I recently read Simon Logan’s Katja from the Punk Band, a tight little crime thriller featuring a cast of dirty, desperate, degenerates angling to secure a vial of a mysterious synthetic drug they wager will secure them passage by boat off the dingy industrial island purgatory they’re all trapped on. They’ll lie, cheat and steal from each other and when that doesn’t work, they’re all prepared to kill for it. It’s a whiplash ride through a single sludgy, bloody night of lifts, double-backs and reversals conveyed in short, punchy chapters rotating the point of view through nearly the whole cast, providing a panoramic appreciation of the action and various motivations that the good, the bad, and the ugly are moved by.
But keep your eye on the vial, the macguffin, the object of desire that make the pieces move in a story, it’s a tricky one.
It’s even inspired a list of some of my favorite macguffins.
The Egg Salad Recipe in Woody Allen’s What's Up, Tiger Lily? – Allen took a 1960’s Japanese Bond-ian spy film, kept its visuals, removed its soundtrack, rewrote the story, and dubbed in his own plot which made the characters run around the globe alternately killing and seducing each other in pursuit of a top secret recipe for egg salad. I laughed.
The Case from John Frankenheimer’s Ronin – What is it? What’s inside? What mysterious power does it represent? Better than the ring of power from The Lord of the Rings because we never learn what it is/does and we’re left only with what people will do to obtain it to attest to its import and better than The Case in Pulp Fiction because, as an audience we were focused on it non-stop for the length of the film and felt we were building up to a final reveal only to… Love that David Mamet touch. Incidentally, I consider this one the first of Mamet’s warrior trilogy followed by Spartan and Redbelt, (no, I’m not counting The Unit) in case you’re looking for a film fest theme…
The Book in Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas – an inanimate object that really feels like a character, The Book of Nine Doors, (where Roman Polanski’s adaptation Ninth Gate gets its title) is a tantalizing and malevolent presence throughout Corso’s journey. Creeeepy. And those illustrations (shudder).
The Falcon in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon – After all that it’s a (spoiler edit)
The Head in Craig McDonald’s Head Games – the speculative and factual basis for this fictional amphetamine dream road story is the head of none other than Pancho Villa. Gruesome, unbelievable, hilarious, and not the last head on this list.
The Identity of Keyser Soze in Bryan Singer’s Usual Suspects – yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s been ripped off to death and yeah, yeah, yeah I’m sure you saw it coming a mile away (sure you did, pal), and yeah, yeah, yeah it’s a cheap trick, but, but, but it was really well done and unlike your typical M. Night Shamalamadingdong film, knowing the final reveal doesn’t ruin repeat viewings. They got me. They totally got me. And the screenwriter followed it up with another goodie –
The Baby in Christopher McQuarrie’s Way of the Gun – the idea is simple, two punks kidnap the very pregnant surrogate mother of the very rich, powerful and corrupt Hale Chidduck’s child, and collect a fat ransom. Eeeeeverybody wants to get that momma back and all for different reasons. The game played for possession of the child is just heartless, just cold and brutal and completely contemptuous of the value of the child outside of its status as ‘prize’ and the mother outside of her role as ‘prize carrier.’ The scene of pregnant mom slouched on the floor of a dirty, flop-house with a shotgun leveled at the door waiting for somebody to just try and take her baby is… fantastic.
The Film in Tony O’Neil’s Sick City – a wild strip of celluloid filmed at a party in 1969 featuring Steve McQueen, Yul Brenner, Mama Cass and Sharon Tate getting freaky discovered months later by a first responding cop at the scene of the Manson Family’s gruesome crime, it’s landed in the possession of two hopelessly inept, but optimistically cursed hustlers hoping to sell it for a fortune. O’Neil’s novel is one of the sharpest, most tart bits of satire wrapped up in a kick-ass crime story I’ve ever read and the ‘sex tape’ is just the perfect prop for this celebrity culture story.
The Kidney in Will Christopher Baer’s Kiss Me, Judas – Ex-cop Phineas Poe awakes in a bathtub full of melted ice in a Denver hotel room with fuzzy memories of the woman who seduced him, drugged him and stole his favorite kidney. The rest of the book follows Poe hot on the trail of the woman and his own anatomical gold mine. But it’s even more complicated than that, as she intended only to take his kidney and ended up with his heart to boot. Yeah, Poe is conflicted about what to do when he catches up – take it back, take his revenge, try and get a date, become her partner and try to make a mint selling it? Decisions, decisions.
Kiss Me Judas and Head Games though, both owe a debt to the greatest macguffin of all time…
The Head in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia – Just go watch it. By the time Warren Oates is stopping for ice chips and having a conversation with Alfredo on the passenger seat, if it’s not just the greatest thing you’ve ever seen… No, it is. The greatest.
You think I missed something? Unlikely, but go ahead, leave a comment. That's my list, and I'm sticking to it.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
