FRANKENTHRILLER III: GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Last July I wrote two essays about so-called Frankenthrillers, pop-fictions that seemed to have been cobbled together – somewhat like Frankenstein’s monster – out of parts of other popular fictions. In Frankenthriller I, I wrote about Ray Russell’s 1976 horror novel, Incubus, which seems to have borrowed from a variety of sources, including The Exorcist (fair enough, since The Exorcist was heavily indebted to Russell’s 1964 novel The Case Against Satan), Jaws, Rosemary’s Baby, various women-in-prison movies, Edwin Newman’s Strictly Speaking (a language guide!), The Night Stalker, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti, The House of the Seven Gables, Harvest Home, The Maltese Falcon, and various other famous works.

In Frankenthriller II, I wrote about Lionel Davidson’s 1994 mega-thriller, Kolymsky Heights, which seems to have borrowed a bit from, among others, Gorky Park, Last of the Breed, The Day of the Jackal, Jurassic Park, the James Bond novels, and the 1976 Johnny Cash song “One Piece at a Time.”

Mind you, I am not accusing either Russell or Davidson of plagiarizing anyone. Both Incubus and Kolymsky Heights are highly original and successful novels. But it seems clear to me that both Russell and Davidson deliberately set out to write a novel that would evoke some of the biggest pop-fiction bestsellers of the previous two decades or so. To a certain degree, anyone who writes in a literary genre does this. Most mystery novels owe a debt to Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett or the works of some other crime writers from an earlier era. What’s impressive about Incubus and Kolymsky Heights is just how many major bestsellers of the late twentieth-century they were able to meaningfully borrow from in the service of their own original story.

Which brings us to Frankenthriller III, Phillip Margolin’s Gone, But Not Forgotten, published in 1993. Margolin, a Portland, Oregon, criminal defense attorney had published two earlier novels – 1978’s Heartstone, and 1981’s The Last Innocent Man – neither of which made much of a splash in the pop-fiction pool. The Last Innocent Man was a bona fide legal thriller published before the runaway success of Scott Turow’s 1987 novel, Presumed Innocent, turned that genre into one of the publishing industry’s most profitable revenue sources. The publication, in 1991, of John Grisham’s bestselling legal thriller, The Firm, further strengthened the market for courtroom dramas. At that point, Margolin may have been feeling unjustly neglected. He had managed to publish a legal thriller a full six years before Presumed Innocent arrived on the scene, and yet no one celebrated him as one of the genre’s begetters. Sometime in the early 1990s, Margolin, who hadn’t published a novel in a decade by this time, must have decided it was time for him to try his hand at writing a novel that would elevate him to the ranks of writers like Turow and Grisham.

Judging from his work, Margolin is a savvy observer of pop-fiction trends. Thus, he couldn’t have helped but notice that one of the most successful pop-fictions of the era was Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel, The Silence of the Lambs, which almost single handedly elevated the serial-killer novel to the same heights that the legal thriller had been elevated to by Presumed Innocent. And by 1991, both Presumed Innocent and The Silence of the Lambs had been adapted by Hollywood into successful films (The Silence of the Lambs was more than just successful, it became immediately recognized as one of Hollywood’s greatest films, a distinction it retains even now). It is my belief (and I am just surmising here) that Margolin, in writing Gone But Not Forgotten (I am forgoing the comma in the title to reduce confusion), was attempting to wed the legal thriller genre, as exemplified by Presumed Innocent, with the serial killer genre, as exemplified by The Silence of the Lambs. Margolin may also have been inspired by John Grisham’s 1992 novel, The Pelican Brief, a legal thriller whose tale involves justices of the United States Supreme Court.

