’s just a lot of running around. But in the classic hunting themes, the prey and the hunter have a mystical bond, and that the notion of instinct, more powerful than reason, and that the themes that Geoffrey Household worked on, one with nature, that what by that when you’re having in this case, it’s two human beings, but it could. I thought about that in First Blood. I have a friend who wrote a novel about someone hunting a polar bear and the bear turns the tide, and all of a sudden the hunter is being stalked by the bear. I mean, there are lots of wonderful ways to turn this around, but that the relationship that exists between them can get very mystical. Now, whether this happens in real life, I cannot tell you, but in in fiction, it’s a wonderful theme, and Geoffrey Household was a master at it, the relationship between the hunter and the hunter, and how this can be turned around, instincts becoming more important than anything, but also how his characters blend with nature. There are few authors that write as well about action in nature and we were saying the last time about how the mud and the burrow that the character is in, and the fields, and there’s just a claustrophobic quality that isn’t always unhealthy. Often it’s the character becoming one, almost melting into his surroundings. And this theme is in other of his books, not all of them. Geoffrey Household wrote many, many books. Some of them were more espionage related, or Soldier of Fortune related, but, but apart from Rogue Male, there’s an essential thriller called watcher in the shadows. And the theme is that someone who survived a constant that’s that World War Two theme. Again, someone survived a concentration camp and is killing the guards that were at the camp. But now one of the guards, it’s his turn. He there. The man is coming for him. What the attacker doesn’t know is that the guard was a double agent and that he was helping prisoners escape, so that he’s exactly the wrong person to be attacked, and he’s trying to send a signal in whatever way he can, and he decides to isolate himself by going into the woods, by going into the country. In Rogue Male, the character goes from Europe to England to smaller and smaller areas. In this case, he’s inviting the assassin to find him so he can explain. And most of the book is them in a forest, circling one another. And he wrote another book called The Courtesy of Death, in which someone finds a prehistoric cave in England, which has cave paintings of the hunt on the walls of the sort that are in France or in Spain. And a cult has developed in the story. I don’t want to go into the plot, but most of the story occurs in the cave with our character being hunted. It’s that theme again, and then the fourth one would be Dance of the Dwarfs. And this is a terrifying novel in which someone in South America living on the edge of a rain forest where there is normally a river that separates the plain from the forest. The rain that the river has dried up and something is coming out of the woods and attacking people. And the natives say it’s the dwarfs that there’s a tribe of dwarfs that lives in the rain forest. But what it turns out to be is a form of ferret. It’s an animal which is almost human. It can stand on its hind legs, and so you might think it was a human, but it gives off a scent, and the scent creates fear. These stories all influenced First Blood. The character in his struggle to survive is trying to over knowing that the scent that they kill in effect by causing their prey to become hysterical with fear and hence, helpless. And that’s what he’s trying to in that a hell of an idea. I thought of that idea, I would I’d say, That’s it. You don’t need to do anything more in the shadow is courtesy of death and dance of the dwarves and other stuff isn’t. But we all have favorites, and those are my four favorite Geoffrey Household novels.

Sarah Harrison  11:56
I’ll just throw in there for our listeners. I’m going to add those. I’ll make a Amazon list for our conversation with David and add those in there. So if you’re looking for those, we’ll post a shortcut for you.

Carolyn Daughters  12:12
In discussing First Blood, published 33 years after Rogue Male, it feels like a natural progression, right? We talked in our last episode about various books that led up to Rogue Male, and then we read First Blood so we can, as Sarah and I discovered, and embarrassingly enough for us, we didn’t know that there was a book of First Blood. And I’m so excited that we read it. And I’m so excited, first of all to know that it exists, and then to have read it and to see even what you were talking about a moment ago, about Geoffrey Household themes and the things he keeps returning to in nature. We see that with Rambo in First Blood. We see him in mud where he is bleeding. And it’s not always clear, is it the blood or the mud, or are they fusing and almost becoming one? There is, I don’t want to jump too far here, because we don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but maybe talk generally about a very mystical and lovely scene in the cave, which I still think about, that scene where Rambo is thinking one thing, and then comes to understand. His understanding shifts. It’s 180 degrees, and he starts understanding the world and his world differently. Before we get too deep in this can we get you to read just a little bit from chapter one so we can get a sense of what First Blood is about?

David Morrell  13:59
This is the first paragraph. I had trouble coming to it. Initially, the insecure first novel. First novelist. I started the story. I don’t know how many people, I mean, a lot of people seen the movie. There’s a chase in the forest in the middle of the movie. And I started the novel initially like that because I was afraid that I just wanted to have excitement up front and of course, it’s all wrong, because then half the novel is going to be a flashback, so right away you’ve got a flaw. And also you don’t know all these people are running around the forest. Who the hell are they like? I mean, you don’t have any identification. You got a lot of action, but action alone doesn’t mean anything. So Philip, I mentioned Philip Klas, whose pen name was William Tenn in our last session, and he was my fiction writer instructor at the Penn State. First Blood begins with Rambo and Teasel meeting each other. So that’s how the book should begin, and not all this other stuff. So this became the first chapter, first paragraph, and it accomplishes a lot of things. It’s very hard to get into some how do you get people interested? And I was, I was lucky, to find a way that promised a hell of a lot of things that were going to happen on that first paragraph and a lot of it is because of Philip Klas’s encouragement. His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky, he had a long, heavy beard, and his hair was hanging down over his ears to his neck, and he had his hand out trying to thumb a ride from a car that was stopped at the pump to see him there leaning on one hip, a coke bottle in his hand and a rolled up sleeping bag near his boots on the tar pavement. In First Blood, you could never have guessed that on Tuesday, a day later, most of the police in Basalt County would be hunting him. Certainly you could not have guessed that by Thursday, he would be running from the Kentucky National Guard and the police of six counties and a good many private citizens who like to shoot but then from just seeing him there, ragged and dusty by the pump of the gas station. You could never have figured the kind of kid Rambo was, or what was about to make it all begin. And then, of course, diesel shows up. And it, as I said it, I was lucky to find a way that promised a lot of stuff, so that in those early conversations, which I was nervous about as the first novelist, that was no longer a problem, because the reader would say, I’m going to be patient, because I know a whole lot of things are going to happen very swiftly. So it’s a bait and switch kind of opening.

