370
JOHN FRASER
help,
it
is obvious both that they can all obtain in works that are
nevertheless very bad, and that works in which none of them obtain
can nevertheless be very good, Schoedsack and Pichel's
The Most
Dangerous Game
being a prime example. At the risk, therefore, of
sounding as
if
I were offering a recipe, I would like to suggest two
or three ingredients that seem to me not marginal but essential
if
the
necessary empathy is to occur and if the violence involved is to be
truly shocking.
I suggest,
first
of all, that an essential element is an acute sense
of the body; and this is not, I think, quite the truism it may sound.
After all, it is common enough in thrillers to find violences endured
with only trivial consequences - sappings without headaches after–
wards, knees in the groin that don't prevent sex the same night and
so on. (At times, of course, as in the Shell Scott thrillers of Richard
S. Prather, things go so far that one is really in Woody Woodpecker
country.) Similarly, in only one thriller that I have come across in
literally hundreds of "tough" thrillers is the information given that
sudden chloroforming is liable to cause a sudden relaxation of the
sphincter muscles, and in only three or four (all by John D. Mac–
Donald, as it happens) is it acknowledged that sudden death and
acute fear can have the same consequences. Again, there are very
few thrillers indeed in which the long-term physiological-psychological
consequences of having heen tortured or methodically beaten-up are
disturbingly acknowledged: MacDonald's
The Executioners
(also
titled
Cape Fear)
and
Death Trap
are a couple, Donald Hamilton's
Date with Darkness
and
The Steel Mirror
a couple more, McPart–
land's
Face of Evil
a fifth, Geoffrey Household's
Rogue Male
a sixth
and no doubt there are a few more that can be added, but it
still
isn't an impressive score. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that
in
the overwhelming majority of thrillers, the body as a complex tissue
of sensitivities and fatigues, an organism with its own imperative
rules and reactions, is scarcely there at
all,
just as
it
isn't
there
in
most erotica. And if this seems a strong claim, the reader should
re–
consider whatever thrillers he is familiar with in the light of the
almost uniquely kinesthetic
Rogue Male
and Kenneth Millar's
Blue
City,
in the former of which
it
is even acknowledged that a hero's
body can excrete. The
really
deplorable thing about most of the
