David Morrell

MURDER AS A FINE ART

David Morrell — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 22:49:53 +0000

In my four decades as an author, from First Blood through The Brotherhood of the Rose and Creepers, I’ve always tried to find new ways to write action and suspense. Readers know that I do my best to surprise them and take them to places they’ve never been.

My latest novel Murder as a Fine Art attempts to make you believe that you’re in 1854 London. It’s a blend of fact with fiction in a harrowing exhumation of the infamous Ratcliffe Highway murders, a series of mass killings that rivaled those of Jack the Ripper for terrorizing London and all of England.

My main character also blends fiction and fact. Thomas De Quincey was one of the most fascinating personalities of Victorian England. He was obsessed about the Ratcliffe Highway killings and wrote about them vividly in his classic essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”

De Quincey invented the term “subconscious” and anticipated Freud by a half century. He was the first person to write about drug addiction in his infamous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He inspired Edgar Allan Poe, who in turn inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes.

This forerunner of the greatest detective will lead you into the streets, slums, mansions, and prisons of gaslit London. As a literary luminary battles a brilliant murderer, their lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.

Publishers Weekly gave Murder as a Fine Art a rare starred and boxed review: “Brilliant . . . an epitome of the intelligent page turner.”

Booklist also gave it a starred review, calling it an “exceptional historical mystery . . . riveting [with] page-flipping action, taut atmosphere, and multifaceted characters.”

To see the really cool trailer, click here.

To see the list of cities that I’ll be visiting, click here.

MY ALMOST CAREER IN MUSIC

David Morrell — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 23:27:09 +0000

NEW IN MY POPULAR-ICON SERIES!

FRANK SINATRA: THE ARTIST AND HIS MUSIC

MY ALMOST-CAREER IN MUSIC

Fans of First Blood, The Brotherhood of the Rose, and my other action/suspense novels might be surprised by the following:

In my youth, before I decided to be a writer, I almost chose a career in music. The rock-and-roll scene made me, like many teenagers, fantasize about being a performer. But unlike many of those teenagers, I realized that if I wanted to be in music, it would help to know something about it.

So I found a classical music composer who was also a teacher, and twice a week I went to him, learning how to play the piano while I also learned the principles of musical theory, harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. I played in a dance band and still pitch in when I’m asked, as this photo shows.

My musical training prompted me to write these new e-works.

FRANK SINATRA: THE ARTIST AND HIS MUSIC

Did you know that Frank Sinatra was permanently scarred from birth and never went anywhere without using pancake makeup . . . that in his youth this supposedly self-taught singer took voice lessons from a Metropolitan opera singer . . . that he learned breath control by swimming underwater and mentally singing lyrics?

These are only some of the little-known revelations in this e-work. Based on more than forty years of listening and reading, it provides an in-depth analysis of Sinatra’s music and shows why this troubled high-school dropout came to be justly called the greatest interpretative singer in the recording era. After you read this, you might never listen to Sinatra or any other singer the same way again.

NELSON RIDDLE: THE MAN BEHIND THE MUSIC

Frank Sinatra. Nat “King” Cole. Ella Fitzgerald. Judy Garland. Peggy Lee. Rosemary Cloony. Linda Ronstadt. No matter their various styles, these and other iconic popular singers had one thing in common—much of their best work was arranged by Nelson Riddle, whose fame within the world of arrangers rivaled that of the legends for whom he wrote. Indeed, some critics maintain that, if not for Riddle, Sinatra might not have overcome his mid-career failure and climbed to the superstar status that he eventually attained.

This e-work describes the career of a musical genius, who changed popular music and proved that a great arranger is as important as a great song and a great singer. At its core is the irony that a man whose music is described as “light” and “bright” should have been so bitter and disappointed in his life.

Scribd

MURDER AS A FINE ART

Coming on May 6: MURDER AS A FINE ART, a harrowing thriller about 1854 London and the first media-sensation mass murders. The book features a real-life main character, Thomas De Quincey, the notorious Opium-Eater, who inspired Edgar Allan Poe who in turn inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes.

This is an extremely beautiful book. I highly recommend buying the printed edition rather than the e-version.