It is difficult to summarize GBNF because it has a highly complicated plot that unfolds on two different timelines, separated by ten years and about three thousand miles. The contemporary story is set in Portland, where several prominent women have mysteriously disappeared. These women tend to be childless and married to successful Portland businessmen. The only clue to their disappearance is a single black rose left behind in each woman’s home, as well as a small note card that reads “Gone, But Not Forgotten.” So as not to panic the local population, the Portland police have kept some of the details of the story out of the press. Nonetheless, Nancy Gordon, a police detective in the small town of Hunter’s Point (population 110,000), in upstate New York, somehow gets wind of what is going on in Portland and immediately flies out to meet with Alan Page, the District Attorney of Multnomah County, Oregon, where Portland resides. (A year before the publication of GBNF, retired Minnesota Viking defensive lineman Alan Page became a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court; Margolin might have named his fictional D.A. in honor of the NFL Hall-of-Famer.) Page and every other top law-enforcement officer in Portland is obsessed with bringing the Black Rose culprit to justice. Nancy Gordon tells him that she can do more than help him; she can tell him exactly who the culprit is.

At this point, the novel digresses and tells of a nearly identical series of disappearances that occurred in Hunter’s Point ten years earlier, when the childless wives of various prominent male citizens began disappearing, the only clue to their disappearances being a single black rose left behind in each woman’s house, and a note card reading “Gone, But Not Forgotten.” This historical episode is as fascinating as the novel’s foreground story. Fairly quickly, the police, including Detective Gordon, begin to suspect a prominent local attorney named Peter Lake. Lake’s wife, Sandra, and his eight-year-old daughter, Melody, are the latest victims of the Black Rose culprit, but they were not abducted. Sandra was strangled and Melody’s neck was broken. The police have connected the murders to the disappearances only because a black rose and a note reading “Gone, But Not Forgotten” were found in the Lake residence. But the cops suspect that Peter Lake murdered his wife and child and then used the rose and the note card to misdirect the police investigation. But then one of the missing women is found dead (thanks to an anonymous phone tip) in the basement of a home occupied by Henry Waters, a sex offender (he has a record for indecent exposure) who drives a deliver van for a local florist. When Waters tries to escape being arrested, he is shot dead by one of the responding officers. The police chief and the mayor, eager to put this civic nightmare behind them, both declare that Waters was guilty of all of the Black Rose kidnappings and murders. Nancy Gordon doesn’t believe this for a moment, but she is a fairly junior member of the police department, and its only female detective, so she grudgingly goes along with this explanation of the crimes while secretly remaining determined to pin the murders on Peter Lake. Alas, a short time later, Peter Lake himself vanishes from Hunter’s Point, and Detective Gordon’s investigation goes cold for ten years, until she gets an anonymous tip that Peter Gordon, under the name Martin Darius, has resurfaced in Portland, Oregon, where he has married a state supreme court justice’s daughter and built up a prominent local property development company. What’s more, he has social connections to all of the local women who have gone missing in the Black Rose case (he also had social connections to all of the victims of the Hunter’s Point Black Rose case). Gordon is certain that Martin Darius and Peter Lake are the same man, and that Darius is up to his old demonic tricks.

This plot description covers only about the first fifth of the book and doesn’t even introduce you to the novel’s protagonist, Betsy Tannenbaum, a Portland defense attorney who is hired by Martin Darius when the police arrest him for the Black Rose murders, shortly after several of the missing women turn up in a makeshift grave on one of the properties being developed by Darius’s firm.

I won’t spoil the rest of the story for you, but eventually, like The Pelican Brief, its tendrils stretch all the way to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Suffice it to say that I enjoyed it a great deal. Margolin’s writing is never more than just workmanlike, and his characters, though interesting, aren’t all that original. Nearly half the important characters in the book – Alan Page, Betsy Tannenbaum, etc. – seem to have been burnt by bad spouses somewhere along the line. That seems to be Margolin’s go-to device for giving his characters a sympathetically tragic back-story. But Margolin was himself once a prominent Portland defense attorney, and this gives his novel a great deal of authenticity. His courtroom scenes sparkle. He was the first Oregon attorney to successfully use the battered-woman defense in a murder trial, something that the fictional Betsy Tannenbaum has done several times, making her a bit of a feminist hero. Like most criminal defense attorneys, he is also highly familiar with how law enforcement agencies and their officers operate. So his police officers are as believable as his lawyers. I was able to figure out some of the twists before they arrived, but I like it when that happens. It means that the author is playing fair. Some online reviewers complain when they are able to predict some of the twists in a novel. Apparently they think every story development should come completely out of left field.

