Behind the Book: Unlikely Hero

Unlikely Hero began with an explosion. Not a character, not a theme. An image: a nuclear bomb going off near Los Angeles, and the question of what that would do.

So I looked it up. There is a site called NUKEMAP. It lets you place a bomb of a given yield anywhere on a map, then shows you graphically the casualties, the blast radius, the kinds of injuries at each distance. It is a sobering thing to use. I placed the bomb all over the Los Angeles area, watching the numbers, until I found a spot up in the mountains where a detonation would do minimal damage to the city itself.

That spot became the one fixed point the entire novel had to serve. The bomb has to end up there. Everything else in the book is the machine that delivers it to that canyon.

How do you build a thriller backwards from a blast?

You follow a chain of necessity. The bomb has to reach a specific canyon in the mountains, so someone has to drive it there and die doing it. That someone became Trevor, the obvious antihero, the only kind of man who could and would make that drive. Then I needed the bomb itself, so the terrorists came next, a cell planning to dwarf Oklahoma City and Beirut. And last came the cop, because a story like this needs an obviously good man in it.

Without one, there is no one to measure Trevor against, and the book means nothing.

That is a different way of building than I usually work. Some of my books grow outward from scattered ideas that spread until they touch. This one ran backwards along a line of what has to be true for this to work. The bomb needs a safe place to go off, so a canyon. The canyon needs a driver, so Trevor. Trevor needs someone to get past, so Martinez. Each piece summoned the next. That backward logic is part of why the book came out so tight and controlled.

Why open a thriller in a therapy session?

Because the book only works if you believe in Trevor, and you will not believe in him if the first thing you see him do is kill someone.

So the book opens in a therapist’s office. Trevor is describing something that happened, a job where a child died, and he cannot get it out of his head. He drives to the family’s house afterward and leaves a bag on their porch. No action, no plot, just a killer failing to explain himself to a therapist. I opened there on purpose. The reader needs to know Trevor has a background, some depth, some regret, before anything else happens.

Without that, he is a paper character, an evil man who does evil things, and no one has any reason to care what becomes of him. The session is a peek inside him before the story asks you to invest in him.

And then, in almost the next scene, I show him being evil. That is deliberate too. Therapy session, then straight into his bad side, back to back, so the reader gets both at once and neither one is a lie. He is not a good man with a grim job, and he is not a monster with a fake soft moment bolted on for sympathy. He is both, established in the first two scenes, and the reader never gets to simplify him after that.

I did the same thing for the cop. Before the two threads ever touch, I show Martinez working, making an arrest, being an officer, so you know exactly what kind of man he is. You cannot compare two characters at the climax if you have not built both of them first. The entire first half of the book is character construction dressed up as setup, and it is the most important work in the novel.

How do you make a murderer sympathetic without letting him off the hook?

The model I keep in mind is Tony Soprano. He is one of the worst men ever put on a screen. He kills, he lies, he destroys the people around him. He also has a family and a good side. Across the seasons you have to sit with both of those things, and you are never allowed to resolve them into one clean verdict. That refusal to resolve is what makes him real. A villain you can sum up in a single word is not a character. He is a prop.

Trevor works the same way, compressed. The therapy session and the cruelty sit side by side so early that you are never able to reduce him to one thing. He is a real murderer. He is also a man with regret and a rule he cannot explain. Both are true at the same time, all the way through, and I never soften one to make room for the other. The trick is not to make the reader forgive him. It is to make the reader unable to dismiss him.

What is the real question the book asks?

It asks it through Martinez, and that is deliberate. If you want a moral question to land, you put it through the most rule-following person you have, because that is the person it costs the most.

Trevor has to get past two walls to reach the canyon. First the terrorists, who catch him and have to be dealt with. Then the cop. Martinez stops the car. And now the honest, by-the-book officer is standing at the trunk of a vehicle with a nuclear device in it, driven by a wanted murderer, and the correct procedure, the thing a good cop is supposed to do, would kill eight million people. Detain the felon. Follow the law. Do everything right, and the city dies.

I do not know what a real officer would do in that situation. I am not sure anyone knows. I wrote what felt true, the only thing a novelist can do at a moment like that. But the question is the point of the book: when the law and the right thing pull against each other, which one are you? And the book refuses to let you answer it from a comfortable distance. It puts you in the patrol car, next to the good cop, at the trunk.

What kind of story is Unlikely Hero, underneath the thriller?

It is a two-hander. There are plot points, the way every story has them, and there is a strong arc, but there are only two arcs in the whole book, Trevor’s and Martinez’s. Everyone else is supporting. The terrorists, the people who move through the edges of the story, none of them change. They are scenery for the two men at the center.

And the shape of those two arcs is the point. One man against another, and then they have to join forces. Trevor and Martinez begin on opposite sides. The cop is literally the wall between the criminal and the canyon. The engine of the book is the moment the good man has to stop opposing the bad man and stand with him instead, because something larger than both of them demands it.

Two enemies bent toward each other until they end up on the same side at the one moment that matters. Strip away the bomb and the terrorists and the chase, and that is the book: can an honest man and a murderer be forced into the same purpose, and what does it cost each of them to get there.

Why is a murderer the hero?

Because that is the irony the title is built on, and because I never let Trevor be only a murderer in the first place.

He is a murderer, and he does not pretend otherwise. But in his own mind, every killing he ever did was justified in some way. They were criminals. They got in the way. There was always a reason, and he has an excuse for every one of them. His entire moral world is held together by that one habit of mind.

Children are the one thing that does not fit it. Trevor does not see a child as a threat, and he likes them. A child cannot be a fellow criminal, cannot have gotten in the way, cannot have earned it. So there is a floor beneath even a man like him: he believes that anyone who murders a child is worse than he is. That is the one line he draws, the one place his excuses run out, and it is the most human thing about him.

He is a killer who still needs someone to be worse than, and for Trevor that is a person who hurts a child.

That is why the ending works, and why I did not make it comfortable. The man at the center of this book is not a good man who fell into crime and gets to redeem himself at the end. He is a bad man who runs out of excuses, and what he does in the final stretch of the book is the hardest, most honest writing in it. I was not interested in handing the reader an easy redemption, the murderer revealed as secretly good all along.

The book does not believe that, and neither do I. What Trevor faces in his last hours is the question of whether one right act at the end of a life like his can mean anything at all, and the book has the nerve to sit in that question instead of answering it the way a reader might want.

The ending leaves you with something worse than a resolution. It leaves you with a question it refuses to close, the kind that follows you out of the book and does not let go. I will not say what it is here. But it is the reason the book stays with people, and it is the reason I think it is one of my favorites. The plot is simple. The two men are not. And the ending asks more of the reader than the setup ever suggests it will.

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