The Most Dangerous Game

It is perhaps a writer’s dream to present an idea that so captures the public imagination that it persists long after they have gone and, as in this case, when the original work has all but been forgotten by the majority of people who came into contact with it. So it is with Richard Connell’s idea of a jaded hunter turning from killing animal to pursuing humans as his new prey.

Connell’s short story ‘The Most Dangerous Game’, also published as ‘The Hounds of Zaroff’ first saw light in Collier’s magazine in January 1924. The story is very simple and perhaps all the more engrossing for that. A famous big game hunter by the name of Rainsford falls from his yacht and swims to a nearby island where he becomes the guest of an émigré Cossack nobleman; General Zaroff. The Russian host was once a hunter like Rainsford, big game hunting was a very popular pastime for the rich in the early 20^th century, but now lives in isolation upon his private island. He has, however, concocted a new pastime, hunting the people who have the misfortune to be shipwrecked on his island.

Zaroff makes the mistake of believing that a fellow hunter like Rainsford would be attracted to this idea but is dismayed by the latter’s condemnation. He resolves to hunt the hunter instead. The rules are very simple. The quarry is released with nothing more than a knife and a 3 hour start. If they can evade Zaroff and his hounds until sunrise on the 3^rd day then they are free to leave. Of course no one ever has seen that sunrise.

Clearly Richard Connell’s story possesses the necessary traits to capture the imagination of the reader. The hero is capable and morally superior to the villain. Although we might not consider big game hunting as acceptable anymore it was very much a vogue activity for the wealthy in the 1920’s and it should be seen in that context. Zaroff is a foreigner, mysterious and threatening. Two men are pitched against each other in a fight for life in an exotic location. It is an idea that has been revisited many times since 1924.

The original story was expanded to include previous survivors from a shipwreck for the 1932 film version, introducing Robert Armstrong as the play boy Martin Trowbridge and Fay Wray as his wiser sister Eve. Coincidently the pair were also making another film at the same time that would be released the following year; ‘King Kong’. The screenplay, written by James Ashmore Creelman, followed Connell’s story very closely and the introduction of a love interest actually heightens the drama. I recently watched the film and unfortunately it has not survived in a very good state. The soundtrack was degraded but the acting was surprisingly good. There is a fight between Zaroff and Rainsford that looks for all the world as if the directors, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, simply told the actors to just go at each other and they certainly did.

At barely an hour long this version was obviously intended to be a ‘B’ feature and it was reasonably successful but the Connells idea was to prove more persistent. RKO returned to it again in 1945 with Robert Wise as the director and produced a more polished version under the name of ‘A Game of Death’. In this outing Zaroff is presented as a Nazi who escaped the end of the fall of the Third Reich.

Trevor Howard, Richard Widmark, and Jane Greer were partnered for United Artists release ‘Run for the Sun’, a reference to Zaroff’s stipulation that if they prey sees the sunrise then they have won the game.

Almost forty years later John Woo used Connell’s idea as the basis for his first Hollywood movie, ‘Hard Target’ starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. The action moves from a tropical island to the jungle of the city, this time New Orleans, and it is the rich who pay to hunt homeless Vietnam war veterans.

Two more film outings have since followed, ‘Surviving the Game’ in 1994 and ‘The Eliminator’ in 2004, and the basic idea of a man being hunted by another as a prey animal has featured in various television shows as disparate in range as ‘Criminal Minds’, ‘Archer’, ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and ‘The Simpsons’. It is clearly a very clever tool for creating tension and excitement within even a larger narrative and often features as the manhunt in various thrillers.

I would not argue that Richard Connell invented the idea of the human hunter hunting human prey, just that he, as a writer, presented it to the public in such a seductive manner that it has remained us in this format ever since and it has remained popular ever since. Connell himself wrote several screenplays, four novels, and was a very popular short story writer but ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ is the one work for which he is most widely known. There are many aspiring and struggling writers today, including myself, I wonder how many of us would like to produce a story that proves to be so influential as that of Richard Connell’s?