Carolyn Daughters  17:27
As we’ve mentioned, millions have seen the Rambo movies, but this book is very different than First Blood, the first movie in the Rambo series, it’s really quite different. And we before we even get into all of the reasons why that is because there are a lot of very good reasons why. The first thing that took me by surprise is that, okay, this book is set in Kentucky, and also Teasel has about roughly half of the story where we’re in we’re learning about Teasel. We’re learning about what matters to him, What is concerning him, what’s happening in his life, who is important to him. We learn about a father figure who is important to him. We learn that he himself wishes he had a child. We’re identifying with him in a way that was unexpected to me and really like riveting to me as a reader.

David Morrell  18:40
Well, du, thank you. The I was in our other episode, I mentioned Philip Klas at a theory that everybody has a dominant emotion and that we don’t always want to identify that emotion. Well, in my case, my I’m old enough that my father was in World War Two, and he, he was, he was a British flyer who had come to the United States to for training, or not, to Canada, rather than for training. And then he had married my mother, and then he’d gone back to England, where he was shot down during the D Day operation, and my mother was unable to support me. I don’t. My feeling is we don’t have enough social services. Now, back then, there was almost nothing. And for a single mother and she, in order to survive, in order to have employment, put me in an orphanage. So I was in an orphanage for a time, and then I was on a Mennonite farm for a time. I was a raised Roman Catholic, but this Mennonite farm had a reputation for being good, for having children to stay with them, and that was my first. Experience with a male figure. His name was Wilfred chance, and it is no mistake that Teasel in First Blood, his first name is Wilfred because my experience with Wilfred chance, who was a stern but likable person. He had a I couldn’t have been four years old, and he had a thing about eating that people ate too fast. And so he I learned to count to 50, because that’s how many times I had to chew before I could swallow. And to this day, I’m the best house guest for dinner you have ever had.

Sarah Harrison  20:46
Well, let for dinner.

David Morrell  20:48
Everybody else is done, and I’m still eating because I chew and chew and chew. That just stayed with me. It’s very healthy too. And being on that farm and all. My mother eventually remarried, but he didn’t like kids, and I don’t think he liked me. If I had 50 sentences in exchange with him, that would have been a lot in my entire life. Wow. And so that the theme, and then I had this I had this sense that my father hadn’t died, that he’d either been disfigured and was too embarrassed to come home, or else he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. So there was a sense of abandonment there. And the whole my life story as a young man was the search for the Father. And fortunately, I found father figures that were amazing. I mentioned in the previous session, Philip young, the Hemingway scholar. When I traveled all the way from Canada to study with him, I mentioned Philip Klas, William Tenn my fiction writing teacher. In the last episode, I mentioned a television show called Route 66 and the head writer Sterling silicon, when he and I became extremely close in later years. And I have a novel, brotherhood of the rose. It was an NBC miniseries, I like to say the only miniseries after a Super Bowl. And Sterling was the executive producer, and I worked on that show, and we became very, very close. the theme of fathers and sons is terribly important to me, even to this day. And the miss most, most of the misbehavior some men as fathers, and that’s a secret duty. And so in the movie First Blood, Brian Dennehy a fine actor, he didn’t have a lot to work with. Basically, he did a lot of tricks in order to give to make the character I love. I like the movie a lot, so I’m not criticizing, but there are issues when you do a 96 minute movie and Brian didn’t have a lot to work with, but more important, he was, Brian is gone now, but he and sly were the same age. Basically, the story becomes one about bickering, if we want metaphorically bickering brothers.

Carolyn Daughters  23:25
Interesting movie.

