Nelson DeMille

I wanted to put in my own two cents about Nelson DeMille, after Joe Finder’s warm personal appreciation last week on Facebook, and John Floyd’s recent SleuthSayers piece, about DeMille’s influence and inspiration. I have two favorites among DeMille’s books, Up Country and The Charm School, for quite different reasons, so here goes. Up Country came out in 2002. It’s the book that sends us back to Viet Nam. If you didn’t know, DeMille served as a platoon leader with the 1st Cav, during the Tet Offensive in 1968. I don’t, in all honesty, think Up Country is that successful as a novel, it seems both languorous and contrived, but there are many vivid moments of striking emotional transparency, when the hero, Brenner, or another American vet on the reunion tour (so to speak), are overcome by memories of what they experienced in their previous combat tour. They make a stop at Cu Chi, in one scene, and go down into the tunnels. Brenner comes back up, and there’s a guy – an American, a former GI – sitting in the dirt, pale and shaking, with the cold sweats, and he hasn’t even gone into the tunnels. Just the thought of it is enough to give him a panic attack. You know that the former platoon leader went to Viet Nam, this time as a tourist, to see what it was like, now, and to see how he felt, and you know that things like this happened, while he was there. We can’t complain that a writer didn’t write the book we wish he had, we all know we write the book only we can write, and we write the only book we can. All the same, I still wish Nelson had written this, not as a novel, but as a memory piece, Viet Nam in his mind’s eye. The Charm School is a very different kettle of fish. It, too, has a Viet Nam connection – see below, spoiler alert – and it came out in 1988, when the fall of Saigon, thirteen years before, was a living memory, and an embarrassment. This, actually, makes up a part of our response to the novel, or certainly, part of my response to the novel. I have to give you a notion of the major plot hook, here, and if you haven’t read The Charm School, skip this next part. One of the chief rewards of the book is its reveal, the measured release, easing the tension off the line, and taking up the slack, but by then you’ve already swallowed the lure. Anyway, the basic idea is that the Russians have built a fake American suburban community, to train sleeper agents. Everybody speaks English, they dress in khakis and button-downs, they shoot hoops in the driveway. But the kicker is that the core role models for these deep-cover agents are American POW’s, captured by the North Vietnamese but then shipped off to the Soviet gulag. So, take a step back. First off, the late 1980’s. Me personally, I always thought the whole POW/MIA thing was a lot of hooey. It’s a fake controversy drummed up to satisfy American vanity, the premise of a couple or three very bad Chuck Norris pictures, that struck a resonant nerve in our domestic grievance politics. I’d call it some kind of mental illness, in fact, to believe we didn’t lose in Viet Nam. It’s also racist. How could a bunch of bandy-legged gooks in black pyjamas beat the strongest military power in the world? Well, the answer is, they didn’t: here’s Chuck, come back to kick their ass. We’ve invented an alternate reality, where history is negotiable, and the loudest voices crowd out the rest. I don’t where DeMille himself stood on this, but I’m guessing he’d be of the same mind I am. The point, on the other hand, is that he took a far-fetched premise - not just preposterous, but politically repellent – and made it utterly convincing. You don’t have to go one way or the other on the MIA question, once you step inside the reality of the book, it all follows inexorably. The Charm School is flat-out one of the best thrillers I’ve ever read, in spite of my not wanting to believe a word of it. I’m sorry you left us, Nelson. May the road rise up to meet you.