ROBERT CRAIS: PIKE'S WAY

The Man Behind the Sunglasses

by

Robert Crais

     The sunglasses, twenty-four/seven. The eerie silence. The red arrows driving him forward.
     Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Joe Pike.
     Tens of thousands of women (and more than a few men) would happily take him.
     I don’t need to be a mind reader to know this. Like Elvis Cole, Joe had always gotten a lot of mail, but a tsunami of email flooded my website when The Watchman was published. They wrote, “I love Joe Pike,” but not in a way suggesting they were simply fond of him or maybe kinda crushing on him. Both then and now, the women who write to Joe are feral.
     They say, “I WANT Joe Pike.”
     Which means, because it’s oh so easy to infer their dripping fangs and pheromone fog even through the filter of internet fan mail, “I’d suck the marrow from his bones.”
     I first saw Joe Pike at the Florida Drive-In Theater in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Would have been one of those triple bills Southern drive-ins are famous for. I would have been a kid, snuck across the marshy fields to slip between rows of sleeping cars, the cars wired to speaker trees like tethered cattle. The darkness was my friend, masking my entrance to that wonderful old theater.
     I remembered him years later when I created the characters and story that would become The Monkey's Raincoat. Gun fighter eyes in a face burned dark by the sun; his eyes as cold as an empty heart. Humorless lips. Your worst nightmare if he paints you with his rattlesnake gaze. Clint Eastwood. A Fistful of Dollars. For a Few Dollars More. The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. A walking can of whup ass. I could have left it there but I never leave well-enough alone.
     Mr. Eastwood, the God-Priest of Manliness back in the day, was not the flash-image inspiration for Joe Pike - he was what I saw when I first imagined Elvis Cole. In those first days of Elvis’s birth, I envisioned him as the stereotypical loner, and my first notions were arch clichés. Cole listened to moody jazz. He had a Hollywood apartment overlooking a neon sign. He smoked, liked cheap bourbon, and was big on sipping the bourbon while watching the neon sign through clouds of smoke. Yawn. When I came to my senses I dropped the nonsense and created the character you know as Elvis Cole.
     But even as I developed Cole, I knew I wanted him to have a friend. Butch and Sundance. Batman and Robin. Lucky Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Thelma and Louise. Before I wrote The Monkey's Raincoat, I wrote a lot of television and watched even more. Cagney & Lacey, Miami Vice with Crockett and Tubbs. These friendships inspired me both as a reader and writer. Cole was not going to be part of a formal organization like the police - I identified more with an outsider who did not have the authority that comes with the badge - but I also had no interest in writing about a character so disaffected he was absent of friends. Elvis Cole needed a friend. Note that I am using the word ‘friend,’ and not ‘partner.’ The human stuff of friendship was important in all of this.
     The afterthought image of the nameless man returned but again quickly changed. The narrowed eyes and sharp-cut jaw evolved within Elvis Cole’s house in the hills into someone much more compelling. I was once aboard ship in the South Pacific where the water was 17,000 feet deep. Water that deep grows dark as it swallows the light. It is bottomless. When you see a shadow move in the depths, the hair will stand up on the back of your neck. You know all the way down in your DNA that something terrible swims in those waters. I was drawn to it. Out there at sea, I leaned across the rail again and again, trying to see into the depths. I still do, only now the water is Pike.
     For an article like this, I find it easier to describe Elvis Cole than Joe Pike. Armchair psychologists will no doubt pipe up that this is because I identify more with Cole, or that he is my alter ego (he isn’t), but I think it is less a factor of identification than with understanding. Pike is an iceberg, and I am trying to understand the parts of him beneath the water. Careless swimmers have disturbed the silt. The waters are murky; the shadows indistinct and shifting; the darkness increases as the water deepens, and Joe Pike lives in the depths.
     Listen. I wanted the fun and kick-ass good time of this enigmatic character - Joe’s now-famous twitch is there for you to enjoy - but Pike and Cole were always more. My fiction is about underdogs. And because I want there to be justice in this world, underdogs must have heroes or they must become heroes. The more I thought about Elvis Cole, and how he came to be Elvis, it occurred to me he could have taken another road that would have led him to becoming someone like Pike. Elvis has chosen to engage life; Pike, in many ways, has stepped outside of it. Somewhere in his past, he became ‘other.’
     Once upon a time for what was, I guess, advertising purposes, a publisher dubbed Joe Pike a ‘sociopath.’ He isn’t. I once thought of Elvis and Joe as a kind of yin and yang, a view that has been echoed by more than a few readers and reviewers. They are not. Nor is Pike simply Elvis Cole’s assassin; a guilty-pleasure author’s device for getting Cole out of the morally queasy sidewaters of dropping the hammer on bad guys without benefit of judge, jury, constitutional protections, or hand-wringing after-action remorse. Pike is Pike. Like Elvis Cole, he is the underdog who has turned himself into a hero.
     My books are about self-creation. I’m big on that. You can either be the victim of your past, or rise above it. Either way, the choice is yours. Both Elvis and Joe have chosen to change, but having changed isn’t a done deal, over and out, now-I-can-relax kind of thing. Having changed, you have to maintain because that whole ‘self-creation’ business, well, it’s an ongoing process.