“A masterpiece—I don’t use that word lightly—a fantastic historical thriller, beautifully written, intricately plotted, and populated with unforgettable characters. It brilliantly recreates the London of gaslit streets, fogs, hansom cabs, and Scotland Yard. If you liked The Alienist, you will absolutely love this book. I was spellbound from the first page to last.

—Douglas Preston, #1 bestselling author of The Monster of Florence

“London 1854, noxious yellow fogs, reeking slums, intrigues in high places, murders most foul, but instead of Sherlock Holmes solving crimes via the fine art of deduction, we have the historical English Opium-Eater himself, Thomas De Quincey. David Morrell fans — and they are Legion — can look forward to celebrating Murder As a Fine Art as one of their favorite author’s strongest and boldest books in years.”

–Dan Simmons, New York Times bestselling author of Drood and The Terror

THE PRINT EDITION OF THE NAKED EDGE IS NOW AVAILABLE!

David Morrell — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 20:00:44 +0000

In 2010, with e-books starting to make their mark, I decided to experiment and release a novel that would be an e-book exclusive. It’s called THE NAKED EDGE. A sequel to my 2003 novel THE PROTECTOR, it features the following character:

He calls himself Cavanaugh. No first name, and even “Cavanaugh” isn’t his actual last name. He’s a protector. If you refer to him as a bodyguard, which he regards as a synonym for a thug, you won’t like his reaction. His hatred of bullies compelled him to enlist in Special Forces. Now as a civilian, he runs Global Protective Services, the world’s best security company. His goal? To defend the helpless, to keep predators from their prey.

In the United States alone, more than 100 million people own e-reading devices of various kinds (mostly iPads, Kindles, and Nooks), so you can see why I was interested in experimenting with THE NAKED EDGE as an e-book.

Some of you contacted me to express your preference for printed books only. I have thousands of printed books and completely understand, although you might want to get used to the idea of e-books because one day that’s the only means by which you’ll be able to read an author’s backlist titles.

But that’s another topic. In response to numerous requests, I looked around for a way to release a printed version of THE NAKED EDGE. This is not as easy as it might seem. These days, a big publisher places major emphasis on e-book rights. Because THE NAKED EDGE has already been an e-book for two years, a big publisher wouldn’t be interested.

That left the possibility of a small press, but because I had already experimented with THE NAKED EDGE as an e-book, I decided to experiment further and to become my own small press, releasing the printed version of THE NAKED EDGE under my own imprint. It looks gorgeous.

This is the descriptive text on the back of the novel:

Once Cavanaugh had a boyhood best friend. They played in the woods near their homes, pretending to be soldiers surviving behind enemy lines. Grownup, they belonged to Delta Force and later worked as protectors for the world’s best security company.

Now their lives have taken drastically different paths, pitting them against each other, forcing them to play their boyhood game again, this time to learn who dies.

The survival of a great city hangs in the balance as two friends-turned-enemies hunt each other and discover that there’s a line between predators and prey, a line that’s called The Naked Edge.

From David Morrell, the father of the modern action novel, comes a gripping global thriller that explores the meaning of friendship and the naked edge between love and hate.

For THE NAKED EDGE, I’m keeping the distribution simple. You can buy printed copies from AMAZON here.

Or else, if you want signed copies, you can order them from the following two bookstores with which I’ve had a long-standing relationship. They can handle both domestic and international shipping. Just click on either name to order a copy.

MYSTERIOUS GALAXY POISONED PEN

Or you can phone them at these numbers: Poisoned Pen (480-947-2974) and Mysterious Galaxy (858-268-4747).

In the future, I plan to release printed versions of my out-of-print backlist titles the same way, along with a new collection of short stories. None of these is the sort of thing that big publishers are interested in these days, but in this brave new world for authors who want to do something different, anything is possible.

I hasten to add that MURDER AS A FINE ART will be released the traditional way. On May 7 of next year, one of the biggest publishers—Mulholland Books/Little Brown—will make my new novel available everywhere. Set in 1854 London, MURDER AS A FINE ART’s background involves a series of real-life mass murders that rivaled those of Jack the Ripper for terrorizing London and all of England.