David Morrell  23:28
The novel, rather, is about fathers and sons, a father and a son, yes, and Teasel, as you mentioned, has, it has a father figure named Orval Kellerman, and who is and wants to have a child. His wife has left him because she does not want children. And in comes Rambo, who is young. There are, there were no middle age. Vietnam War veterans. Rambo would have been 2021, 20 years. Two years. Sure, and he is. He’s, as it were, the son that Teasel might have had, but no, because it’s like the father and son fighting underneath it all we talked in the last episode about subtext, and one of the subjects in this is this for a surrogate father. And this is a fight between a son and a father. And at the time, when I wrote First Blood, it represented older America and younger America. Older America being for the war and younger America against and that famous slogan, don’t trust anybody over 30. And so that there was a lot of it’s a generational story so that and but you couldn’t do that in a movie. I mean, it was, it’s just too much. And also you have a major movie star, Sylvester Stallone, and that’s a Sylvester. Own movie. So basically, you can’t divide the story evenly between Brian Dennehy and Sylvester Stallone. That’s just not. That’s not in the Hollywood world, sure. So the character had it pushed down and but in the novel, what you have is alternating viewpoints. Rambo Teasel, Rambo Teasel, Rambo Teasel. And it never varies. So Rambo will do something, and we’ll say, Well, okay, this cop is a bad guy. And then we get into Teasel point of view, and we say, I get it. Now Rambo is the bad guy. But then when we get back in Rambo’s point of view, we understand him. And then we get in Teasel his point of view. We understand him. And the reader is in this, this seesaw that reader does not know who to identify with, from chapter to chapter to chapter as they alternate, so that at the end of the story, when they come at each other, and that 100, 100 thing that we talked about in male it’s like the reader is watching two trains coming together, unable to stop it from her occurring. I was thinking of catharsis and fancy words like that, that the reader in in that moment when they’re coming. It’s actually quite a long sequence that the reader would be torn apart if the reader was that far, because who you cheering for? You can’t cheer for anybody. You can’t. And so that was the whole point of the structure, and it took me a long time to find that structure. Originally, there were a sides to the deputies and the judge and all that stuff. And it’s not important matters is these two people.

Carolyn Daughters  26:53
Rambo straddles this line, right? He looks like one thing, but he is another. He is a decorated war veteran, Green Beret who looks like a war protester, he looks like a hippie. And so, super interesting. At the beginning of First Blood, Teasel drops him outside of town, and Rambo immediately turns around and starts walking back into town, and this, this is how I read a book. So this is information about how I read I’m reading this, and I’m like, No, I’m verbally, I’m audibly saying, No, don’t you know? Like, as if in any book or movie, as if you could stop somebody from doing this thing. And I’m like, turn around. And then, of course, Rambo turns around, and the book ends on page 14. No, like it’s, I’m blown away by him walking back. And so it with regard to Father, Son relationships. So there’s a writer who I know and love in Boulder. Her name is Sheri Caudron, and she says, There’s a story only you can tell. So everybody has the story only they can tell. And father-son, relationships are so key to your writing. And there’s one thing that Orval Kellerman, who is the second father for Teasel, there’s one thing that he says to Teasel that I thought really stood out. He says this thing. He says Teasel was like a son to him, Yes. He doesn’t say, You are my son. Blood or no blood, you are my son. He says you are like a son. And Teasel feels it like he’s been hit by an arrow or a bullet, like he feels it in his gut. I mean, so we talked about fear being key or integral to this sort of writing that you’re interested in pursuing and then the writing that you do. But I would think father son relationships and the complexities therein, that’s also really key to what you do.

David Morrell  28:59
It is, would, would you tell me again, what that friend of yours said about, how is it, everybody has a story only they can tell.

Carolyn Daughters  29:08
The story only you can tell so and what, what we see is that story only we can tell appears in it’s in different forms and structures, and the narrative is different. But you see it over and over again in the books and stories people write that it’s this thing that you can almost pull out of all of them.

David Morrell  29:30
Yes. The story only I can tell. This goes back to Philip Klas, and I keep mentioning his pen name, William Tenn. Is what he what he said, and that he had a friend named Donald Westlake, who is a famous crime writer who, under the name of Richard Stark, wrote a series of books about a professional thief called Parker. And Don was very helpful to me, too, and the two of them would tell me, go down to a bookstore that has all the latest publications and read the first page of every one of those books. And didn’t matter what novels, didn’t matter what kind of novel they were, just read the first page and forget about who wrote it. And so we’ll say there were 100 books and, and he and they said, you will notice that 90 of them sound the same. 90 of them sound like the same person wrote them. And they’re all going to be the same book, different plot, but the same, but 10 of them will sound different and equally important, each of them will sound different from one another. And this is what Klas was trying to tell me about that dominant emotion in us. And he said, if you look at I’m just going to pull some classic American novelist. If you look at Edith Wharton and you look at Ernest Hemingway, and you look at William Faulkner, and you look at John Dos Passos and you look at Henry James, they’re palpably different. As soon as I say their names, they had a certain kind of book that they wrote, and that’s what, what Philip Klas was trying to get me to do. And so that, in a way, later in life, I developed a technique called a written conversation with myself. And before I began a book like First Blood, I would, I would have a question and answer conversation. How are you this morning? David, oh, I’m pretty good. So why are we talking here today? Well, I have an idea for a book. Well, what’s the idea? Well, it’s like this, and I give a little bit, and then the other part of me would say, that’s not good enough. Give me a little bit more. And these would go on sometimes for 30 pages, single space. And they would be getting deeper and deeper into it with the one question is, why is this worth a year of my life? And so what? What you’ve what you singled on? I mean, if we look at, I mentioned a book called Brotherhood of the Rose, and I mentioned I was in an orphanage. Well, it’s about two orphans, one Jewish, one Catholic, who are befriended by a mysterious man who comes to the orphanage and says, I can’t adopt you for various reasons, because I’m work a lot, and I’m not married and, but I’ll come and visit you, and I’ll take you to movies, and we’ll do this, and we’ll do that. And how would you like karate lessons? Would that interest you? Or, how be we watch some more movies, or hobby, we watch some spy movies. And what this man is, is, is works for the CIA, and he’s he recruits orphans to be his private operators and what our guys don’t know, who grow to love him as a father over like 25 years, they don’t know that he has other sets of orphans other places, and that they are all dispensable. And as they realize that this set of orphans died for him, and this set of orphans died for him, they get on and eventually, of the two of the main characters, one of them is killed. And then we are in a absolutely ruthless determination for the surviving orphan to get his name is Elliot, and to get to Elliot and punish him as much as he possibly can. Well, this is anger at the at this, at this, the stepfather. This is psychotic, almost, but it has for my initial books, up until when I was in 1987 most of my books I realized, subsequently had this theme. And then my son died from cancer when he was 15, and you’ll never guess what happened. All of a sudden, my books became about fathers looking for sons.

