In the upcoming monthly posts, I’m going not only to present the profiles of my thriller cast, I want to share how they got to be who they are.
IN THE BEGINNING…
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Me – I need to create make-believable characters. Not as hard, one would think, as I only had to personify the traits from which each player operated. These would be traits I wanted to exploit or explore. And, while I wasn’t going literally to breathe them into the physical world, I knew that I had to make them real.
RITA MARS
If I told you that I am not a part of Rita Mars, you’d know I was full of it. I think of each book’s protagonist as a construct incorporating the author’s view point, a bit of the author’s personality, hunks of author ideology and her larger-than-life response to the main character’s challenges. In thrillers and mysteries, we get to be the protagonist as hero in the end. (Of course, I love this bit!).
Where did Rita Mars come from?
This author has been a rebellious sort forever. I was the bane of my mother’s social senses. I spent a good deal of my youth protesting wars and racism and hate in general. Rita, therefore, is that woman who will charge like the Light Brigade if she believes in the cause. She views people in high places as simply another human who puts their underwear on same as everyone else. Rita speaks her mind and sometimes gets away with it and sometimes she doesn’t. She’s just not going to stop speaking out when she disagrees. Rita will always let the chips fall . . ..
In my career of developing law enforcement and security applications, I had the most instructive education ever in work with federal agencies as well as local authorities. I was honored to work with people who were dedicated. They were smart. They understood the stakes.
I soaked up the war stories from these men and women. They taught me the nuances of surveillance. They recounted the cases that haunted them, the murders, the disappearances, the deaths they could not prevent. Theirs was a passion for holding the line. The toll it took in broken families and splintered relationships could be enormous. Nonetheless, they believed in their mission and they carried their grief and fear in silence. Their stories are part of Rita’s.
Her father had been one of those whose beliefs carried him into the Viet Nam war. It was not the fear of battle that shattered his sense of place in the universe, it was the disillusion borne of his awakening to the savage stupidity of war and the absurd idea that we must coerce everyone to our personal projection of what is right. In the end Robert Mars released himself from his loss of faith. The blow from that escape left Rita Mars clear-eyed about the evils of judgement. It also engendered a stance to keep that small, vulnerable flame of self-belief guarded; to shun intimacy and embrace emotional armor.
The last I’ll say about Rita – it is the wall of self-preservation that hampers Rita’s attachments. While not a battlefield veteran, she’s witnessed the ugliness of betrayal, the infinite appetite of greed, the foundational loss of those we have loved. Underneath her willingness to step into the cage, Rita Mars harbors the belief in a just world and that she will forever nurture the internal spark of that belief against what may come.