Books Are Always Written In Chapters Aren’t They?

The answer is both yes and know. This is because writing a book is not immediately confined to a set layout. The chapter system has proven its worth over the centuries of novel writing because it is useful for organizing the story and for giving the reader timely breaks should they need them without losing their place when they come back to pick up the action again.

I do not use chapters when writing the first draft, however. The reason for this is that I believe that it is important to get the actual idea of the story down as soon as possible. For me the first draft is a crucial part of doing this and getting distracted by formulating a chapter matrix is a hindrance. I might insert breaks in the manuscript that I think are logical but they are not set in stone. In fact they invariably never survive.

The question of how to organise the book only really surfaces when I approach the end of the first draft (actually I usually never complete the first draft). By this point I have a very good idea of what the story is, the themes, the main characters, the plot and everything else. This is when some organisation is needed.

For ‘The War Wolf’ I quickly realised that a standard Chapter One, Chapter 2, etc., simply was not going to work. This was because the action, once it started in 1066, occurred in a very brief space of time. It seemed better to me to use each day as a chapter and group the events in the story accordingly. This gave me a very strict framework to work within and removed the need to consider how many chapters I needed to write.

I applied exactly the same approach to ‘For Rapture of Ravens, which was logical as it followed on directly from ‘The War Wolf’ and if you are writing a series then readers generally appreciate a degree of consistency. However, for my next novel, ‘Eugenica’, I was straying away from the early medieval period to something much closer to home; the 1930’s.

For this project I did actually attempt to write the first draft in chapters. I created folders on my computer and inserted first draft file copies into them accordingly. It did not work however. The reasons for this were numerous. First, there was my approach to writing; getting the ideas down as quickly as possible and leaving the polishing for the first re-write. I get so deep into the writing that I lose track of time, never mind all the finer points of constructing a book. I quickly found that my ideas were running much faster than the chapter system and trying to keep up proved frustrating so I effectively abandoned it. Another reason was the emergence of other stories within the main story. There was an awful lot going on between the characters and even independently as well.

Once I got the first draft as close to completion as I wanted to I took the time to step back and consider the organisation of the book. I quickly noticed that in trying to write it chapter by chapter I had not done myself any favours; plot-wise it was a mess! Events were not happening in a chronological order if I maintained my original chapter matrix. Obviously I had to abandon it.

That might seem a little radical but really it is not. I believe that my problem was that I was trying to force my story into a system of organisation that was poorly thought out at the beginning. Serves me right for allowing myself to become a slave to convention. I decided to use each individual day as the basis of the chapter organisation. It was similar to what I had done before but the reason for doing it was different. In writing ‘The Sorrow Song Trilogy’ actual historical events were the determining factor. ‘Eugenica’ is an alternative history novel, however, and so it not so closely tied to the actual history of the day. It was one of the major themes of the book that decided the issue.

When I re-read the first draft I realised that there were two stories that were mirroring each other. Both featured a journey, one by airship and the other by bus and then by any means possible. The journeys were triangular, returning to their points of origin. In the airship the theoretical consequences of eugenics are discussed by a congress of savants in superb luxury. In the other journey disabled people experience the practical implications of that same theory when it is applied to them. I did not set out to write the story in this way; it grew and developed as I wrote the first draft. I could see the attraction of it, however, as a vehicle for telling the story. This is where another determining factor came into play. The airship completes its’ triangular flight, Britain to America, America to Germany, Germany to Britain, within a definite timeframe; approximately nine days.

I reviewed the other part of the story and realised that it benefitted greatly from an immediate increase in tension if played out over a relatively short period of time. The move from apparently benign treatment of the main protagonists to a fight for life is accelerated and the tempo of the story picks at a speed much faster than the apparently casual progress of the airship might suggest. It made sense to use each day as a chapter.