Carolyn Daughters  34:39
Interesting.

David Morrell  34:44
This is an example of what you were saying. That’s really a powerful thing. Each of us has a story only we can tell. Unfortunately, some people, they want to tell stories, but they just want to imitate other people. I had a one of my slogans when i. Teaches be a first rate version of yourself rather than a second rate version of another. And it’s the market you’ll always see its backside. So anyway, they had, they changed the theme for the movie, and I’m not complaining. I did a. I did a. It’s rare for this to happen, I was asked to record a full-length audio commentary for First Blood that’s on home video. I gotta get that to talk about all of this, and how I got involved in and my views of the film, because they took the plot that they reinterpreted the character. My guy is, is furious at what happened to him, whereas Rambo is a victim in the movies.

Carolyn Daughters  35:52

He is partially a victim, but it’s very complicated in First Blood, but in the movie, it’s very, it feels very cut and dry.

Sarah Harrison  35:59

He’s the underdog.

David Morrell  36:02

We got a cheer for the hero, sure, exactly, and but you made me smile earlier. You were talking about, I thought it was so in in the, in the in the 19, late 1960s if you had facial hair, a males or long hair, you were, you were guaranteed to be to have insults. And I have people. Can’t see this, but you see me, I have a mustache, and I grew that mustache in 1968 is a form of method acting. See what would happen with authority and figures react. And my hair was always short, but I had the mustache you wouldn’t believe the insult, really hostility. I mean, it was an automatic sign that I was simply I wasn’t a good enough. I mean, it was, it was a style from police officers, mostly for a mustache. Yes. Wow. And, and, and, so, um, I thought this is interesting. What would happen, the teas look, it’s not, I didn’t have a lot of politics in it. It’s like, I think Vietnam’s mentioned five times in First Blood, but the feeling of that time for Rambo to have become so disaffected, he’s got a beard, long hair, and they he looks like a Vietnam protest. Actually, the COP is going to go after him, but this is exactly the wrong guy that you should be doing to. So I always, it always makes me laugh. Now, in the movie, Sly has long hair. I mentioned, I know Sly. Well, He’s really He’s a fabulous guy, very interesting, very smart, very amusing. But in the movie, he is long hair, but he doesn’t have facial here, and Brian Denny says to him, we don’t like guys who look like you coming to our town and in the movie theater, this is not 82. Ten years have happened in the movie theater. All the guys in the audience who had long hair said, whispered, well, what’s wrong with the way he looks? Society had evolved, at least changed.

Carolyn Daughters  38:29
Society had evolved, changed — could this movie have been made in the early 70s? I mean, so the books published in 1972 could the movie have been made then? Or did it require a decade?

David Morrell  38:39
There were there were enormous. There were three studios, 26 scripts. The initial purchase was by Columbia Pictures in 1972 with Richard Brooks, whom I admire as writer, director. Richard Brooks did Elmer Gantry and cold blood, the professionals. I mean just a absolute, absolute master. And after a year that was the property was sold to Warner Brothers. I never learned why. And there, Martin RIT was said to have been approached as a director. He had done sounder with Paul Newman in the role, and that didn’t go anywhere. I think that may have just been in the talk stage, but for absolute certainty, Steve McQueen was signed to be Rambo in a picture he was going to be made 1975 with another of my favorite directors, Sidney Pollack, directing out of Africa. A lot of other Three Days of the Condor, but McQueen was in his 40s. And in 1975 there were no 40 year old then. Non veterans. So that fell apart. Various attempts were made, and Rambo was always like in First Blood, but when Sly Stallone got involved with a company called Carol CO and the director had been associated with a version that they were trying to do at Warner Brothers. When sly got involved, the character began to change, and it began to be more the sympathetic, DOE eyed character who was being picked on. A lot of lot of different things. I don’t want us to get away from something that about Geoffrey Household, because we were talking, and I had, I wrote Household a fan letter after I read, I’m working on First Blood, and I’m reading Household, and I got this guy is brilliant. And I, somehow, I forget, I think I probably sent the book, the letter to his publisher, and then they probably so then he sent a letter back, and then I sent a letter back. And so we had exchanged maybe six letters, and he told he wasn’t. He didn’t talk a lot about his work. It was more about the business. And, but at one point I said, I finished this book called First Blood, and I wonder if you could look at it, maybe you could give you a quote, and he said, Sure, send it along. Well, he was shocked. This British subdued grace under pressure, very quiet in the violence book in first in Rogue Male, he wrote back, and he said he couldn’t possibly give me a quote because the book was far too bloody. And my joke is that, well, the title ought to be a clue, yes, and but so my my mice and Time Magazine. There was a lot of great reviews. Time magazine was the only major reviewer that hated the book. They called it carnography, the blood, the meat novel. Okay, so basically, the reviewer for time was the same as what household was saying. But my view, and this has now been shown historically, is I was trying to take household and make him American, so to speak for his themes in an American context, and you can’t do without violence if you’re going to because America is a violent country and ad so the Time magazine was right in the sense that I had changed, and he didn’t like the change that was being brought but it turned out to be predictive in terms of the way one of, one of the one of the films that was most important to me was a movie called The Wild Bunch in 1969 with Sam Peckinpah directing, which reinvented the Western in terms of how violence was, was depicted. And I always thought of myself as maybe, and this is a terrible thing to say that maybe I could do for Peckinpah did for westerns.

