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So here’s the story of the time I almost wrote a novel based on the TV series, The Prisoner.
This was several years ago, and I’d just gotten off a multiple-book contract based on another licensed property, which though fun as far as the writing went turned out to be absolute hell on any professional level. Three times during the composition of the trilogy the book packager defaulted on its payments to the copyright owners, and each time left me midway through a novel based on characters I did not own, and that I could sell nowhere else. The stress made me no good for any other writing, and the resulting delay in advance and delivery payments caused me serious financial hardships. The fucking continued for years after the events I’m about to relate; the last two books, marketed as best-sellers to coincide with blockbuster movies – to the extent that they were stacked, in hardcover, dozens of copies high in box stores throughout the country – earned the company enough to keep its lights on and pay writers higher up the pyramid, but I was told that they hadn’t earned out and ultimately received an insulting pittance as royalty.
I think I was owed something in five figures. You don’t wanna know what I got.
Ultimately the guy in charge was hit by a bus, leaving behind books that proved his company had been skating on the edge of bankruptcy all along. Suffice it to say that I almost quit the trilogy one and a half books in and then again two books in and then again two and a half books in, openly telling the guy to get someone else to finish it; and that ultimately, out of a loyalty to the readership that – hear me now -- I WILL NEVER ALLOW TO TRUMP COMMON SENSE AGAIN, I finished the trilogy and reaped a reward in professional reputation, if not in filthy lucre.
But when I was done I said, that’s it. No more work-for-hire. No more licensed properties, ever. No more novels based on characters I don’t own. No more contracts that won’t give me the option to cross the street with the manuscript, if the earth opens up and swallows the publisher whole.
One of my good friends is a very successful writer of licensed fiction, who has written dozens of the things and done quite well with them – and who defends his professional model with intelligence and eloquence. He always says that I just got the shit end of the stick. He does much better. But he witnessed the whole thing and understands my fury.
Anyway.
I finished the books and said that I would never do a licensed property again, but made the tactical decision that I would still listen to all offers, even from the guy whose purgatory I’d just escaped.
He called me some months later, under the impression that we were on good terms. I was polite. He told me that he was eager for me to do another trilogy.
He said, The Prisoner.
Now, I gotta tell ya, I got stars in my eyes.
He was the devil, but that’s the thing about the devil. The devil never tempts you with a BAD offer.
The prospect of writing The Prisoner, toying around in that universe, was so irresistible that for a while I forgot I didn’t want to work with this guy again. I said, tell me more.
He said he wanted a sequel trilogy to The Prisoner, set in the present day, respecting the continuity of the series (omitting the deliberately nonsensical final episode, if I desired, and if that was the only way to keep Number Six incarcerated).
I said, so what you want is for Number Six to still be there, decades later, an octogenarian, having spent the majority of his life being fucked by the Village’s mind games.
No, my publisher said, he has to be the same age as in the show.
I said, I could do that. I would do what DC and Marvel do to keep their characters current, and drag the backstory closer to the present day.
No, my publisher said, the backstory still needs to take place in the 1960s.
I thought furiously, and said, okay, unless we want Number Six rendered invalid by age, we would need to put him in suspended animation for decades, or something, and while the people behind the Village probably have that technology, it makes no sense for them to do that, as the march of history goes on and the secrets in his possession grow cobwebs. I can’t abide that.
So how about this? I create a NEW Prisoner, a young woman involved in espionage, who gets dragged to an updated Village and encounters Number Six – now much older, but still defiant – while she’s there. She’ll be the protagonist, but he’ll be the Obi-Wan Kenobi figure, the guy still dangerous in his own way, who…
…no, my publisher said. It has to be the Patrick McGoohan Number Six. It has to respect a backstory set in the 1960s, and it has to be set in the present day. He said, can’t you just ignore the aging issue?
Although good writers have written realistic series novels of characters who don’t age as the years and decades go on – see, for instance, the 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain – that was because the books are meant to work individually; they aren’t tied to a backstory that is itself tied to a specific decade.
And so we were getting into nested impossibilities here, especially since I didn’t wanna write the novel of a Number Six who had been tortured for decades, without end.
ALL of my suggestions would have made kickass novels, that would have blown fans of THE PRISONER away, but the temporal issues were driving us toward an impasse.
