A film in book form. That’s what one reviewer said of Mark Giles’ new noir thriller “The Wolf Hunter,” which the island author will discuss and read at 6 p.m. Friday at the Vashon Bookshop.
Of course calling the book a film — but in a different form — is not that much of a stretch for the former screenwriter, video editor and one of the early writers for the PBS mystery series “Murder She Wrote.” In fact, Giles admits to originally writing “The Wolf Hunter” as a movie in print.
“Then I changed to writing it as a book and got into it,” he said. “I enjoyed the writing and was lucky enough not to have any blocks.”
Luck aside, Giles also credits his understanding of script writing for the ease he experienced in penning the book.
“Everything in movies is done in threes,” Giles said. “I applied that to scenes in a chapter and how the larger (arc) is laid out with beginning, middle and end. I also used an old script technique of putting everything on index cards.”
Which makes good sense as there are plenty of characters and issues to keep track of in Giles’ fictional town of Stanley Valley, Montana, a place where extremes collide. For starters there is Annie Mann, the outsider with style who champions local wolf packs and owns a serious chunk of real estate in the Walker Ranch. Her nemesis and former lover Wilhelm Spatz owns the Rocking R Ranch, which sits adjacent to Walker Ranch. Spatz nurses a vendetta against Mann and, as the book jacket says, “all the other out-of-state big money liberals who turn the wild and free ranges into boutique grasslands.”
Giles professes an ongoing interest in issues about humans’ abuse of the planet. He devours travel books, along with the 20,000 other titles the voracious reader has under his literary belt. For “The Wolf Hunter,” Giles envisioned a conflict set in an area where both sides of an environmental issue preside.
“I wanted Annie — as the wolf lady — to have utter power with A-list clients but with an enemy in the guy she used to live with. He’s into poaching. He’s a taker, and Annie is literally outgunned until the wolf hunter shows up.”
But Giles doesn’t let the reader off the hook that easily. The issues are complex and so is the wolf hunter. He has one foot in the hunting, killing side and the other in the balanced ecology side. A man of few words, Spatz lived a long time in the wild and now works as a federal marshal with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In movies, Giles said, the plot involves two extremes, which inevitably leads to violence. But Giles detests films — and books — in which the gun is the solution.
“I wanted to show how (using the gun to problem solve) makes things go horribly wrong for everybody.”
That’s the noir thriller aspect of the book, but Giles also wanted the story to be fun and include a “very cool wolf,” who appears throughout the story.
Giles’ goal, among others, was to write an intelligent thriller, saying he worked hard to make all the characters engaging, including the waiter who would typically be ignored.
“I wanted to make all the characters interesting,” Giles said. “Spatz is a bad guy, but not insanely. The contest is from a failed relationship. My greatest challenge was to write a thriller a woman would want to read. It’s not their typical genre, but if the story line is good and characters interesting, it might appeal to a wider group of readers.
According to another reviewer, Giles just might have accomplished his goal, calling “The Wolf Hunter” a very literate thriller.
