Stephen Hunter on guns and his Bob Lee Swagger character

OPINION:

I recently watched a portion of a poor thriller on TV. I was compelled to switch channels when during a gunfight in the film I spotted at least four serious errors involving the use of firearms.

Although I’m military-trained and I’ve owned and shot guns nearly all my life, I’m not an expert on firearms in the way that Stephen Hunter, the author of the Bob Lee Swagger thrillers, certainly is.

Mr. Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger, known as “Bob the Nailer,” a legendary Marine sniper who served in the Vietnam War and later becomes involved with criminal and national security plots, is a wonderful character and he appears in a fine series of thrillers. But I especially like that Mr. Hunter always portrays and uses guns accurately in his novels.

In his last Bob Lee Swagger novel, “Game of Snipers,” which I reviewed in these pages in August, the elderly character came up against a younger and equally skilled terrorist sniper.

Swagger has been portrayed by Mark Wahlberg in the film “Shooter” and Ryan Phillippe in the TV series, but if the novels had been written decades earlier, the tall and lean Swagger would perhaps have been better portrayed by Clint Eastwood or Chuck Connors, who portrayed a Western character wielding a modified Winchester in the TV series “The Rifleman.”           

Like his father, Earl, a WWII Medal of Honor winner and Arkansas state trooper, and his grandfather, Charles, a WWI hero and Arkansas sheriff, Swagger is a rugged individual with a strong sense of justice and honor.

I recall asking Stephen Hunter about Bob Lee Swagger. “Swagger was originally modeled on an actual Marine sniper named Carlos Hathcock, but at a certain point he was too much like Carlos and the character didn’t have any independent life, so there was a concentrated effort to disconnect him from Carlos and part of that was building up in my mind a family history,’ Mr. Hunter replied. 

“I wanted to know more about the Swaggers. I wrote all these books about West Arkansas. One thing led to another and the books did well, and I found an almost pleasure in writing them. It took off on its own.

“I was born to shoot. I was attracted to guns very early in my life. By the age of four I was gun obsessive. Guns have always nurtured, fascinated, stimulated, soothed, and delighted me for more than 60 years.”

Mr. Hunter worked for the Baltimore Sun for 26 years and was the Sun’s movie critic for the last 16 of those years. He moved over to the Washington Post as a movie critic for 11 years and took a buy-out in 2008. His first novel, “The Master Sniper,” was published in 1980, and his first Bob Lee Swagger novel, “Point of Impact,’ was published in 1993. He still treasures his time as a newspaper man.

“You are so lucky if you get to spend a lot of time in a newsroom. Newsrooms are fabulous places. Particularly a feature department, where there is more emphasis on writing and less emphasis on speed,” Mr. Hunter said. “There is a lot of irony, wisecracking, and that sort of Ben Hecht kind image of the newspaper. I always enjoyed that.”

Mr. Hunter said that if someone had asked him at 40 what he was going to do, the last thing he would have said is that he was going to write a saga of books about an Arkansas alpha male.

Although Bob Lee Swagger is getting on in years in the more recent novels, he is still a man one should not take lightly.  

“I’m trying to make him age gracefully, reasonably and accurately. He can’t get into fist fights or chases, but he still has a gift with machines, particularly guns. Of course, the gun is an equalizer, so he can’t fight a 22-year-old with his fists, but put .45 automatics in each of their hands and guess which one comes out alive. He still does some gunfighting, but his physical range has been dialed way down.”

I asked Mr. Hunter if there was a message in his novels about guns and if his goal was to educate people about guns.

“Absolutely. A subsidiary reason for wanting to do this is was that there is so much bad information out there, from technical information of what guns can do to social information of what they mean,” Mr. Hunter said. “One of my goals from the beginning was to get that stuff right. I’ve made some mistakes, but if my name stands for anything, I want it to stand for that kind of accuracy in gun detail. I thought there would be a readership that appreciate that.”

• Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction, mysteries and thrillers.