My training as a private pilot

David Morrell — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:26:25 +0000

My 2009 novel THE SHIMMER is about the mysterious Marfa Lights that have been appearing in west Texas since people first settled in the area in 1889. The lights are very real (I’ve seen them) and were sometimes chased by aircraft when the military had an airbase there in WWII. Because I love doing research and making details as accurate as possible, I knew that, to write these scenes, I’d need some experience as a pilot, so I went to my local airport in Santa Fe and signed up for a few flight lessons. I enjoyed these so much that I took even more lessons and eventually became a private pilot.

Recently, FLIGHT TRAINING MAGAZINE (a publication of AOPA, which stands for Airplane Owners and Pilots Association) did a feature on my training and asked me to offer advice to student pilots. They called it RAMBO PILOT. It shows a nice photograph of me with my Cessna Skyhawk 172 aircraft. You might enjoy reading about what it’s like to learn to be a pilot.I added the article to the BIO page of my website, which is constantly evolving.

Here’s a link to it.

If you’re curious about the Marfa Lights and THE SHIMMER, here’s a link to information about that novel. You’ll see that in THE SHIMMER I call them the Rostov Light, but they are essentially the same as the Marfa Lights, which are described at the bottom of the link.

My novels dramatize fear.

David Morrell — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 22:48:05 +0000

My writing tends to dramatize fear, with characters struggling to suppress it or else giving in to it. Sometimes I write about anxiety and panic attacks, a topic I know well because I suffered them twenty-five years ago when my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from a rare bone cancer.

I describe these attacks in FIREFLIES. From the symptoms I experienced, I didn’t know which was going to kill me first, a heart attack or a stroke, but in the end, anxiety and panic attacks were the culprits.

They rank with depression as major problems for many people. When I speak to grief groups, I often discuss panic attacks because the majority of the audience suffers from them.

Perhaps you suffer from anxiety attacks and don’t know it. Or perhaps you know that you suffer from them but don’t understand the physical mechanism that causes them. In any case, you might find the following comments helpful.

The physical cause of anxiety disorder is an imbalance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in our blood. The ultimate cause is psychological, of course, but the result is the same: some sort of powerful stress affects our breathing. Unaware of what we’re doing, we hold our breath or else hyperventilate or perhaps take only quick small breaths in long sentences. This affects the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide circulating through our bodies. Our bodies sense that something is “off.” Our heart rate increases, causing us to want more oxygen, but our breathing is already not the way it should be, and pretty soon we’re breathing even faster until a reinforcing cycle of rapid heartbeat and rapid breathing is established.

At that point, our bodies are so confused that an adrenaline dump occurs, and we feel we’re in a fight-or-flight situation, even though there isn’t an emergency. As the cycle worsens, our hands and feet turn numb, and often the area around our mouths. Our eyes dilate, causing spatial disorientation, as if everything is far away. Muscles constrict in our chest, as if we’re having a heart attack, while simultaneously we feel dizzy, as if we’re having a stroke. In this ultimate stage, called a panic attack, the only way to stop the cycle occurs when we nearly collapse and our bodies force us to rest.

There’s a helpful book called THE ANXIETY DISEASE, which explains all this in detail. Concentrating on how we breathe can help reduce the onslaught of symptoms. But the true help comes when we realize what is causing the stress and we work to deal with it. Not so easy, but self-knowledge never is. Only when I accepted my son’s death instead of fighting its reality did my symptoms lessen. Again, not so easy.

Marilyn Monroe and my cultural-icon series.

David Morrell — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 18:47:25 +0000

Fifty years ago this month, on Aug. 5,1962, Marilyn Monroe’s body was discovered in her Los Angeles home. The circumstances have always been mysterious. Although the medical examiner’s verdict was probable suicide from a barbiturate overdose, President Kennedy and his brother hovered in the background in the days before her death. There was a long gap between when her physician declared that she was dead and when the police were called. The police investigation was shoddy. Conspiracy theories persist that she was murdered to keep her from revealing her affair with President Kennedy.

On the recent anniversary of her death, items appeared everywhere in the media. Newspapers, magazines, and television talk shows featured glowing appraisals of her. It’s difficult to imagine any icon from the early 196Os who continues to be as vivid in popular culture as Marilyn Monroe.

Graham Green once said that an unhappy childhood is a gold mine for a writer. That principle applies to creative people other than writers. As a child, Marilyn was in twelve foster homes as well as an orphanage. One of her guardians programmed her into wanting to become a movie star. Starved for affection, thinking that movie stars received plenty of love, she devoted her life to her career, but although she had the talent and the drive, she couldn’t bear the pressure.

