Writing probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Gene Hackman, said Belinda Luscombe in Time. Yet the actor, 81, hasn’t made a movie since 2004, and in that time, he’s written or co-written three novels. His latest, Payback at Morning Peak, is a Western that begins violently. His main character, Jubal Young, finds his mother dead, shoots his father, and tries in vain to save his sister’s life—all in the first chapter. “I wanted to dig myself into a hole so that I would have 300 pages to get myself out,” Hackman says. “I kind of maybe overdid it a bit.”
A few elements of Hackman’s true self do show up in his protagonist, said Michael Hainey in GQ. “I had a troubled youth,” he says, referring to the father who walked out on him and his own decision to leave home at 16. Hackman became a very young Marine, and echoes of that challenge are in the novel too. “A lot of what I experienced as a young man I kind of exaggerated into what this young Jubal may have found himself doing.” Any wisdom that the book imparts, he says, owes to his mother, not to him. “They tell you not to write about your mom in books, but I don’t know how you keep from doing that.”
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