Sarah Harrison  43:47
I want to pause on that idea that America is a violent country, because you alluded to this before. It’s not that Geoffrey Household was writing really violent stuff. He was just alluding to it subtly. Whereas Rambo in First Blood is much more overt, can you talk about that difference between they’re both violent acts, but one is subtle and one is direct.

David Morrell  44:18
A lot of it has to do with our history. I mentioned that I have, I was a professor of American literature, and if you look at one of, one of the really interesting analysis of American literature is by D. H. Lawrence. And Lawrence, basically, this isn’t the quote, but he says that American literature is a violent literature, then American culture is a violent culture. And he talks about Natty Bumppo and James Fenimore Cooper’s character in The Last of Mohicans.

Carolyn Daughters  44:57
The Leatherstocking Tales.

David Morrell  45:01
Exactly, not so well written, but my God, they’re so important in terms of our even then Cooper is saying the frontier is over, and that’s back in the early 1800s. D. H. Lawrence’s book and his essays are about this violence in American literature, and it are our week. We created the mystery story with Edgar Allan Poe, but really where we went with it was into gangster stories, and into the violence of Private Eye stories and the violence of the Western I mean, most of our, of our indigenous literary forms have roots In violence. And so I, my view was that what I was trying to do was take the thriller to do, in a way, what Household had done because he made it real. It says, as it worried, made the 39 steps real. And I thought, well, what if I could write a thriller and it would feel like a novel. And it took me three years to write it. And there were many occasions where I absolutely gave up. I just rethink it and rethink it and rewrite it. There were many revisions of First Blood, but I knew what I wanted to do and it. I just had the sense that there was a way to write thrillers, to make it so we believed the characters. So we felt that this was actually happening, that that it would be worthwhile doing, even if it would be upsetting to some people.

Carolyn Daughters  47:01
So one question that I have, and maybe it’s a multi part question, I’m not sure, but so World War Two, so you had said, I believe that you were thinking part about Audie Murphy, when, when you wrote First Blood, and so Audie Murphy was America’s most decorated soldier in in World War One, but when he came back, I’m sorry, World War Two, but when he when he came back, he experienced something that we would call now as PTSD. And even in 1972 PTSD was not a phrase or fully understood. And so people might have called it soldier’s heart or shell shock, or Vietnam syndrome. They might have had different phrases for it. Yet, in my mind, in reading First Blood, Rambo, is suffering from PTSD. And so I guess the couple part question I have is, what do you see as the differences between World War Two, Korea and then wow, Vietnam, right? I mean, this is a completely different kind of war, and the repercussions of PTSD, and then your coming from Canada into the United States, and seeing, maybe this entire war and its repercussions playing out in a fresh or different way than people who are who had lived there, lived here the whole lives. So do you feel like that impacted your ability to understand what was happening during Vietnam and in a different way.

David Morrell  48:45
Absolutely. I was born and raised in Canada, and I came to the United States to study with Philip Young, as the Hemingway scholar at Penn State. And my wife and I and our very, I think Sarah might have been four months old. We had a Volkswagen Beetle, and that was about it. We came to the United States. It was that route, 66 thing that I was talking about, finding your way, moving on. And when we crossed the border, I had a student visa, and I this is still emblazon on me, the man behind the counter allowing us through into the United States because we had to get out of the car. He said that we’re having a lot of trouble this. And this was in 66 I mean, he had, he didn’t know what trouble was. He said, We have a lot of trouble here, and people just a great country, and it’s we have to find our way. And you are a guest here. You do not have a right to. A political opinion. You are here at heart, and we’re allowing you to come here and so be polite, be a guest. So I never had anything, I never made any political comments when I was a grad student, and but I watched and I listened and I didn’t know what Vietnam was in Canada, and all of a sudden, not my student friends are, they think they’re going to be drafted. What are they going to have? That whole sense of, did they believe in Vietnam? I mean, was it worth going there in the first place, which is still being discussed. And so I basically watched a lot, and in 68 when I started First Blood, 68 was an amazing year of violence. That was the year of Martin Luther King Junior’s assassination, of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, and it was the year of when I give a speech about this, when I give talks, I like to do it this way. I say there weren’t 25 riots, there weren’t 50 riots, there weren’t 100 riots. There were several 100 riots, and they went all the way across the country every night. It seemed it was a new riot. Some of it was for racial reasons, and some of for civil rights, and some of it was because of the protesting against the war. And they went together because an disproportionate amount of blacks served in Vietnam compared to whites, because they weren’t getting the student deferments. And so I 1960 I started First Blood in 1968 in response to one after the other, after the other. And so I but I wasn’t saying anything, because I was the guest. But you mentioned, let’s go back to the PTSD, which I think is can be I never heard of PTSD until Rambo: First Blood part two, the second film, came out, and all of a sudden people were talking about it everywhere. And I think an argument can be made that the Rambo movies made the expression PTSD, and the concept of it something that people understood and talked about.

Carolyn Daughters  52:32
That is so interesting.

