Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s with William Diehl An Interview with Kevin Courrier

Author William Diehl

(Sharky's Machine, Chameleon, Primal Fear), a writer who wrote luridly powerful pulp with a political tinge, became a fascinating exercise in self-examination. When I discovered that Diehl was a pacifist who once marched with Martin Luther King in the South during the demonstrations against segregation, I was compelled to find out how such a peaceful man reconciled his polar opposites. To both my surprise and satisfaction, he was more than happy to comply while providing a vivid examination (through his thriller Chameleon) of the growing political mercenary movements in the eighties that would ultimately lead to Waco and Oklahoma City. Diehl would die at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on November 24, 2006, of an aortic aneurysm. At the time of his death, he was working on his tenth novel.

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kc: I get the impression that when you sit down to write there's quite a war going on in your head.

wd: That's quite true. I find that subconsciously things from my past keep getting in and coming out of the books. A lot of the critics in reviewing Chameleon have called it one of the most violent books ever written. Yet I'm basically a pacifist. I don't own weapons. I don't even have a gun in the house. I live alone on an island. No doubt that it's a throwback to World War II when I served as a ball-turret gunner. All of those latent aggressions and violence are surfacing now. It has to be that because I'm certainly not interested in becoming active in the things I write about. But I should say that there's nothing about the violence and the weaponry that I depict in Chameleon that isn't really happening today.

kc: In this book, you examine an assassination squad -- a secret terrorist organization that trains at "The Farm" -- What is that?

wd: I knew that "The Farm" existed. I've known about it for several years and I met the man who runs it. He's a guy named Mitch Warbell. One night, we started talking about the place and he told me that while a lot of mercenaries go through the training course, many of these people are bankers and folks going to countries where terrorism is prevalent. They take the course as a self-protective device. That's what triggered the idea. Then I went out and took the course. Over a period of six months, I spent time talking to the instructors. Their stories gave me the basis for the book.

kc: When you were describing a moment ago those latent aggressions and the violence, how does it manifest itself when you are writing a book like Chameleon?

wd: The first chapter of the book was triggered by the Doobie Brothers' song "What a Fool Believes," which I heard on the radio as I was driving home. The song started a lovely little romantic story going in my head. Suddenly, it turned very dangerous and it got very violent. I don't know where it came from. All of a sudden, as I'm working on this romantic idyll, it got very tough. It was then that the story took off.

kc: At the heart of this violent story is a particular code of honour. Where does this come from?

wd: Chameleon is a story about honorable people versus dishonorable people. And I've put at the heart of it the Oriental philosophy of honor. My belief is that the Oriental philosophy of honour is a very positive and uncompromising belief. Whereas in my country, you have to struggle just to be a little bit honest. That's why in my novel Sharky's Machine you have four cops who are basically losers who become winners in the end because they couldn't be corrupted. That's also the story of Chameleon where you have two or three people who are honourable. I'm dealing with knights on white horses slaying dragons. And I still believe that's possible.

kc: Does the writing of action fiction though become a safety valve for your own violent fantasies?

wd: It's indeed a great release. What it is, is playing out your fantasies on paper. For instance, in Chameleon, I developed my own brand of martial arts. What I did was draw stick figures where I could try out the moves -- sometimes in front of a video camera -- and describe them. I really got into it. Then I also got into the method of trying to remember things without taking notes which is what these people in the book could do. I never took it as far as them but I found that if I went into a restaurant and found it fascinating enough to use in a book, I can remember every little detail of it. Then I file it away in my word processor. Often I tell people that I'm a method writer because I actually act things out in the room because you deal with your psyche on paper.

kc: How do you act these things out?

wd: If I'm angry, I go in and write a violent passage for a book. When I come out, I don't even want to step on an ant. If I'm writing about a character that I really like, and I know that the character is going to be killed, I can get depressed for a couple of days. In Sharky's Machine, when Nosh, Sharky's best friend, gets killed, I got into a funk over that and I couldn't write for over three days. I was so upset over having to kill that character. When certain things happen, I react emotionally as it is really happening. It can be draining at times. It's a good thing that I live on an island where my house is a hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean. A lot of times after writing a passage I'll go down to the beach just to calm myself down. What happens is that I get hysterical inside and I can't translate that on paper. How do you describe to anybody the feelings and thoughts that go through your head at times like that? The best thing to do is find a way to get rid of it, once you've used up the part you need to put on paper.

kc: I'd like to take that a step further. If you resolve certain conflicts within yourself, does it also mean that your writing will change?

wd: Absolutely. My writing changed radically from Sharky's Machine to Chameleon. And a lot of it is in the emotional content of the book. I think Chameleon is a better book than Sharky even though it feels colder. Maybe that's because of what some of the characters do in the story.

kc: Has living on the beach provided the sanctuary needed?

wd: Yeah. I remember when the film of Sharky's Machine had its world premiere in Atlanta. All of the movie stars came and it seemed like the biggest thing since Gone With the Wind. As a result of it, I started to get a celebrity status in Atlanta. I was expected to be places and doing things. This started to really disturb me because I started to lose the independence that I had gained by writing these books. One day, I got on this airplane and flew down to the coast of Georgia and told this real estate agent that I wanted an island. The agent found me one immediately. Now I don't even go to the mainland. I don't even want to leave this place. There's one place there that is like Cannery Row restaurant filled with expatriates and people who just go to escape like me. I go there in the morning, read the newspaper and chat, then I don't see them until the next day. Since I moved there my writing productivity just jumped.

kc: I guess the biggest distinction some would have to make meeting you -- or knowing you -- is to separate the man from the writer?

wd: Probably most writers become very involuted and difficult to deal with when they're working. And I feel that I'm difficult to deal with because I vague-out. I can hold a conversation without even knowing what I'm saying. I'm so used to doing it. When I'm through, I wake up one morning and the book is finished and I have nothing to do. It's a bit of a downer because I've been living with it for so long. Then I go and do crazy things like scuba diving for weeks at a time. It's a schizophrenic way to make a living, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I love the isolation. Nobody can invade it. What other occupation is there where you can be totally isolated and deal with yourself in whatever terms you want to deal with yourself in?

