The ironies became stronger. In 2001, now an American citizen, I was on a publicity tour in Poland. So many journalists asked for interviews that I met with them for twelve hours in a row. They all spoke excellent English. A woman in her mid-thirties noted that I seemed surprised by all the journalistic attention I was receiving. She told me that I needed to understand the way Rambo was viewed in her country. During the Solidarity years of the late 1980s, when Polish youth protested against the Soviets, the Rambo movies were not allowed to be shown, but illegal videotapes were smuggled in. She said that protesters would watch the movies to fire up their emotions. They would then put on forehead sweatbands resembling the one Rambo wore and go out to demonstrate. In an indirect way, she said, Rambo was an element in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her explanation reminded me that in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, demonstrators were filmed painting “Rambo” on the wall before they tore parts of it down.

Rambo’s name is in the Oxford English Dictionary. In positive and negative ways, it continues to be part of daily vocabulary around the world. The novel has been translated into twenty-six languages. It has never been out of print. But I didn’t expect to see a fourth movie about Rambo. Released twenty years after the previous one, the new film, simply titled Rambo, took the character into one of the most politically repressive and violent regions in the world, Burma, the official name for which is Myanmar. Yet again, my character was reinterpreted, but now, to my surprise, for the first time he was presented in the way that he had appeared in my novel so many years ago: angry and disillusioned. Sickened by violence but knowing that killing is what he does best, Rambo has fallen into despair. He hunts cobras for a snake farm and is so at home with death that he handles them with indifference, just as they seem to recognize a kindred soul and submit to being handled. He spends a lot of time in the rain, trying to cleanse himself of what he has done. People call him “the Boatman,” with all the Greek-myth implications of death and the River Styx. During an anguished scene in which he forges a knife to go into yet another battle, he tells himself: “Admit it. You didn’t kill for your country. You killed for yourself. And for that, God won’t forgive you.”

In a Rambo movie. Absolutely astonishing. After four films and thirty-six years, the character returned to the tone of his origins in my novel. It felt like old times to see him again.

CAROL O’CONNELL

Born in New York in 1947, bred in New England and New Jersey, Carol O’Connell attended the California Institute of the Arts. This was back in the days when it was located not far from LA’s MacArthur Park (anarchy heaven of the 1960s). She was a hippie without portfolio (wrong wardrobe, no love beads, no albums of Indian sitar music, and she never bothered to lay out the cash for her own bong). Edging eastward, she completed her studies at Arizona State University, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree (the major she had the most credits in when it came time to leave school). O’Connell then moved to Denver, Colorado, regarding it as a largish halfway house between coasts east and west. After a few years as a papergirl for the Denver Post, on to Manhattan. During the early New York years, she earned her living as a freelance proofreader, working at mind-sucking graveyard-shift jobs while doing the starving-artist thing. Upon publication of Mallory’s Oracle, the first of ten novels, she was (in her own words) incredibly overpaid, and this enabled her to quit the rent-money gigs. The author also trashed her alarm clock. Now O’Connell goes to bed when she gets tired and wakes up when she’s completely finished sleeping.

She writes every day.

MALLORY

BY CAROL O’CONNELL

In 1994, after my first book was published, I received a fan letter and a great deal of religious material from a woman who wanted to save me from eternal damnation. That was when I realized that I was onto something with my protagonist, who is an officer of the NYPD, a woman, and a sociopath. Call her Detective Mallory or just plain Mallory, neither Miss nor Ms., but never call her Kathy. She likes that chilly distance of the surname.

Aloof? Perhaps. In Stone Angel, she is likened to a cat:

The cat hissed and arched its back as Charles’s hand moved toward the sugar bowl. Apparently, he had violated some house rule of table manners. Slowly, his hand withdrew from the bowl and came to rest on the table by his cup. The cat lay down, stretching her lean body across the checkered cloth, and the tail ceased to switch and beat the wood. When his hand moved again, she bunched her muscles, set to spring, relaxing only while his hand was still. The cat controlled him.

Now who did that remind him of?

The old woman was back at the table. “Don’t touch that cat. She doesn’t like people-barely tolerates them. She’s wild-raised in the woods. When I found her, she was too set in her ways to ever be anybody’s idea of tame. She had buckshot all through her pelt and chicken feathers in her mouth. Now that told me, right off, that she was a thief. And she is perversity incarnate. Sometimes she purrs just before she strikes.

Charles nodded while the woman spoke, and he ticked off the familiar character flaws as she listed them. Now he peered into the cat’s slanted eyes. Mallory, are you in there?

Miss Trebec bent down to speak to the cat, to explain politely that an animal did not belong on the table when company was calling. The cat seemed to be considering this information, but she left the table in her own time, as though it were her own idea. The tail waved high as she disappeared over the edge.

It was disconcerting that the animal made no sound when she hit the floor. It crossed his mind to look under the table, to reassure himself that the cat did not float there, waiting to catch him in some new breach of etiquette. Instead he peered into his cup as he stirred the sugar in his coffee. When he looked up to ask his hostess a question, the cat was riding the woman’s shoulders.

(And, after wading through all of that, here is your punch line: A passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses inspired Mallory and best defines her in only eleven genius words. Mr. Joyce wrote, “Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.”)

However, like a cat, Mallory seems to have no affinity for these animals. In Dead Famous she had an encounter with New York City ’s only attack cat, a pathetic creature with nerve damage. When he’s in pain, he lashes out at strangers, and this earned him the name Huggermugger, Mugs for short. He was softly creeping up behind Mallory when a tiny squeak of excitement gave him away. Then he paused as their eyes met, and they mutually agreed that she could kill him any time she liked. Mugs, wise cat, retreated to his basket.

I am nothing like my protagonist. Consequently, I am, in person, a huge disappointment to everyone who expects her and gets me. Mallory is tall, I’m short; she’s blond, I’m not; she carries a gun, and I don’t. Yet every time I lecture, someone will ask, “Is Mallory autobiographical?” I’m always stunned, but I never harm these people. I say, “No. Mallory is a sociopath, and I’m a nice person… I’m a relatively nice person.” Given that proviso, people generally do not push their luck with the question.

I blame this on the Germans.

When I arrived in Berlin on tour with my first book, I was told that a local journalist had written an article that mistook Mallory’s Oracle for a rather strange third-person memoir. In every interview, and there were many, I set the reporters straight. Mallory was a work of pure fiction, I said, “Not me. Nothing like me. I’m a wimp.” But they preferred the earlier, erroneous version of me, and my correction never appeared in any of their newspaper interviews. To this day, many German people believe that I’m a tall blonde with disturbing defects.