Significant character names
I've just finished Plunder Squad by Richard Stark (also known by his real name, Donald E. Westlake) and started Peter Temple's Identity Theory (also known as In the Evil Day).
In each book, the author gives at least one character a highly evocative name. Stark's Jacques Renard is an oily, dangerous middleman, and renard is the French word for fox. Temple's Con Niemand is a former mercenary and a security agent trained to kill. Niemand means nobody in several Germanic languages, including Afrikaans, a language of South Africa, where Niemand works and Temple was born. That's not a bad name for a potential killer whose services are for sale. I'll hope to have a full report on the overtones of this name in a few days.
In the meantime, what characters can you think of with significant or evocative names?
© Peter Rozovsky 2007
Technorati tags:
Peter Temple
Donald Westlake
Richard Stark
In each book, the author gives at least one character a highly evocative name. Stark's Jacques Renard is an oily, dangerous middleman, and renard is the French word for fox. Temple's Con Niemand is a former mercenary and a security agent trained to kill. Niemand means nobody in several Germanic languages, including Afrikaans, a language of South Africa, where Niemand works and Temple was born. That's not a bad name for a potential killer whose services are for sale. I'll hope to have a full report on the overtones of this name in a few days.
In the meantime, what characters can you think of with significant or evocative names?
© Peter Rozovsky 2007
Technorati tags:
Peter Temple
Donald Westlake
Richard Stark
Labels: Donald Westlake, Peter Temple, Richard Stark
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 10:46 PM
7 Comments:
Harry (turns out to be short for Hieronymous) Bosch?
That's a good one. I've never read Connelly, but L.A. is a garden of earthly delights, all right. Any author who gives a character a name like that had better create a world and a character so convincing as not to induce eye-rolling in the reader. Connelly, I gather, succeeds, and I think Peter Temple will, too.
The name is less of an issue in the Richard Stark book I mentioned, where the character is minor.
Thanks for the note. The name Wyatt certainly has Wild West overtones, at least partly from Wyatt Earp. Earp was a lawman, which opens the discussion up to even airier realms of speculation about connections -- or to academic papers at univesities that have popular-culture departments.
Kickback and Paydirt give just the one name -- Wyatt -- though I did read a reference, probably on Amazon, to the character as "Wyatt Wareen." I suspect that was a mistake, but there's only way to find out for sure.
I hope to be able to do the research myself. I've read the first two Wyatt novels. The others have been expensive and hard to find, at least in the U.S. But I shall keep looking.
Yesterday's sad news that Michael Dibdin had died brought to mind the possibly significant name of his protagonist, Aurelio Zen -- Aurelio, as in Marco Aurelio, or Marcus Aurelius, and Zen, as in that form of Buddhism that has connotations of acceptance, resignation, and laughter in the face of adversity.
Hi. I am the author of the Wyatt novels. I've never given Wyatt another name and consider it to be a surname. Soho Press in NY have for some reason called him Wyatt Wareen without consulting me. Thanks for your interest, Garry Disher
What the heck is a wareen? A small war, I'd say, if the character were Irish.
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