Because the culture of the time saw beautiful women only as objects, Marilyn was forced to pretend that she was simple in order to navigate her way through a sexist labyrinth. As her character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes says, “I can be smart when I want to. But I’ve noticed that most men don’t like that.” Indeed the men in her life didn’t like a lot of things. Her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, beat her, and her third husband, Arthur Miller, emotionally abused her. Severe anxiety attacks led to self-medication.

The poignant life and tragic end of this vulnerable, talented, tormented woman is moving to the point of tears.

For more about this essay, please click here.

While I’m a novelist, I’m also a former professor of American studies. I write essays in what I call my cultural-icon series. MARILYN MONROE: LEGEND AND TRAGEDY is part of that series, which also includes John Wayne: The Westerns and Rambo and Me: The Story behind the Story. Soon I’ll add essays about Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen, and Bobby Darin—cultural giants who fascinate me as much as Marilyn does, because of the way these damaged personalities used their troubled childhood to create personas and careers that illuminate American culture.

A lot of people ask me about my firearms training.

David Morrell — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 22:06:12 +0000

Readers often ask me about the action-skills training I receive when I write novels like THE PROTECTOR and THE NAKED EDGE. After the Colorado-theater shooting, I was reminded of my firearms training when gun sales increased because people wanted to be ready—“just in case.”

There are good reasons and bad reasons to carry a weapon in the United States. The pros and cons aren’t the subject of these remarks. What I want to talk about is training. When people tell me that they received a concealed-carry license after a day or two of instruction, I’m appalled. Anybody can easily learn how to fire a weapon. It’s not difficult. But there are so many other factors.

A proper concealed-carry course should spend at least a day on the legal use of deadly force. Did the opponent have the means, motive, and opportunity to threaten your life? Did you have absolutely no other option except to shoot? Do you know about grand juries and the sorts of serious questions they ask when someone shoots someone else? Ideally, a proper course would even put you in a grand-jury scenario, requiring you to get an idea of what it’s like to justify your serious actions in a way that convinces people who don’t have experience with guns.

Further, a proper concealed-carry course would provide a minimum of two days in which the class acted out scenarios that may or may not have required the use of deadly force. A man bangs on your door. He’s extremely distraught. He says his car broke down outside and his wife’s in the back seat—she’s pregnant, she needs an ambulance, she needs to get to the hospital! He pushes his way in, saying he needs to use your phone. You tell him to wait outside while you make the call. He shoves you away, demanding to know where the phone is. “Wait outside!” you order him. He knocks you to the floor and lunges past you toward the kitchen, yelling “The phone!” He might be a nutcase. Or he might be telling the truth. If you shoot him, you might be spending the next ten years in jail. Not to mention you might be financially ruined if it turns out the guy was telling the truth and the woman gives birth in the car, but the baby dies, and the woman almost dies also. You’ll be living in a tent by the time the lawsuits are over. But maybe the guy is indeed crazy and dangerous, and you saved the lives of your family and yourself. You need to make a decision in an instant. Good luck. Two days of rehearsal in this kind of scenario are probably not enough.

And then there are the physiological reactions to being in a gunfight. Most gunfights occur within ten feet of the shooters, and in many case, although a lot of shots are fired, the bullets go everywhere, except at the target. A gunfight is chaos and noise and adrenaline. Hearing shuts down. Tunnel vision sets in. Some objects get amazingly large. To replicate that chaos, which is not at all like the movies, this is one valuable scenario I experienced.

I was put through a shooting maze (sometimes called a “shooting house”). Inside a structure, there were various rooms with pop-up targets. Some showed bad guys with guns and grenades. Others showed a businessman with a briefcase or a woman with a baby carriage. One showed a woman being used as a shield by a guy with a gun. But I didn’t know what any of these targets looked like before I entered and confronted them.

My instructor spun me violently five times to the right. Then he spun me with equal violence five times to the left. As dizziness set in, he cursed at me, using the foulest language imaginable. Meanwhile he also pounded my chest and back. He literally threw me into the shooting maze so that I almost fell on the floor.

