Pulp Fiction

The sea on the second day of the hunt is as calm as the first and Benchley likens the Orca to "a paper cup in a puddle." Less Samuel Taylor Coleridge and more Raymond Chandler, the image is another of the author's  workaday comparisons (as flat as gelatin, like laundry falling from a basket etc). An admirer of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, Benchley himself had no illusions about the artistic merits of his own work. In his third novel The Island he slyly inserts a moment of self-criticism into the text when one of the characters tosses a paperback he has just read into the ocean, reasoning that any work of popular fiction is only worth reading once.

To while away the hours of boredom on board the Orca, Brody has brought along The Deadly Virgin, "a sex mystery" he has borrowed from his deputy. Hendricks seems to have a thing for books with the word 'deadly' in the title - when he first appears in Chapter Two, he's reading a detective novel called Deadly I'm Yours. Both books are the invention of the author of Jaws, but both titles sound entirely plausible examples of pulp fiction. The name - as Tarantino's film of the same name tells us - comes from the rough, unfinished paper on which the magazines or books were printed. If tossed into the ocean, the books would no doubt quickly transform into 'a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter.' My own paperback copy of The Island got exposed to sea water the summer I read it, and its pages warped and curled.

Although we are given a tantalising glimpse between the pages of Deadly, I'm Yours (heroine Whistling Dixie defending herself from gang rape with a linoleum knife), we learn nothing about the contents of The Deadly Virgin. Brody himself never gets to finish the book - just after he goes below to retrieve his "half-read" copy from the cabin, the shark appears, and shortly thereafter the cage goes in the water. When the Orca sinks in the final chapter, the book becomes flotsam, possibly to be washed up on one of Amity's beaches as an unrecognisable pulpy mass.