QUINT
Robert Lautner (robert-lautner.com)
The Borough Press (boroughpress.co.uk)
£16.99
Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop
I started Quint around 2012. Yep. Seriously.
It wasn’t in shape to be submitted until 2013 and I had just finished writing The Road to Reckoning which was due for publication in 2014, to be followed by The Draughtsman in 2016. Two books under my belt.
Quint came about under a special circumstance.
We’d just moved to Wales with the intention of building our own cabin, just after our second son was born. My wife’s parents lived there and were getting older so it made sense to be closer and we just couldn’t afford to rent in Windsor any more.
Building your own home sounds great but it was the hardest thing we’d ever done in our lives. So much goes wrong that you’re surprised when it doesn’t. We were living in chaos and I only had an old laptop and a borrowed armchair to escape, to work on.
It needed the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
Somewhere in this I retreated to JAWS as a comfort watch on the laptop, which I think it becomes to a lot of fans as we get older. As I was technically between books I began playing with the idea of writing, for myself, a story about Quint, a memoir, just as a therapy of sorts with all the shit around me. And it actually helped. It helped with all the nonsense and tribulations going on with the build. Every night I could put all the frustration of the day onto Quint and he could bury it on the page for me. But I was only writing it for me, there was no way it was for publication, the rights would never be attainable. And then, as the cabin was almost finished, I began to think about it as a possible future book and started to work on it seriously. After all, we were (then) coming up to the 40th anniversary of JAWS and I thought that someone somewhere might think it was good timing. And I didn’t want someone else to mess it up. I wanted it to be a literary treatment not a cash-grab, not something where the only spine was on the book, not in it. It needed the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
Miraculously the publisher got Wendy Benchley’s permission (she had read and approved) and she owned the copyright for the character. All steam ahead, done and dusted. Then Universal heard about it.
Long and short, lawyers from our side and Universal decided “no” was the way to go (lawyers love saying “no”) and it was all over. Quint went back to being a book just for me.
Fast forward a few years and, completely out of the blue, They got in touch with Us.
Although there were still some legalities and territory restrictions, which some people probably got paid a lot of money to insist over, the gist is that the 50th anniversary was coming up and Universal decided that licences for JAWS were a commodity they could ease up on the copyright of (hence you may have seen an ongoing up-tick in merchandise lately).
What has surprised, and pleased me, with the novel’s reception was how the “literary ventriloquism” of voicing Quint has been so remarked upon, the authenticity of the character, as if Robert Shaw, as Quint, is performing the book.
It’s sleight of hand, of course, but the downside in the attempt to achieve this was that Quint began to inhabit my own personality and voice. I was not an easy person to be around, apparently, so I’m told. I think I do this with all my protagonists but I suppose most are not as irascible or cynically commanding as Quint. I’m not divorced at any rate and he’s long gone now.
So 2024 rolls around and I finally see Quint in print, more than a decade after I first wrote him for myself. It didn’t seem real after waiting so long.
The weirdest thing is that I’m now older than my 1968 Quint is in the story, I’m older than Robert Shaw was in JAWS, and in death. I wasn’t when I wrote it. I’ve outlived them both. I was a different person then, younger than both of them. Now they’re behind me, I’m behind me, but the book is falsely new, is fresh, its paperback ink yet to exist. I have salt and pepper flecks of grey in my hair and beard which weren’t there back then, a boy who was a baby when I wrote it is as tall as me, can read his own copy of something written around him before he could talk. It’s new and old at the same time.
It’s the strangest thing to hold a brand new old thing in your hands.
But if you asked me I bet I could, with a wink, still pull my cap down, give you a grin, and that same dulcet drawl would come rolling right back out again. Just with a bit more grey in it.