Mind spinning, heart pounding, lungs heaving, adrenaline flooding, I had 30 seconds to get through the maze and shoot the bad guys but not harm the good ones. I managed to do it, but it wasn’t easy. I personally saw a student empty a 15-round magazine into a target that showed a woman with a baby carriage. The instructor yelled, “She’s got a gun! She’s going to kill you!” The student kept firing. “She isn’t dead!” the instructor yelled. “Shoot her again!”

Having emptied his magazine, the student did a rapid reload and emptied another 15-round magazine into the target of the woman with the baby carriage. He was absolutely certain that he’d shot a bad guy, because the instructor had shouted repeatedly that the target showed a bad guy (the instructor was lying to make a point). It took the student 20 seconds to get his mind straight and to realize what he’d done.

Let’s consider the situation in the Colorado theatre. The place is full of smoke. Theater patrons are stampeding. The loud, action-filled movie adds to the confusion. The shooter is wearing body armor. Does it make sense to use a concealed-carry weapon in this scenario? As more guns go off, who can know the difference between the shooter and the people trying to defend themselves. The phone calls to the police would have said there were multiple shooters, thus adding to the deadly confusion. Well-meaning people with guns would almost certainly have hit bystanders.

It all comes down to adequate training and knowing what’s the right thing to do at the right time. If you decide that a concealed-carry weapon is necessary for you, remember what I said a minute ago. There are few responsibilities greater than carrying a weapon. Does the gun own you, or do you own the gun? There can never be enough training, and it can’t be repeated often enough.

These are some of the topics in my novels THE PROTECTOR and THE NAKED EDGE, which have a long list of the people who were kind enough to teach me the expertise that keeps them alive in their dangerous professions. I’m fascinated by protective agents and the commitment they make to strangers to defend them, even at the possible cost of a defender’s life.

If you think you’d enjoy reading action scenes based on the variety of training I received, please click on the the titles that are highlighted above.

I attended an interrogation course.

David Morrell — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 21:15:25 +0000

A few weeks ago, for research, I attended a law-enforcement course about interviews and interrogations. Several people asked me what happened there.

“Interrogation” has violent connotations. We think of people being beaten with rubber hoses etc. in scenes from old gangster films. Or else we think of the water boarding and sensory-deprivation techniques that I describe in my espionage story, “The Interrogator” (available as an e-story with a detailed introduction about my spy training).

But not in American law enforcement. An “interview” is a conversation with someone (a witness, for example) who has information that a police officer needs whereas an “interrogation” is a heightened, persistent conversation with a suspect for the purpose of obtaining a confession.

The idea is to appear to be sympathetic and “to sell that person a prison sentence” our FBI instructor explained. “The best interrogations end when the suspect hugs you out of gratitude because you persuaded the suspect to confess.”

How do you accomplish that? With rapport. When I was a student at the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security years ago, I first learned about neuro-linguistic programming and became fascinated enough that I took an NLP course and became a certified practitioner.

In simple terms, it works like this. People tend to be sight, sound, or touch oriented. Sight-oriented people say things like “I see what you’re getting at.” They look up when they’re remembering something or generating a thought.

Sound-oriented people say things like “I hear you.” They look to the side in the general direction of one ear or another when they’re remembering something or generating a thought.

Touch-oriented people say things like “I don’t feel comfortable with what you’re saying.” They look down toward the floor when they’re remembering something or generating a thought.

People who understand NLP can identify the type of person they’re dealing with and match their vocabulary and body movements in what’s called “mirroring” in order to establish rapport. Think of it in the reverse. If someone keeps using metaphors of sight such as “I don’t see what you’re getting at,” how much rapport will you establish if you reply, “Don’t you hear what I’m saying?” The disjunct is considerable. (Some marriages have been saved by NLP counseling, helping sight-oriented people learn how to get along with sound-oriented spouses. These marriages are literally mixed metaphors.)

The CIA teaches many of its field operatives about NLP because the skill is useful in recruiting and debriefing. Also, a careful observer can even determine whether people are lying on the basis of which way they move their eyes, left or right. Fascinating stuff.

