I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the character of Colonel Trautman (who 'created' Rambo) was not in the first draft of First Blood. **
Few movies have ever so pleasantly surprised me as First Blood. I had avoided it like it had leprosy because I expected a brainless action-fest, but then one day I was at a friend’s house and without warning he put it on his VCR. “It’s good,” he assured me, but his tastes and mine were not always compatible.
I was astonished to discover the action scenes were clever, the dialogue was snappy (“To eat things that would make a billygoat puke”), it was well paced and it was populated with actual characters rather than cardboard cut-outs brandishing guns. There was even a theme and some emotional content to go with it.
When I discovered First Blood was based on a novel – this would have been sometime in the mid-1990s – I made a mental note to pick up a copy. It took me the best part of 20 years, but thanks to e-books I finally got around to it.
David Morrell’s idea, which he explains in the introduction to this edition, was to bring the Vietnam War home to America. Thus we have the ‘establishment’ in the form of Teasle, a small town police chief and Korean War veteran who is going through a divorce, and the ‘objector’, Rambo, a Vietnam veteran suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and a vagrant who keeps getting ‘moved on’ from small towns due to his unkempt appearance. When Rambo decides he won’t be moved on any more, he and Teasle face off in an escalating personal war that goes well past reason.
The characters are the strongest facet of First Blood. Morrell refused to let his own opinions on the Vietnam War colour his characters, so Teasle and Rambo are in turns sympathetic and unlikable. They are real men with real problems – deep-seated and pathological problems that end up getting many people killed.
The narrative in First Blood never lags. I gobbled up the book in a few days and it made a nice break from some of the heavier, more literary stuff I had been consuming. But that brings us to the prose…
Sometimes First Blood is a tutorial in how not to write. Telling rather than showing is probably Morrell’s greatest transgression, closely followed by a profusion of that decidedly American tendency to use an adjective where an adverb should be (‘Drops of water spilled icy onto his spine’). The prose also tends to vacillate between long passages of straight description and what amounts to internal monologue, both of which outstay their welcome. This gives the book a bit of an ‘unbalanced’ feel – it doesn’t have the rhythm more competent writing achieves. Some say the breakneck pacing means Morrell deserves the mantel of 'the father of the modern thriller', but since that means he gave rise to the likes of James Patterson and Matthew Reilly, I’m not sure I’d be crowing this ‘achievement’ from the rooftops.
All hyperbole and criticism, aside, First Blood reads like what it is: a first novel by an author still learning his chops, but with a damned good idea chugging it along.
One last thing: I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest the character of Colonel Trautman (who ‘created’ Rambo) was not in the first draft of First Blood. I’m further going to allege that in the final scene of that first draft, Teasle and Rambo shot each other simultaneously – and an editor read it and decided it was not believable. That’s why Trautman appears about halfway through the novel, stands around a lot telling everyone how tough Rambo is and why he feels sorry for him, and then rolls up wielding a shotgun just in time to get rid of that far-fetched simultaneous shooting.
Pure speculation, of course. Would you care to comment, Mr Morrell?
**UPDATE 20/3/15: David Morrell was kind enough to get in touch via Twitter and tell me I was wrong about Trautman. I thought I could see the stitches. Oh well. : )