To Hook or Not to Hook, That is the Question? Read online

To Hook or Not to Hook,

  That is the Question?

  By

  Robert Hendry

  Published by Lidiya Petrova Novels,

  An Imprint of Hillside Publishing

  Copyright 2011

  The Moral Right of the author has been asserted.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Author's note: All characters depicted in this work of fiction are 18 years of age or older.

  To Hook or Not to Hook,

  That is the Question?

  By

  Robert Hendry

  Chapter 1

  ‘To be or Not to Be?’ is, without doubt the most famous question in literary history. It poses a fundamental question, but it does not appear in Hamlet until Act 3, Scene 1, so it is not ‘a hook’. A 16th century literary agent, if such being had existed in those days, which I doubt, would have decided whether to represent Mr W Shakespeare long before he got to that poignant moment.

  In a soliloquy, literary conventions demand that the speaker is the sole character on stage. Shakespeare threw that idea out the window, as Ophelia is on stage and in a position where Hamlet can hardly fail to see her. Claudius and Polonius are lurking in the background as well. This has persuaded some literary critics to ask ‘Soliloquy or not to Soliloquy?’

  The question is inane, as Shakespeare used the device to help the plot along. He did not care if he complied with some convention or not. He was a master playwright delivering excitement, tension, passion or humour at the right moment. Is there not drama, ironic humour and passion as Mark Anthony stands beside the bleeding corpse that was his friend in front of a baying mob. He comes to bury Caesar not to praise him. Before the end of the speech, the crowd, who had acclaimed the conspirators, seek their heads.

  Could Shakespeare have written in that way today? I would suggest there is one short and grim answer to that. He would be on the slush pile. The Question that my 21st Century Hamlet asks in his soliloquy is

  To Hook or Not to Hook?

  Whether 'tis nobler to deep POV

  Or suffer the Slings and Arrows of

  Outrageous Agents, that is the Question?

  As a child, books surrounded me. In one bookcase, nestled the complete works of William Shakespeare. They rubbed shoulders with John Buchan, Sir Walter Scott, Enid Blyton and Anthony Buckeridge’s ‘Jennings’ novels. I loved books. I also loved it when my mother, who was a natural story teller, would tells me stories that had been handed down in the family over many centuries.

  I got to know of a girl called Sukie. It was the time of the Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763. For years the Royal Navy had been invincible, and French attempts to gain control of the seas had shattered before its might. In 1761, the Royal Navy encountered Sukie, and as her future happiness was at stake, Sukie was prepared to give battle. No novelist would dare pit a 20-year-old girl against the Admiralty and have the girl win. Sukie did not realise that, so she reorganised the world as she wished. She married the French naval officer she had fallen in love with and lived happily ever after. As to the RN, well that was tough.

  Literature meant a lot to me, and from my father I inherited an interest in transport, in ships, trains and so on. At the age of fifteen, I decided I wanted to write books. Eleven years later, I held my first book in my hands. That was in 1976. Thirty-five years later, my own books fill a shelf on one of my bookcases. Ignoring reprints, there are twenty-six published titles, a couple of which have been reprinted twice and one became editors’ choice of the quarter for one of the Swindon Book Clubs.

  The reason I say this is not out of any desire to boast, but to establish two points. Literature has been important to me from when I was old enough to read, and with twenty-six non-fiction titles, and quite a few very flattering reviews, I am not lacking in experience in writing.

  For many years I was content with Non-Fiction as a field, but gradually I felt I might like to dip into the inkwell of fiction. The catalyst for this was more than twenty-five years study of the political-military complex of the Soviet Union. The USSR was an astonishing world, where Tom Clancy’s celebrated comment about the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must make sense held true.

  In the West, we had visions of the Politburo thinking through the implication of the invasion of Afghanistan, and that it was part of a grand strategic master plan. The reality, and Leonid Brezhnev’s comedy contribution to one of the most tragic decisions of the twentieth century was beyond serious belief. If you wrote the discussions in the Politburo as fiction, an author would court scorn.

  I had studied the Soviet aviation cruisers, Moskva and Leningrad. They were to be the first of a large class, but only two were ever built because of their deplorable sea keeping qualities. They were confined to the Black Sea as Moscow had the quaint idea that a gale in the Black Sea was not like a gale elsewhere.

  As I looked at this strange world where reality was less plausible than fiction, I felt that it was the ideal subject for fiction. Rather than the usual Cold War novel where valiant Western agents in the mould of James Bond tackled the Soviet baddies, I decided to use my knowledge of the USSR to have the battles within the Soviet Union. They would erupt between those who hoped for peaceful co-existence with the West, and those who had a very different idea.

  Before I ‘put finger to keyboard’, I already knew that much of what I intended to write was breathtakingly close to reality. The discussions in ‘my’ Politburo mirrored what had actually taken place in Moscow. The only drawback was that in the real world, things did not have to make sense. In my fictitious USSR, I did not have that luxury.

  As my first novel started to take shape I entered the world of literary agents, and found a world that was at least as strange as that of the Politburo in Moscow.

 

  I encountered ‘the hook’. This was not some sinister device from a 1950s horror movie, but a term used by literary agents. Something had to hook their attention in Chapter One, preferably on page one. I soon discovered that the ideal ‘hook’ was a dead body. This had to be in the first chapter, preferably on the first page, and if possible in the first paragraph. If the body had net a gruesome fate, such as being impaled on a hook, that was even better.

  I started to think back to some of the great fiction I had read, by masters of the craft such as John Buchan or Erskine Childers. In Buchan’s Mr Standfast, the opening chapters are quite calm, and his hero Richard Hannay soliloquises on this during a train journey as he travels though the peaceful Cotswold countryside en route to meet the person who will be his ‘controller’ in the intelligence operation that is to unfold.

  Before long the pace heats up, but the opening pages of Mr Standfast capture the somnolent world in which action man Richard Hannay, who is fresh from the Western Front, finds himself. It is a perfect beginning, but with no hook.

  I though of Erskine Childers and The Riddle in the Sands. Childers’ own life, as an ardent believer in the British Empire, and in Irish Nationalism, was worthy of a novel in itself, and in The Riddle of the Sands he created the modern espionage novel and wrote his own epitaph. Carruthers, who relates the story soliloquises about daring all for a cause, and Childers was to dare all during the Irish Civil War, and was to be executed by an Irish Government firing squad on 24 November 1922.

  The Riddle of the Sands has never been out of print in more than a century since it appeared. It is one of the classics of English literature, yet it too opens in ennui. We sense Carruthers crushing boredom as he languishes in London when all his friends in the smart set have gone off to the great houses. Childers caught his hero’s boredom in the low-key openin
g to The Riddle of the Sands. Had there been a mutilated body on page one, the contrast between Carruthers dull existence in London bereft of all his fashionable friends and the desperate attempt to unravel the German invasion plans would have been lost.

  Did Buchan or Hannay use a hook in Chapter One? Frankly they did not. They were master wordsmiths, and used a peaceful opening to make the contrast between the everyday world in which we live where nothing much happens and the action packed events that will follow. If someone were to change Richard Hannay to Fred Bloggs, or Carruthers to Snodgrass, and re-title the books, Mr Valiant-for-Truth and The Friesian Coast and submit them to a literary agent today, what would happen?

  If we were writing fiction, the