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From: Jasper
Date: 5/17/01
Time: 6:34:34 AM
Jean, Miss Marple
I was hoping to go into all of this more of the Smoking Gun board.
In Iago I devoted only one chapter to Fuhrman-the-copycat in Fuhrman at the movies. While I have concentrated on the extent to which Fuhrman and the killer (had to be the same person) copied ideas big and small from the big and small screen, I know that the man reads, too.
Many aspects of the movie/TV links I found dovetail into Ruby Ridge and other historical incidents that "a war and history buff" (that's what Fuhrman called himself) like Fuhrman would be hard pressed to miss. The Confessions of Nat Turner (fact) and The Turner Diaries are just two literary examples. William L. Pierce's Hunter is, of course, another. I have seen others and I know that you have seen similar mixes of fact and fiction in the writing of Christopher Darden.
Once something you have seen or read leaves an impression on your mind it's there for as long as you live. It's bound to come out when the right word in the right context or the right object in the right set of circumstances triggers it. I keep seeing examples in my own novels from scenes in movies and television programs I thought I'd forgotten. I saw one just yesterday in The Magnificent Seven. If you saw The Magnificent Seven and read just the first to chapters of The Random Factor, you'd see what I mean.
No one is immune to this kind of subconscious "idea stealing." I doubt that Fuhrman made a conscious link between William Pierce's Hunter and Fred Dryer's, but there is no denying the fact that Fuhrman and Laura Hart did meet with the producers of Hunter to pitch their screenplay idea and to sell them on Fuhrman as a technical advisor.
Gotta go to work now, but let's talk about this sort of thing again on The Smoking Gun Board. --Jasper