Next time you’re with caring spouses or two good friends, watch the way they unconsciously mirror each other’s movements. One friend crosses her arms. A few seconds later, her friend does the same. Two people are in chairs across from each other. One crosses his legs. Soon the other does. Friends and lovers match each other. A skilled interrogator will study a suspect and begin to mirror that person. Done properly, the suspect doesn’t realize what’s happening, but the effect is to make the suspect feel that he’s been on good terms with the interrogator for a long time. “Do you see what I’m saying?” the suspect asks. “I get the picture,” the interrogator responds, supplying a sight metaphor in response. In a way, it’s like hypnotizing a suspect into confessing.

For several days, this is the sort of material that the instructor explained. I enjoy doing research of this sort and believe readers feel the authenticity when I put details like this in my fiction (again, my e-story ″The Interrogator″ is a good example).

There was one element of violence, however. The instructor showed us a videotape, with the caution that it’s important to be prepared for an interview/interrogation. In the case of the tape we were shown, the officers were far from prepared. They brought in a suspect, put him on a chair in an interview room, and went to get him a bottle of water. Alone, he pulled a pistol from beneath his shirt and blew his brains out.

On camera. Seriously. The officers hadn’t searched him before starting the interrogation. Blood flew out of his mouth. One of his eyes popped out. He slumped. After about fifteen seconds, the gun fell out of his hand. His head sagged. But he remained sitting in the chair. No flying across the room. It ain’t like in the movies. And in this case, it was a reminder that in law enforcement, every conversation, interview, or interrogation has the potential to be deadly.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

My letter to beginning authors

David Morrell — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 21:39:59 +0000

Recently I participated in an on-line tutorial with this year’s authors in the International Thriller Writers debut authors’ program. Afterward, I wrote a letter to each of them. I thought that some of you might be interested in what I said.

Dear Fellow ITW Authors—

I’m amazed by how far International Thriller Writers has come since Gayle Lynds and I co-founded it (with a lot of help from others) in 2004 at Bouchercon in Toronto. At that time, there were 84 members. Now we have thousands.

Our goal is for everyone to help everyone else, whether the authors are veterans or beginners. ThrillerFest—and especially the CraftFest part of it —is one major way we accomplish that goal. Another way is the Debut Authors Program, to which I heartily welcome you.

When I was 17, I made the decision to become an author. I never looked back. In my fifth decade as a published author (an eternity in the writing world), I have a few mantras that worked for me. I discussed some of them recently in my Internet chat with many of you. Here they are again. They deserve to be repeated and thought about.

Be a first-rate version of yourself and not a second-rate version of another author.
Don’t chase the market.
Let the story tell you what it wants to do. Don’t get in its way.
A long career has peaks and valleys. Keep the long view.
Use your writing to make you a fuller, better person by exploring themes that matter to you, by using techniques that stimulate you, and by doing research that excites you.

On my website, you’ll find a WRITING page that has several free essays. Among them are FIVE RULES FOR WRITING THRILLERS, FIVE FURTHER CONCEPTS, and CHOOSING NAMES. The first chapter of my writing book THE SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST is also available there.

I salute you at the beginning of your careers. What we do is not for the faint of heart, but having lived this way for two-thirds of a lifetime, I still wouldn’t have chosen another path.

My Rambo novelizations are now e-books.

David Morrell — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:38:40 +0000

For me, the month of May has always been associated with Rambo. My first novel, First Blood, which introduced the character, was published forty years ago in May of 1972. The film sequels, Rambo (FirstBlood Part II) and Rambo III, were also released in May, on Memorial Day weekend of 1985 and 1988.

I wrote novelizations for the second and third films. Continuing the tradition, I’m celebrating my four decades as a published author by releasing those novelizations as e-books on Memorial Day weekend.

In many respects, the plots of the books differ so considerably from the films that I think of the books as the stories that the films might have had. Rambo’s character is extended and deepened far beyond anything in the films, surprisingly so.

I spent considerable time revising the texts and writing in-depth introductions about the fascinating background of these books, which have been unavailable for twenty years. Here are the brand-new covers, as well as the covers for First Blood and my e-essay, ″Rambo and Me: The Story behind the Story,″ which describes how Audie Murphy (America’s most decorated soldier of WWII) was the model for the character.

For purchase information, please click on the titles.

Rambo (First Blood Part II) Rambo III Rambo and Me: The Story Behind the Stories First Blood