Character Profile
Tom Hunter is the violent protagonist of the Ted Denton thriller series which includes ‘TIGHT LIES’ and ‘HOSTILE’. A blunt instrument deployed by The Unit, a private kidnap-rescue organization assembled by the shadowy Charles Hand, known as the Hand of God, Hunter is a powerful, larger-than-life character to write. Relentless, honest, unpredictable, good humoured, violent and consistently flawed. He represents the extremes that can exist in all of us, serving perhaps as an exemplar of the fragility of the common human condition. As a consequence, there is a relished freedom that accompanies writing this character. He’s not afraid of the consequences of his savage actions nor ashamed by attitudes which may often be incongruous with a moral and politically correct society. The writing can reflect this. Hunter is a visceral character. He’s the anti-hero that the reader can at once find repellent yet remain inexorably drawn towards; unable to look away from, compelled to know more. He straddles the line of right and wrong and that incongruity can make the reader feel uncomfortable. There’s work to be done for the reader to rationalize how they actually feel about Hunter given society’s pervasive conditioning of us all and how we see ourselves in that context.
Despite accepting what he is, at a base level, with an overt bloodlust and rampant carnal appetites, Tom displays a ready, often self-depreciating sense of humour and an underlying intelligence which belie his veneer of unrepentant and often unedifying machismo.
Hunter accepts his manifold mistakes and challenges with an undercurrent of bravado. He shows a degree of self-awareness, whilst embracing a relentless torrent of painful introspection through the recognition of his own personal demons. It cannot be said that he truly likes himself. Nevertheless, he embraces his fierce capabilities and understands what drives him. The deep contradictions that ride as an unwelcome passenger with all of us, however much we may battle against them, are evident in Hunter’s ever-present discomfort with normality. He’s a man haunted by persistent waking nightmares left over from a life absorbed in so much violence, addiction, and the murder of his true love - ripped brutally away as a consequence of his own bad choices. The disconnection he feels from belonging within a civiised society is exacerbated by the pervasive feeling that he doesn’t actually deserve that privilege. Instead Tom clings onto sanity by his ragged fingertips and a pervasive belief that if he just keeps moving forward and makes an attempt to show some sign of accepting social conventional and interaction, then he might just get away with it unnoticed.
Tom’s lust for extremes in all things is perpetuated by an overriding need to feel something relatable. To feel alive. The daily torment he endures from an onslaught of retrograde memories may serve to generate the unwelcome self-illusion that he’s already residing within a version of Hell itself. The physiological responses to pain, adrenaline and high octane risk-taking, induced by the human body’s real-world response mechanisms, serve to prove to Hunter that he’s still very much alive and kicking. And he’s determined to make a dent in the world in order to prove that to himself.
Tom Hunter is a larger than life character and a figment of Ted Denton’s creative imagination. He’s brought to life on the page, born from a desire to present a protagonist to the world who is as flawed, conflicted and perhaps as contradictory as many people today happen to be themselves in real life. There’s inherent risk, of course, in that readers may prefer to know where they stand with a lead character before they start reading, which is a notion that can be traced across the history of story telling. It’s a notion that doesn’t sit comfortably with Denton. Bad people do good things and vice versa. Now you’ve just got to figure out which side you’re on.
The action drives the books and Hunter is a key proponent of this. However, in positioning his lead character, Denton did not wish to emulate many other action heroes of the written word. Unlike such characters where the world is black and white and the reader easily knows where to place their allegiances, there is much that may actually prevent us from being drawn to admiring or siding with Hunter. Or admitting that we may do so to ourselves given the uncomfortable reflection upon us it may bring.
Hunter’s choices and motivations are often self-centred, a fact which he acknowledges freely and unremorsefully. He does not feel that he is on the side of right versus wrong. He doesn’t actually feel that he deserves to make that linear distinction. Hunter knows that he possesses a dark and tormented heart. As inescapable as the demons of his past which persistently haunt him, he is ultimately captured by an insatiable bloodlust for killing, born of self-loathing and a life of addiction, misdeeds and pain.
Despite this plain truth that the character does not actually like himself and doesn’t feel comfortable within a normal, conventional world doing typical things and reacting in expected ways, he does possess a self- depreciating sense of humour. He has a sense of self-awareness, appreciating that his best uses are potentially only as a blunt instrument to get a dirty job done. He navigates his world with swagger and a cavalier charm whilst intent only upon his mission. This simple myopic focus is surely a distraction from too much self-introspection and a need to shed the unnerving sense that he may already be inhabiting a form of Hell itself. Perhaps there is little of that in all of us. It’s certainly something that resonates with the author himself, however uncomfortable it may be to conjure.
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