David Morrell  52:35
And I my reaction, because this, in a way, was the start of it all I Penn State paid, allowed me to study, to go there without having to pay tuition. And they and they also allowed me. They gave me money. They gave me a little bit of money every week, my wife and I, my little infant daughter, had a graduate housing, one bedroom apartment we could live in. It wasn’t much money, I think it was, my recollection, was $65 a month, and in exchange. And I don’t know why they thought I could do it, but I can. I was a teacher. I taught beginning rhetoric, as they called it, incoming students, I taught them how to write term paper. And at the end of one class, a bunch of young men, there might have been seven of them stayed behind. This is one of those life changing moments, and you have to say, Wow, this is really happening. And they said to me, why are you here telling us what to do? Why aren’t you in Vietnam? And I said, Well, I’m Canadian. I’m married. And in 68 they there was still a question whether married young people would go and I have, by then, I have a two-year-old daughter, and I said, There’s no way I’d be in Vietnam. So, so let’s talk about this in a different way. You tell me about yourselves, and they began to tell me they’d seen combat, and they began telling me about coming home and the difficulty relationships, too much alcohol, instability in their emotions, anger, insomnia, or else, nightmares, jumping to behind cover if there was a Loud noise, all of that. And so that was my research, in a way, for Rambo in First Blood. And then I thought of Audie Murphy, because, and this all goes back to your question a while ago. Audie Murphy was America’s most decorated soldier World War Two. And what he did, he received the Medal of Honor for things that you wouldn’t believe if they were in a Rambo movie. I mean, he was astonishing with this little guy. I mean, he was just this little baby faced kid, and he was doing things that are like, unbelievable and but he eventually wrote a book. I don’t know if he wrote it or someone did it for him, called to help to hell and back, about his experiences in World War Two, and he was a western movie actor, a good choice, but he said in interviews that he’d like to do a second book about the difficulties he had adjusting the peace time, and that was so all of that was in my mind, as I was doing this. So this is a multitiered answer to a multitiered question.

Carolyn Daughters  55:54
I appreciate that.

Sarah Harrison  55:57

I think it’s actually an incredible strength, and it sets it apart from the movie in that you’re coming at it, not with the perspective of somebody’s right and somebody’s wrong, somebody’s a victim and somebody’s a villain. Is that you have two people that are good and bad, and father and son and needing help and trying, I think that perspective of coming at it and even handed way makes it that much stronger.

David Morrell  56:25
I wonder, you make me think, because I wasn’t allowed to have an opinion, right? I mean, what were they going to do? Did send me out of the country, but even in a hot bed of Penn State and a lot of demonstrations. But even there, I kept out of it. And so I wonder if this studied a distance that I was maintaining didn’t say because, I mean, which side, as you know, with so much in life that we feel strongly about, and there’s an opponent, you know? I mean, these days, I just feel that people should sit down and say, Why do you feel like, why do you believe what you do? And then I’ll tell you why I believe what I do. And then maybe we can, I a lot of it comes from the way we raise from the background that will come from. We’re conditioned, in some ways, to feel a certain way and react a certain way. And it, it occurred to me that, you know what, what we would what we would see in First Blood, because nobody was in the right, and not necessarily anybody was in the wrong either, and that, this is Richard Brooks, when he was writing, directing, when he was going to he and I had a difference of opinion about this. I thought it was a terrible idea. It was the theme. He said at the end of the book that there’ll be some shooting, and somehow Rambo and Teasel are together in a ditch as all the bullets are tearing up. And that Teasel would look at Rambo and say none of this would have happened if only we had tried to understand each other. Well, that’s a terrible way to end the movie, and I told him, and he never spoke to me again. But that’s the theme that is, in fact, the case, and it’s the case in almost every example where we don’t get along, but we’re so controlled. People say I feel and I what I want to say to them. I don’t care what you feel. Tell me what you think. Tell me what why you think you feel this way, and then we can have a discussion. And that was basically the whole point behind First Blood.

Carolyn Daughters  58:42
And Troutman says this in First Blood to Teasel. He says, without having any understanding of the individual in front of you, you created this entire path of action, if you had known anything about him, his war history, his metal his Green Beret training, if you had known anything about him, you would have surely changed the path. And the same, same holds true with Rambo, where you know. And so it is for me, the way the two viewpoints go in the book. It is a dialogue in a really interesting way. And then I don’t want to spoil the end of this book. I want everyone to read First Blood.

Sarah Harrison  59:30
Yeah, it sounds very like a book for modern times.

Carolyn Daughters  59:34
Please read First Blood. If you watch the Rambo movie and enjoyed it, that’s amazing. Now you can read the book, and you’re going to get a similar but, but in some ways very different story. So read, read this book, is what I would say. And the dialog happening with these two characters, I think, is just marvelous. And I will without spoiling the cave scene, which is my. Favorite scene of the book, I will say probably three quarters, maybe a little bit further through the book, there’s a really great scene with Rambo in a cave that, for me, harkens back a little bit to Rogue Male and it is so much about what a human being brings to a situation and interprets without asking the deeper questions. And when we give ourselves up and just resign ourselves and say, I am here, and we just, we release ourselves what happens, and I will just, I will tease with that and say such a marvelous scene. And I really enjoyed, enjoyed that, and I hope people read this book.