Peter Lake, the villain of GBNF, is just as evil as Hannibal Lecter, without being quite as memorable. He is frequently referred to as “demonic,” and there is some suggestion in the novel that his ability to pull off such heinous crimes largely undetected, and his ability to avoid responsibility for them when they are detected, could quite possibly be supernatural, if not proof that he really is a demon. Margolin wisely left open the possibility of writing another novel featuring Peter Lake, in much the same way that The Silence of the Lambs was a sequel to Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, published in 1981. Alas, it appears that he never reused the Peter Lake character, which is a shame, because Lake is the most compelling character in the story.

In addition to trying to tap into the early 1990s vogue for both serial killer novels and legal thrillers, Margolin may also have been interested in capitalizing on the vogue for crime novels featuring plucky young female heroines, women such as Clarice Starling, the protagonist of The Silence of the Lambs. By the 1990s, writers such as Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky and Amanda Cross and Elizabeth George and Janet Evanovich were helping to make female sleuths as popular in American fiction as legal thrillers. Several reviewers of GBNF compared it to the 1993 film The Fugitive, since both feature family men claiming that they were framed for murder. But Margolin’s novel was published just a few months after the release of the film, so he couldn’t have been influenced by the movie, though he may have been influenced by the TV series that spawned it. Plenty of other reviewers compared it to both The Silence of the Lambs and The Firm, two properties whose success I think Margolin was probably consciously trying to emulate.

All of this, of course, is speculation on my part. Although Margolin is still alive and writing, I haven’t read any interviews with him. And both Ray Russell and Lionel Davidson tended to avoid the limelight. Whenever I claim that a book was clearly inspired by various genre predecessors, I am merely expressing an opinion, not a fact. It is entirely possible that Margolin has never read The Firm or The Silence of the Lambs or any of the other books that GBNF seems to have been written in emulation of. But whether it was done intentionally or not, Margolin’s Gone But Not Forgotten still qualifies, for me, as a Frankenthriller. It adeptly combined elements of a lot of pop-cultural artifacts of its era and became, itself, one of the best pop-fictions of the year 1993. The late TV talk show host Larry King, not known for understatement, said that it was easily “the best fiction book of the year.” I don’t know about that, but it was certainly among the best pop fictions of the year, primarily because 1993 was a remarkably bad year for pop fiction in America. Two of the three best selling novels of the year were The Bridges of Madison County and Slow Waltz at Cedar Bend, both written by Robert James Waller, a hack whose talent was on par with Richard Bach’s, a writer that even this pop-fiction junkie has never been able to warm up to.

Phillip Margolin has written roughly thirty novels since the appearance of Gone But Not Forgotten in 1993, but GBNF remains the only once of his novels to have earned a rating of better than four out of five stars from the reviewers at Goodreads.com. It is also his highest rated book at Amazon.com. I haven’t yet read any of his other titles, although I hope to do so soon. It may seem that GBNF itself is now all but forgotten, but I don’t think that is the case. It remains in print and I see used copies of it in second-hand bookstores all the time. Had the novel received the same kind of major-motion-picture Hollywood treatment as Presumed Innocent, The Firm, and The Silence of the Lambs, it might now be a household name like those other intellectual properties. Alas, the book was made into a 2004 TV film starring Brooke Shields, Lou Diamond Philips, and Scott Glen. It was supposed to air on The Hallmark Channel, but they passed on it when they saw the finished product, causing it to be released direct to DVD. I haven’t seen it but I can’t imagine that it is very good. Curiously, though the novel is set in the town where I grew up (Portland, OR), the film is set in my current home town (Sacramento, CA).