Talking Out of Turn #13: William Diehl (1982)

-- Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. Courrier continues his lecture series on Film Noir (Roads to Perdition) at the Revue Cinema in Toronto in March. He's also facilitating a film series called Reel Politics at Ryerson University continuing February 27th.

Burt Reynolds On Sharky's Machine

 Author Sidney Sheldon first mentioned William Diehl`s novel Sharky`s Machine to me at a party. Soon afterward Clint Eastwood sent me a copy of the same best-selling book with a note saying: "This is Dirty Harry in Atlanta!" Discovering it combined elements of two of my favorite movies, Laura (1944) and Rear Window (1954), I persuaded newly formed partners Orion Pictures and Warner Brothers to acquire the screen rights for me. The kind of film Robert Aldrich would`ve been great at, I knew from the get-go I had to direct. Granted complete creative control, for me only the third time this had happened, I assembled my cast. The film had one of the best crews I`ve ever worked with. Let me just say this about Charles Durning. He may be America`s finest working actor today. Right down to the soundtrack, a jazz fiend, I called my own list of all-stars. The picture opened at the end of the year to critical reviews that were beyond my expectations. But when even the New York Time`s Vincent Canby also got it, I was bowled over. The reviews made me a hot director.

Bill and Burt - Atlanta Magazine Cover - November 1981

Burt in '81: Sharky's Machine

Sharky’s Machine was Burt’s third film as director, he would direct only two more features (1985’s Elmore Leonard’s adaptation Stick was the most immediate follow-up, and his last film as director was 2000’s The Last Producer At the time, Burt joked that he made the film as his version of Dirty Harry since his friend Clint Eastwood was having success mining typical Reynolds’ terrain with the “Loose” series. One wonders how his career would have differed if he had successfully shifted from an acting to directing career. Sharky’s Machine certainly shows he had the skills.

READ COLONEL MORTIMER'S FULL REVIEW HERE

Check Out This Gorgeous Cover of the Dutch Edition of Sharky's Machine!

Pachinko is a Japanese pinball game played on a vertical board.   I see the connection.

Hardboil Vintage Read Reviews Sharky's Machine

http://vinpulp.blogspot.com


Sharky's Machine By William Diehl
Dell 18292, Copyright 1978

William Diehl waited until the resilient age of 50 to start his first novel. The story behind that, is he was a seated juror on a trial and was so bored with it, he grabbed a notepad and starting writing. Well if true, we have to thank his local jury commissioners office, because what came out was “Sharky’s Machine,” a novel that holds nothing back and throws just about everything at the reader.

She lay beside the table. Her face was gone. Part of her shoulder was blown away. The right side of her head had been destroyed. She was a soggy, limp bundle laying partly against the wall in front of the door, blood pumping from her head, her neck, her shoulder. A splash of blood on the wall dripped down to the body.
Sharky clenched his teeth, felt bile sour in his throat, cried out, "No. Goddamnmit, no!"

Kicked out of the narcotics department after a bloody shootout in the streets of Atlanta, Sharky gets thrown down into the lowly Vice Squad. But he’s a good hard street cop and along with fellow beaten down Vice misfits, (the “Machine”) they quickly stumble upon a high-class prostitution ring. The operation seems to be shaking down wealthy “johns,” so they set up surveillance involving everything from shadowing people to wire-taps. A hooker named Domino becomes the "person of interest" in the corrupt scheme and Sharky obsessively makes her the focus of the investigation. Just when we get comfortable with the violence, sex, and pace in the story, Diehl takes it to another level. You have an U.S. Senator making plans for a Presidential run linked to the call-girl, a shady millionaire called DeLaroza who is connected to the Senator and Domino, and one of the most ruthless paid killers I have come across in any novel. Murders start occurring and once Sharky learns that Domino’s life is in danger, the "Machine" decides to hush up the investigation from their superiors and go it alone.

This turns out bigger than a standard street cop novel. Millions of dollars of stolen gold from WWII is tied to DeLaroza, and he needs people silenced. The U.S. Senators’ bid for the White House is in jeopardy and he needs Delaroza’s help. And our crazed hitman just keeps on coming. Of course Sharky falls for Domino, and the sex scenes of her with customers and Sharky listening in on the wire, are vicariously erotic. (Definitely “adults only” stuff) The novel succeeds in capturing the acrid street pulse of the late 1970s, using violence on high-volume, plenty of foul mouth language, and mysterious characters thriving on sleaze and power. Diehl creates a dirty, rash, and cold atmosphere, which makes the private scenes between Sharky and Domino, that much more endearing. And it is these brief pockets of tenderness that balances out the extreme raw edge that dominates the novel. But don’t get me wrong, this novel was written to get your attention.

For starting late, William Diehl authored a handful of excellent novels and fans of his work will differ on which is their favorite. But for me, “Sharky’s Machine” will always be on top.

This novel is an erupting force that spits at you.....

Still From Sharky's Machine

William Diehl's Appearance in Sharky's Machine