This past weekend there was a Bookbub promotion for the Jack Higgins book The Violent Enemy. I’ve been reading Jack Higgins since before the wrote The Eagle had landed, and while in recent years I haven’t followed his new books as faithfully as I used to, there’s always a comfortable feeling when I start one of his books. That same feeling you get when you sit down with an old friend after a long time since seeing them.

The Violent Enemy isn’t a recent book. If I recall, it was written in the late 1960’s, and the references to the life experiences of the characters set it in the timeline. It’s not a long novel, maybe 45,000 to 50,000 words, but I read it during the course of Sunday afternoon and evening.

Dean Wesley Smith recommends studying Stage 4 writers – those who’ve been writing for several decades, and who are still publishing best sellers today – writers like Nora Roberts, Stephen King, and John Grisham. 

I was close to the end of The Violent Enemy when the scene shifted to a coastal marsh for the final chapter. Jack Higgins used, I think two sentences to set the stage for the action to come, and in those two sentences, I was there in the damp and mist. It bears mentioning that when the coastal marsh was introduced earlier in the book, there was a more detailed description, but it took just those two sentences to pull me right back in.

Jack Higgins is right there with the other Stage 4 writers, and along with Robert Ludlum, was one of the early influencers in making me want to write.

If I’d known then, what I know now . . . But isn’t that a refrain we all have at some point in our lives.