And therein lies both their difference and their sameness. Check it out.
     Their example is the example of choices made. Cole doggedly embraces the ‘normal,’ and cultivates those parts of himself that resist the darkness of his own experience - the Disney icons, the science fiction films he enjoyed as a boy, the relaxed and comfortable attire (Hawaiian shirts and sneakers), the self-effacing sense of humor. These are the proud standards telling you this man is living life on his own terms. His very job - private investigator - tells you he holds himself apart. Cole is the product of these lifestyle choices, and would be a great guy to have a beer with or catch a Dodgers game.
     Joe Pike is a conscious representative of our righteous rage. The product of abusive childhood violence, Pike learned early that if you want justice, you must look to yourself. An only child living with his mother and a violent, alcoholic father at the edge of a small town, Pike and his mother suffered regular beatings by his father. Society did not save Joe - not the police, friends, or neighbors. No Eastwood-like hero rode into town to save Mrs. Pike and her young son, so Joe learned his father’s lesson well. You deal with a bully by an overwhelming physical response. Presented with a threat, you confront it. Pike’s philosophy was boiled to its primal base: Dominate or be dominated. Pike set about preparing himself to control his environment, and does. He buried his pain so deep he could pretend it was gone, and removed himself from normal life.
     The seed of this was the rage he felt at his own helplessness, I think, but Pike’s rage is not mindless. He knows some part of himself was lost in the process, and has spent much of his adult life learning to deal with his ‘otherness.’ To think he is mindless - floating in the dark waters like his namesake fish, all cortical activity and no forebrain - would be a mistake.
     Though I know many things about Pike, he is still a mystery.  When Pike is within himself and seemingly disconnected from his surroundings, he has pulled back from the outer world to a place I describe as ‘the green world’ - a primal world where he feels safe.  It’s as if Pike has submerged, settling into a temporary moment of transcendental calm like a zen warrior at the eye of a storm, divorced from the chaos around him, but at peace with it.  The green world represents the safety of the forest where he hid from his father, but the green world also represents the primitive nature of Pike’s character.  We can’t see his thoughts in that green world, and might not understand them even if we could, but we are one with and part of that nature. After all, we are part of the natural world, too. We are the animals in the forest whether that forest is a leafy green glade or the sprawling city of Los Angeles. Our animal natures are revealed in either place.
     Pike would probably tell you, if he thought it was worth spending the breath, that he has accepted the responsibility for his own security. Pike doesn’t give a lot of due to what we call ‘black letter law.’ Pike has a very strict moral and ethical code, but it is a code independent of the statutes of written law.
     When Larkin Conner Barkley asks him, in The Watchman, whether he feels remorse at having killed men, Pike is able to answer without hesitation.
     “No.”
     He doesn’t. If a man threatens you, you put him down. It is the natural order. No sense worrying about it, so he doesn’t. How Pike sees the world is part of his mystery. His lack of emotion suggests an inner landscape so damaged it is as barren as the desert surrounding Tikrit. It also suggests an emptiness waiting to be filled, and therein lies Pike’s tragic nature, and, I suspect, the sexy-hot core of his huge appeal. (It is not lost on me that the young male heartthrobs in the current crop of insanely successful vampire novels and films are all brooding bad-boy vamp loners – held in check from their evil ways only by the love of a good woman, who is herself moved by their tortured hearts. Has any vampire been as lethal as Joe Pike, or as tortured?)
     Pike is the ultimate bad boy. He is dangerous, enigmatic, and an outsider. He is male with a capital M, but it is his tragic soul that makes him sexy with a capital S. Readers intuit that he is redeemable, or, at least, repairable, and – you know what? – their read is true. If the readers who lust after Joe do so because they feel they can fill the empty place within him, or heal the hurt of his damaged heart, then maybe they can. After all, though Pike’s inner landscape might be barren, he recognizes that Cole’s inner landscape is teeming with life, and wishes his own were as fertile. He wants to heal. This desire probably defines the specialness of their friendship.
     This struggle is the stuff of heroes. These books are heroic fiction with liberal doses of myth and adventure, but I hope they are more than escapist fantasy (even for the legions of readers who send mash notes to Pike, care of me). Though these are crime novels, the ‘crime novel’ is simply the canvas upon which I have chosen to paint, and my subject matter, I hope, is larger than gunfighting and high-velocity action sequences (though these things are certainly part of my books and I want you to enjoy them!). I write about people. My thrill of accomplishment doesn’t come from the blind-side plot twist, but from that nuance of character that touches you, moves you, and, I hope, surprises you not with the ‘aha!’ of an unexpected plot reveal, but with the surprising resonance of human understanding.
     At the end of the proverbial day, Joe Pike might be sexy, but I also want him to be a fully realized human being. I think he is. My readers agree, and I love it.