David Morrell  1:00:43
That’s my favorite scene of First Blood, by the way. That is the key scene in the book. That’s when it starts to become mystical. I mean, toward the end, Rambo and Teasel can almost read each other’s minds. That you know that, and that goes back, in a way, to Rogue Male and Geoffrey Household that other 100 and that identification and almost mystical way, but that, that scene is he, he changes it. And it’s in the depths of the mind. And then it changes, it’s three parts, the same as Rogue Male the town, and then what happens in the mountain. And then after the cave scene, it’s what happens when Rambo comes back to town. And, and so we have a natural three-part structure. And one of those, I still remember the day I wrote that. I wrote that in one day, and I never changed. If I changed two or three words, I’d be surprised. I’ve never had a more intense experience as a writer than the day I wrote that particular scene.

Carolyn Daughters  1:01:56
Because it felt human and real and true.

David Morrell  1:02:00
Yes, and I never seen anything like it, you know? I mean, trying to, I have a rule that if I think I’ve seen it in a book or movie, I’m certainly not going to put it in one of my books. There has to be a new, different way of approaching the material and but anyhow, and I’m so pleased that that’s the scene that talked to you.

Sarah Harrison  1:02:26
Well, David, I know Carolyn said we have 14 hours together, but …

Carolyn Daughters  1:02:30
We have 12 hours together.

Sarah Harrison  1:02:33
I wish that we did. I think there’s so much we could talk about First Blood for quite a while yet. But I know we are you’re past our time.

David Morrell  1:02:41
Just say one of the things, because please, three part story. So we have Rambo and we have Teasel. We have a generation gap. We have difference between wars. Teasel is a war hero from Korea, which was a conventional war. Rambo is a decorated veteran of Vietnam, which is a whole different thing. So we have, we have, as it were, contrasting wars. This is we have contrasting generations. And then we add to that Colonel Troutman in First Blood, whose first name is Sam. So I let that just sink in a bit. Is Uncle Sam. He is the system. I mean, in a way, this is an allegory we have, and we could look at it almost in terms of the extreme attitudes on the right and the left in our political spectrum. In a way, Teasel is on the right and Rambo is on the left in this story, and then, but what we have is the system. We have Troutman. We have the man who trained Rambo, and we have the man who destroys him. We have we. And I saw this as a kind of allegory that in the end, the only winner is the system. And that sounds a little simplistic, but you know that the mechanism that made all of that got all this going in the first place is the only winner. And slide he when he made the fourth Rambo film, the one that said in Myanmar, which is otherwise known as Burma, when he phoned me one day and he said, I’m trying to go back to the tone. He said, in retrospect, I think the second and the third movies glorified violence and the military in a way. That is unfortunate, because it isn’t pretty, but somehow people thought it was. And he said, I want in this fourth movie to go back to the tone of your novel First Blood, and there’s a director’s cut of the of the movie, because it was edited for the condensed at. For theatrical showing. But sly prepared. Sly directed it and wrote it is a director’s version. It’s longer, and it has lines. It has lines like war. Old men start them, young men fight them. Nobody wins. And, I mean, it’s no critic. There’s lots of speeches like that in the movie. No critic that I read addressed any of the themes that the movie was really about, and any he it’s it is overpowered by an excess of at one point, too much action. But the key themes that I talked about are so that he lifted a lot of not lifted. That sounds wrong, but he adapted certain things from the novel and put them into the end of the movie. The fifth movie, I don’t consider to be a Rambo movie, so I just disallowed that.

Sarah Harrison  1:04:06
On that note that when you were talking about the Brotherhood of the Rose, that really demented father character, adopting the orphans that reminded me of the Troutman character in First Blood, that dysfunctional father and, yes, in the way that they use their children.

David Morrell  1:06:31
In Brotherhood of the Rose. He’s a very, very avuncular guy. You like him. He’s very smart, and he’s all he’s very solicitous. But he has, he has other motives or there was another of my books called last Reveley, which is my only Western. It said in 1916 and Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit invaded, crossed over and attacked a Mexican or New Mexico border town called Columbus, and the military, there was a cavalry base there, and they chased via into Mexico. And eventually, we, the United States sent two columns into Mexico, invading Mexico, to hunt for him. I mean, this isn’t unbelievable that this happened. And the story is about a a scout for the cavalry who was in the who was young enough to have been in the Civil War, who was in the what were called the Indian wars and native wars against the Native Americans. He was in Philip the Philippines. He was in Cuba, and this is his last go round, and there’s a young man who realizes that if he doesn’t find a guy like the old Scout, he doesn’t have a chance. And again, it’s the relationship between the young man and the old man. So, after a while it becomes like, Oh, here he is at that theme again. But then, as I said, after my son died, I no longer wrote about that. So they’re there, as I just I can’t get over what you said about that. We all have stories.

Carolyn Daughters  1:08:10
Each of us has a story only we can tell. The story only you can tell. Your story evolved from First Blood onward.

Sarah Harrison  1:08:18
In speaking of your other books, David, really quick before we close. You sent us a really cool one. I just want to touch on it. Murder as a Fine Art. This is going to be a giveaway for our listeners. Do you want to just briefly mention this?

Carolyn Daughters  1:08:31
How do I how do I win this book? I want to win it.

Sarah Harrison  1:08:35
I know I was like, do we have to give it away? I actually would like to read it before we give it away.

