I know I said I was all through with the Tudors, but as my last post makes clear, I seem to have lied. I'll finish The Sunne In Splendour and then it's ho for the Ives book on Anne Boleyn, which appears to be the biography of Henry VIII's second queen.

Over the weekend, however, I had two vampire novels by Barbara Hambly out of the public library. Over the past few weeks I have done considerable giggling and a little ranting about this one inept vampire novel, and in passing I commented that I really don't do vampires in the first place. Hambly's books, especially Those Who Hunt the Night (classed as young adult in my public library) were recommended to me as excellent examples of the genre. Subgenre. Whatever. I also signed out Traveling With the Dead (containing absolutely no references to Jerry Garcia) which is about the same characters (James Asher, Oxford don and former spy, his intellectual wife Lydia, and Don Simon Ysidro, 350-year-old vampire who "danced with both of Henry VIII's remarkable daughters"--a nice turn of phrase for sure.) The books take place in 1907-08.

And my verdict is... well, if you're interested in vampires, these are probably really good books. But as it happens I am not interested in vampires, so I spent most of the weekend gorging on some DVDs I borrowed from my brother--Season 4 of The Rockford Files (and do follow that link for an excellent essay on the series.)

And therein lies the tale, because I ended up with a very clear idea of why I don't like vampires and do like Jim Rockford--and possibly why I write the characters I do.

I'll leave out the human characters in the story, who were more or less likable (the wife was more, the ex-spy husband less--he's bothered by something he did once upon a time for Queen and country, and although the being-bothered makes him more likable, I agreed with him that what he actually did was kind of hard to get past.) I did find they were both a little too self-sufficient, particularly him, for me to worry about, and when part of the story involves the fear of deadly peril to the characters, I do have to, you know, fear the deadly peril.

Which clearly tells me that I like for characters to be not flawed, exactly, but at least a little bit vulnerable. In Traveling there's a character who embodies all the stupid romantic ideals of a stupid romantic girl being manipulated by a monster (Simon) and as infuriating as she was (I wanted to shake her. Frequently) I liked her better than anyone else in either book, because I had something to hang onto there.

But let's look at the vampires--ruthless icons of cool that they are. Simon Ysidro has been a vampire for so long that he's forgotten how it feels to be human. (He does retain certain characteristics of the gent he once was.) Hambly makes the smart decision of inserting a minor character who hasn't been a vampire for long and doesn't have anybody to teach him how to be one. That character interested me and certainly showed a chink in the vampire armour. It was a nifty decision by Hambly.

And she did an admirable job of depicting credible vampires. Her Undead are creatures who cling tenaciously to life. My question was, Why?

Except for the pleasure of the kill, of the death of the victim, they don't really seem to have a hell of a lot to "live" for. They don't eat, can't have sex, rarely have friends. Vampires don't love (or at least most of them don't.) The pleasures of life have vanished, leaving odd little packrat obsessions and the urge to hunt. (These vampires feed daily. That's a lot of murders in the course of 350 years.)

And I find I just can't get interested in creatures whose emotional lives are so utterly barren.

Which makes the Rockford thing make sense. If you read the essay I linked to, all the reasons Rockford works as a character are laid out: the show followed a lot of the hard-boiled traditions, but Rockford himself is not hard-boiled at all. And he's certainly no romantic loner--just his relationship with his father, Rocky, is enough to make that clear. There is a great moment in one of the episodes I watched recently, in which someone is trying to kill Angel, and Angel suggests he drive somewhere with Rocky. Rockford gets between the two, backs his dad up a step and tells Angel in a completely different tone of voice than he's been using, "You don't go anywhere near him." Rockford is doing his best to help Angel and he knows he might get killed himself, but Rocky? Is not negotiable.

So not only is the show well-written, and not only did Rockford have his quirks like the gun in the cookie jar and doing the reverse 180 in his metallic gold Firebird--he also had a complete emotional landscape, and people and things he cared about, and when he punched someone in the nose his hand hurt.

You can care about a character like that because there's something there to get hold of. And even when you know that on a show called The Rockford Files there is very little chance of the character named Rockford getting seriously injured, it was possible to lose sight of that for minutes at a time in an episode. He rarely went on about his moral code, though he had one, and seldom gave in to being smug (which is what did me in on my former old pal Spenser) although he wasn't above lecturing someone he felt needed it.

He was a very human character, was Rockford. And apparently that's something I require, because I've found that suspicious and self-righteous Henry VIII, ambitious Anne Boleyn, long-suffering Catherine of Aragon... and, moving back in time, conscientious Richard of Gloucester--all of them interest me. It's not just that they are "real" people, it's that they feel real. Even Henry, monstrous as he could be, is sympathetic in the specific way that people are when you let yourself feel what they're feeling--even if you disagree with them profoundly.

The thing about vampires is how completely self-centred they are. It's not just that a creature that's incapable of seeing past the end of his own nose bores me, it's that they don't even have the interesting Henryish feature of attempting to justify themselves to themselves. They're like sharks, except that (according to recent research) even great whites have friends.

So. Apparently I'm not into vampires, and apparently I know why.

Good. Now I don't have any scruples about dropping the subject and moving on to other things that interest me more. Whew!