When a reader opens ‘Eugenica’ they will see an instantly recognisable table of contents arranged in traditional headings; Chapter One, Chapter Two, etc., but these are not the elements that define the book’s actual organisation. Beneath those headings will be the real determining factors of how the events in the story are organised and presented to the reader. You might read it from Chapter One through to Chapter Nine but that is certainly not how I wrote it!

Charity begins on the phone but not again.

I agree with giving to charity. I think that it is a moral imperative that if you can give afford to give a little then, as a human being witnessing the despair of another human being, even through removed mediums like television, the press, and the internet, that you should do something. Last year I responded to the UNICEF appeal for children in Syria caught up in the deadly fighting. No big deal, I did not donate a fortune, just what I could afford at the time. It felt like doing the right thing.

A few days after I made my donation I received a call from a private number. I do not normally answer unrecognised numbers but this time I did. A young man went into a scripted speech of how grateful UNICEF was for my act of kindness, now if only I could see my way to making another, bigger, donation or how about taking out a direct debit and paying just £5 a month?

Straight away I got it. The psychology is pretty basic, complement the person, build them up, then hit them with a sob story and ask for more money. It has very little to do with charity. I told the caller that I had given what I could afford and that I as I already supported two charities through monthly subscriptions then I did not feel that I could take on a third. This represented no problem to the UNICEF spokesman, he just told me to ditch one of the two and take on his charity instead!

Being English I tend to be polite even when annoyed and I politely told him that I would not do that and that I could not at that time make another donation to UNICEF. He asked if he could call back and I respectfully said no because my mind was made up. The next day the same telephone number appeared on my mobile again as it busily played The Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’ to alert me of an incoming call. I did not answer it or the several other calls that followed over the next few weeks.

They don’t take no for an answer, well not immediately anyway.

A few months later I was moved by an advert on television by Save the Children and, totally forgetting my UNICEF experience, I used my mobile to make another donation. It probably will not surprise anyone reading this to discover that a charity representative was quick to start ringing me; it was only my sluggish brain that got caught out. I did not answer the calls, however, but instead entered the telephone number into Google and discovered it was the money raising arm of Save the Children. I also read several complaints from other people who resented this unasked for approach from charity fundraisers after making a donation in good faith.

I have now vowed not to use my mobile to make any charity donations ever again. It is not the slight annoyance of unsolicited telephone calls that prompts me to this decision, it the lack of respect and genuine appreciation that the charity fundraisers give my donation. To them my donation paid through my telephone is a valuable piece of information; my mobile’s number! Armed with this they can ring me and make me feel guilty about the paltry sum that I offered, convince me to sign up for a monthly subscription, and may be even get me to make a larger one off donation. Then in a couple of months’ time they can ring me back and try and get me to increase my contributions.

Make a donation through your mobile phone and you become a cash cow or so it seems.

The two charities that I have supported for many years through monthly subscription have something in common; neither has contacted me to ask me increase the amount of money I give them. They both send me updates on their work, by email now instead of printed matter, and if I feel able then I make an extra donation. I also shop in charity outlets on the high-street by the way. I believe in charity.

I am not a cash cow I am a human being with an ounce of compassion of fellow human beings and I do what I can when I can. I find it rather telling that paid professional fundraiser for large charities treat my effort with such cynicism whereas the people I see selling copies of the ‘Big Issue’ on the street never fail to be polite whenever I buy a copy from them; and they never ask me for more money either.

The point for me is that by displaying just a little gratitude for my efforts the two charities that I do support, and the ‘Big Issue’ sellers, get more money from me in the long run. The artificial, even cynical, approach of the professional fundraisers just turns me off to giving to them ever again, which cannot be good. The whole point of charity is surely the provision of relief for human beings by human beings? The key component is not money, which is just a tool for use, it is people and when the fundraisers fail to appreciate that fact then they are not going about their business in the proper manner.