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Hailey’s research was impeccable. He spent weeks and months in airports, hospitals, hotels or banks, studying how they functioned and wove his plots around characters working in these institutions. Often the plots were based on personal experiences and vivid imagination. While on a flight he thought of what would happen if the cockpit crew was exposed to unexpected danger like food poisoning. The result? Flight into Danger his first novel. The excellent research also resulted in vivid and realistic characterisation. This applied even to his minor characters, like the big-breasted dietician in Final Diagnosis or the dirty, smelly black man in charge of burning rubbish in Hotel who salvaged a vital piece of evidence, helping the hotel management to prosecute an influential hit-and-run driver staying at the hotel. These men and women appeared only briefly but clearly left and impact. During his peak, Hailey was highly productive, every three years he came out with a bestseller. So long as he stuck to familiar themes, he was highly successful. Look at the wealth of information about the functioning of the US automobile industry in Wheels. But in later novels like Evening News where a TV network was shown dealing with a terrorist network or Detective, the story of a serial killer, Hailey faltered because he was not familiar with the themes. He tried to keep up with the times by switching over to plots interspersed with liberal doses of violence, bloodshed and sex. These novels were a let down compared to his earlier ones. People wanted and expected family novels from Hailey. Mother would read them, pass them on to father who in turn saw to it that the rest of the family read them. Hailey was ideal read for commuters. You bought Airport while boarding a flight and time flew as you finished it. The same applied to his other novels; they did not have a single dull moment. Like contemporary Frederick Forsyth, Hailey was a ‘one theme’ novelist. In Forsyth’s books, the hero planned something big and went about executing it — political assassination (The Day of the Jackal), hunt for a Nazi killer (Odessa File) or the capture of a mineral-rich African state with the help of mercenaries (The Dogs of War) — while Hailey’s books revolved around institutions and agencies which were linked to our everyday life. There had be some kind of sameness with the themes and the discerning readers could get bored. But then, if you were a commuter, there was nothing like a Hailey bestseller. Photo: Reuters |
Millions
of people travel by plane, stay in hotels, get treated at hospitals, buy
and sell cars and are involved in money changing. How many, among them,
produce highly readable, best selling novels on these themes? Arthur
Hailey did. The 84-year old British writer and resident of Bahamas who
died recently left a legacy of about dozen novels (total sales 170
million) and constantly topped the bestseller lists. From Flight into
Danger to The Detective, the novels covered a wide range of
topics related to day-to-day life. That was why people took to his
novels. Passengers who waited endlessly in snow-bound airports or were
victims of bomb threats, men and women who enjoyed or were disappointed
with hotel room service, executives who could not withstand the rat race
of Detroit, the car town, or those who invested in banks which
threatened to collapse identified themselves with the protagonists of
Hailey bestsellers like Airport, Hotel, Wheels and Moneychangers.