Desperate Measures - Softcover

My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. Books and movies were my escape. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970. The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986. One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). To make a new start, my wife and I moved to the mountains and mystical light of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my work changed yet again, exploring the passionate relationships between men and women, highlighting them against a background of action as in the newest, Burnt Sienna. To give his stories a realistic edge, he has been trained in wilderness survival, hostage negotiation, executive protection, antiterrorist driving, assuming identities, electronic surveillance, and weapons. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, Morrell now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The prolific Morrell (Assumed Identity, 1993, etc.) produces another high-speed but hollow thriller. Reporter Matt Pittman, grief-stricken to the point of suicide over the death of his teenage son, pulls the gun from his mouth long enough to do his best friend and former boss, Burt Forsyth, one more favor: write the New York Chronicle's obituary section for nine days, until the paper is shut down. In hopes of reviving Pittman's interest in life, Forsyth assigns him to research a detailed obituary of Jonathan Millgate, one of five men whom D.C. insiders call ``the grand counselors.'' These wielders of great power and influence are never elected but always appointed. Although Millgate has suffered a heart attack, he's not dead yet- -but then he's taken away from the hospital in a private ambulance by suspicious figures who seem intent on rectifying that situation. Pittman's efforts to save Millgate's life get him accused of murder. On the run, everyone he approaches for help seems to get killed too, but the adrenaline of the chase--along with the presence of nurse Jill Warren, who joins him on the lam--finally gives him reason to live. Morrell has made a concerted effort to endow Pittman with psychological complexity, but all the other characters are less than stick figures. The story's ultimate stakes (Millgate was buying nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union and selling them to South Korea) are so flimsily tied to the immediate plot (ferreting out the pedophile in the five counselors' closet) that there is hardly any suspense. The gimmick of having Pittman resort for help to criminals he's written about in the past is as weak as the premise that the forces of law and order are no help to him at all. Fairly gripping in portions, but this has all been done better before. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.