Especially since (I increasingly realized), my novel did absolutely need to acknowledge the final episode. Many PRISONER fans are (to my mind) unaccountably in love with that mess of an episode – I will no doubt hear from some, in response to this thread – and they would crucify me if I tried to pretend it had never happened.
So I ruminated, and said this.
Okay.
Here’s your story.
Number Six escaped exactly as reported.
He didn’t go back to his life, because he couldn’t be sure he’d be safe, and because he was by now even more thoroughly disgusted with the whole thing than he was when he resigned.
He changed his name (as per the Secret Agent Man theme song, “They gave you a number and took away your name”), and went off to while away the rest of his life as a expatriate in some tropical paradise somewhere.
He has lived for decades in a kind of indolent stasis, respected by the locals, loved by a local woman (who would have died by the time of our story, leaving him rootless). He is a figure who goes out in his fishing boat and enjoys the sun and participates in the community.
It has not escaped him that he has in effect exchanged one village for another, but at least this one is real life, and he can live there on his own terms.
And then one day he is passing through town when he sees a man as elderly as himself, passing through town on vacation; and he recognizes that fellow as one of the many Number Twos that tormented him.
He thinks, they’ve found me. Or worse, they always knew where I was and have been watching me all along.
The old fire re-ignites, and after some clever tradecraft he gets the drop on the other figure, confronting him in his hotel room.
The old Number Two is astonished to see him. He claims that their meeting is just a coincidence. He is retired himself, and traveling; just passing through town, hardly expecting this confrontation with his old “guest.”
Number Six accuses him of being a liar.
And the old Number Two says the absolute worst thing anybody in his position could possibly say to the old Number Six.
He says, essentially, “Get over yourself. The secrets in your head are decades old. Almost all of them have been declassified. Everybody forgot about you years and years and years ago. Nobody’s looking for you. Nobody WANTS you. Even if you showed up at the new village and surrendered, they’d just laugh at you and either kill you or send you on your way.”
The one thing you don’t tell Number Six is that he’s irrelevant. He’s still the splendidly arrogant figure he was back then.
For a moment he’s devastated, and then he says, “Then I want you to go back to the Village, wherever it is now, and I want you to tell them something.”
“What?”
“Tell them I’m coming to shut them down.”
“Don’t be crazy,” Number Two says. “You’re an old man! You can’t possibly…”
“I am a free man,” Number Six says. “And you no longer tell me what I can and cannot do.”
The natural objection to this was that the story would mostly take place outside the Village, as Number Six searched the world for it and inexorably drew closer, but I had a solution to that: alternate chapters, detailing the plight of the new, female prisoner I’d posited. The novel would build intense suspense over when “our” prisoner would arrive, and meet her; the twist for her, at the end, would be that she does break, that her storyline actually predates his, that when she is carted off her apartment in the village is cleaned up and refurbished for that famous opening scene where Patrick McGoohan wakes up there. The twist for “our” prisoner, having raced all over the world in search of a phantom, is that while the mindgames continue, the actual village no longer exists. It no longer needs to. With the rise of the internet age, it is now worldwide: literally, and horrifically, the “Global Village” of McLuhan’s phrase, and we are now all in it.
The publisher liked this, and asked me to write a proposal.
Feeling misgivings, I complied.
Even so, the contract never materialized. I found out much later that at the time he pitched me he did not even have the rights to produce novels based on The Prisoner, but was asking me to write a pitch that would help him obtain them. He, of course, never told me this.
Undaunted, he asked me if I wanted to do a series of Twilight Zone novels – a deal that was even worse, for other reasons even more noxious – and then Green Lantern, and then the Transformers, my theoretical interest in the properties diminishing along a path that paralleled my diminishing interest in working for him as I gradually realized the scale of my previous rape. And then he got creamed by that bus.
The good news is that the scene I pitched to him, the old spy living in peace confronted by old taskmaster, remains in my head and that I fully intend to use it someday. It doesn’t need to be The Prisoner. It can be my own creation, and someday it will be, the serial numbers carefully filed off. Indeed, that scene is already written; if you ever see it, in one of my novels, you will know that it began life as The Prisoner.
Sometimes I sigh that it never happened.
But more often, I am tremendously relieved.
July 27, 2010
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