Saturday, February 12, 2011

On BALEFIRE ...

A 'balefire' is a signal or warning fire, often placed on high ridges on fearsomely stormy nights to warn ships of impending danger ... an apt title for my first published novel because it was all about fear and impending danger in which fire played a key role.

The theme of BALEFIRE is terrorism ... or, more specifically, the idea that a lone terrorist is perfectly capable of blending into the population of a relatively small beach community (like Huntington Beach, CA) and taking on the local police department with ease as he prepares to ignite a highly visual demonstration against the coming Olympics in LA.

As it happened, I was the chief criminalist in charge of the HBPD's Scientific Investigation Bureau at the time I began writing BALEFIRE.  The inspiration: a highly educational lecture by Chief Earle Robitaille --- a former federal agent and expert on terrorism --- who was annoyed because he didn't think we were taking his concerns about terrorist activities on the outer perimeter of the Olympics seriously.  After reading some of his books on terrorism, I had a sense of what a terrorist might be and might need in the way of resources ... but I couldn't understand how one individual --- no matter how skilled and daring --- could penetrate our security, much less take all two hundred of us on and win.  Robitaille smiled, asked for my badge and credentials, and then told me to put myself in the mind of a lone terrorist, go out into the city as a civilian, and see how easily it could be done.  Twenty-four hours later, I was a believer.  And by forty-eight, I was ready to start digging a moat around the police building ... and our house.

I won't go into the details of what Chief Robitaille told me, or what I found in my 'covert civilian' wanderings around the city.  You'll have to read the book to find that out.  Suffice it to say I became progressively more fightened as I wrote the book ... wondered if I should even try to get it published (Robitallie said yes, do try, because I wouldn't be telling the professional terrorists anything new and the public needed to know) ... watched in amazed disbelief when Bantam published the story and it became a NY Times best-seller ... lived thorough the 1984 Olympics in dread fear of some idiot trying to replicate the events of BALEFIRE with a copy of my book tucked into his backpack.

I relaxed when the Olympics were finally over .. and stayed that way until a federal agent buddy of mine sent me an eye-opening review of a new book:

From the non-fiction book THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD (The Chilling Inside Story of America’s Violent Anti-Government Militia Movement):  “When the FBI entered the house, it was like hitting the Comstock Lode.  As the agents swarmed through the house, Anderson was invited to join them.  Inside, he saw an open book on a bed.  The book was Kenneth Goddard’s BALEFIRE , about a terrorist planning to strike at the Los Angeles Olympic Games.  Certain sections were underlined in red.”

Not what I wanted to hear at all.

It's been many years since THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD came out, and as far as I know, no terrorist or wanna-be idiot has tried to replicate the events in BALEFIRE.  And, in retorspect, I don't think they'd want to.

Why do I say that?

Well, without giving too much away, let me explain that as a young kid living in San Diego (CA) county, I spent a lot of time at the local beaches body surfing ... and trying not to think too much about the White Sharks that roamed the very deep waters of the near-by Continental Shelf.  And since BALEFIRE is all about fear, I didn't see anything wrong with including some of my own fears into the plot.  So there is a shark theme and analogy in BALEFIRE ... the general idea being if you're out in the water, and the shark comes at you on the surface, you've got a chance to fight back; but if it comes at you from beneath the surface, your chances of survival are slim to none.

That would be Thanatos, the shark in cold human form.

There are a couple of 'water' scenes in BALEFIRE that still make me twitch a bit, often causing me to think that it would be great if some movie company bought the book and filmed those scenes ... even though I probably wouldn't be able to watch them in a darkened theater ... so I was only vaguely disappointed to learn that it was highly unlikely they ever would be filmed because of the cost.

That was before AV Pictures (UK) bought the rights to film BALEFIRE in 2010, and just recently teamed up with Stewart & Wall --- an Australian Film Company that has already produced some scary shark-themed movies --- to actually film the movie in Australia.

So will I actually watch the film version of BALEFIRE in a darkened theater if they make it as realistic as the book version ... which, I gather, they're perfectly capable of doing?

We'll see...





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