David Morrell  1:08:41
My career has been going into different genres to find different ways to write action, starting with First Blood, and in that with the kind of ambition that Geoffrey Household had. My granddaughter, Natalie, who was 14, died from the same cancer that my son died from. And for reasons that I don’t recall, I guess I do, Charles Darwin lost his daughter to went at a young age, his favorite daughter and he was working on his origin of species, and when the child died, he couldn’t, couldn’t move forward. And his wife to talk about the ways people can be cruel. His wife, who is a devout Christian and understood that for some people, the theory of evolution of natural selection could be threatening to their faith. And so Darwin, his Darwin’s wife said that. Maybe it was God’s will that the child died to stop him from writing Origin of the Species. Yeah, it’s jaw dropping. And there’s a book, I’m sorry, a movie, and I’m drawing a blank. That’s the story of Darwin’s writer’s block after the death of his daughter, and how he can’t move forward with his work. And near the end, our daughter who is looking for themes about people reacting to the death of the child. She said, you should watch this movie? Well, yes, because how about two thirds of the way through, one of these characters who has no other function except to deliver a message, shows up and says to Darwin, out of nowhere. You know, Charles, there are people like Thomas de Quincey who believe that we can be controlled by thoughts and emotions we don’t know we have. And that was the end of the movie for me. I thought, Who the hell is Thomas de Quincey?

Sarah Harrison  1:11:21

Sure, I have a great copy of that book. I love it.

David Morrell  1:11:25

I thought that sounds like Freud.

Sarah Harrison  1:11:29

That sounds like Rogue Male a little bit. And maybe First Blood.

David Morrell  1:11:33
Exactly. So I did some research, and I’m now convinced that Freud lifted because the Quincey invented the word subconscious because of his drug addiction, was fascinated by what was happening in his mind. And I thought, I’m going to write a book. I’m going to write an imitation Victorian novel that’s a thriller that as if it could have been published in 1854, when the novel, when the novel occurs. And so all of it’s absolutely historic. And in it Thomas de Quincey, who was famous as well for a book about on considering murder as one of the fine art it’s actually a series of essays and he was fascinated by the first publicized mass murder in English history, the at Cliff Highway murders of 1811 in London. And he’d written a lengthy essay about it, inventing the true crime genre in which he’s recreating. Anyhow, he, I thought, I’m going to write a novel in which somebody uses the Quincy essay as a blueprint to make to do the killings again. And he is the natural suspect because he’s, he’s obsessed with that, with that murder, and it that it would be a contrast between the coin, between to Quincey theory of the subconscious, that alien nature is hide in us, undetected. That’s a quote and Scotland Yard recently created. And their fascination with plaster casts of footprints and things like that, and so I thought that would be fun. But where I’m going with this is the Quincey had a 20 year old daughter named Emily, and she was his caretaker because all the other children had fled because he was so weird. The problem is that I have a drug addict as the main character. So how do I make him likable? Well, why not introduce his daughter, and if she loves him, then we’ll love him. So Emily became, for me, the most important character in the novel, and I realized later that she was a surrogate for my dead granddaughter. So just as in my earlier books, it was the son trying to find the father, or the father trying to find the son. Now it was the grandfather, although they were father and daughter, but I was, I started it. I mean, she was my granddaughter, so that even though she was the daughter, I began thinking of her in this relationship. And that goes back to what you were saying. Stories only. We are meant to write only we can write. And I don’t know if anybody else, except somebody with my background would have written murders of fire.

Carolyn Daughters  1:14:51
I know we’re past time, but we still have 12 hours. I would love maybe next year, sometime, if we can get more of your time to maybe talk about this. Thomas de Quincey mystery series, Murder as a Fine Art. I think that would be so much fun.

David Morrell  1:15:15
There are three books. Murder is a Fine Art, Inspector of the Dead, and Ruler of the Night. And each of the three is about a major Victorian crime, real crime, that that paralyzed London and England. The second book is about the multiple attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria, all real. And the third one is about the development of the English train system, which sounds bored. No, I’m an engineer locked into the trains. The conductor locked you into your perch, wherever there were separate compartments, and you were locked in and there were bars over the doors and in one of the major cases, a murderer was in the in, in the booth with a wealthy man, and there was like a slaughter. There was blood dripping from the ceiling, wow. And I mean, it was so bad that the blood flew out, and people had their windows open in other compartments and blood flew into the compartment is farther along. I mean, this is like so the first murder on an English train, which was a big deal because people didn’t want to get on trains anymore.

Carolyn Daughters  1:16:38
No, no way.

David Morrell  1:16:40
The guy attacked him. You couldn’t get out of the booth. So anyway, yes, that I feel my long career, these three books are the books I most enjoyed writing, and that the books that are most important to me, and I think the most interesting because of the way they have these weird Victorian details that nobody at the time noted, but that we look at, say, like a prosperous woman’s clothes worth, like, 40 pounds, wow, because of the hoops.

Sarah Harrison  1:17:12
Like your work, it sounds multi layered, fascinating. I have read Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and there is actually delay between recording a podcast and publishing it, so maybe I can squeeze in reading this before we have to give it away.

David Morrell  1:17:29
You’ve been very kind. I did warn you off stage that I maybe it’s because I was a professor, but you get me going and I just chat, but I did promise you would have no dead air.

Carolyn Daughters  1:17:42
It’s been wonderful talking with you about First Blood. We hope to have you back on in the future. Thank you very much, David.

David Morrell  1:17:55
My pleasure.

Sarah Harrison 
We hope you enjoyed this episode with David Morrell discussing First Blood. If you did, it would mean the world to us if you would subscribe and then you’ll never miss an episode. Be sure to leave us a rating or review on Apple podcasts Spotify, or wherever you listen to Tea, Tonic & Toxin. That way, likeminded folks can also find us on all platforms.

Carolyn Daughters
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Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.