Thaddeus Beaumont

Thaddeus “Thad” Beaumont’s decisive conflict is with George Stark, the crime-writer identity he created to escape a period of writer’s block. What begins as a literary separation becomes a supernatural division: Stark acts in the world, while Thad’s trances and automatic writing suggest that the connection between them runs deeper than authorship. Thad must eventually recognize his own part in Stark’s return and face the limits of his ability to control either his creation or the sparrows associated with the dead.

Identity and the Making of Stark

During a difficult period from 1973 to early 1975, Thad wanted an identity distinct from his own, believing that the right pen name could break his writer’s block. He chose George Stark in conscious relation to Donald E. Westlake’s Richard Stark persona. The contrast appealed to him: Westlake wrote different kinds of work under different names, and had described writing his own books on sunny days and letting Stark take over on rainy ones. For Thad, those rainy days offered a model for separating creative selves rather than asking one name to contain them both.

The crime fiction associated with Richard Stark also supplied a tonal reference. Thad points to Parker, a professional thief with a single-minded pursuit of robbery, and to the character’s almost mechanical persistence. He recognizes a related quality in Alexis Machine, the central figure of the first and last George Stark novels. Yet Thad’s own first Stark novel did not remain a copy of that model: he says that if Machine’s Way had continued as it began, he would have put it away rather than publish it, but that after roughly a quarter of the book it developed its own rhythm. Stark’s literary identity is thus both borrowed and deliberately made distinct.

George Stark’s books acquire a readership and a recognizable place in hard-boiled crime fiction. Dodie Eberhart, a landlord with a strong preference for crime novels, considers Stark the best of the writers she reads and follows the books from Machine’s Way and Oxford Blues through Riding to Babylon. Her attachment helps establish Stark as more than a private device in Thad’s writing life: the name has become a public authorial identity, with readers invested in its work.

Suspicion and the Pressure of the Double

When Thad and Sheriff Alan Pangborn discuss the murders, Thad reconstructs the elaborate twin scenario that could explain how he might appear to have been in two places. In the hypothetical, a twin hosts a party and takes up Thad’s domestic life while Thad murders Homer Gamache, uses Gamache’s truck, travels onward to New York and Washington, D.C., kills Frederick Clawson, and then returns to Ludlow. The scenario also leaves open whether Liz was part of the supposed deception. Liz laughs at the account, and Alan responds with frank surprise. The exchange exposes the impossibility and dark absurdity of the double as an ordinary alibi, while showing Thad’s ability to turn suspicion into a sharply articulated story.

That imaginative explanation takes on a more threatening cast as Thad’s mental connection with Stark intensifies. While being escorted by police, Thad feels a familiar unease: a fluttering sensation across his skin, pressure at his temples, and a sense that events are about to go wrong. He remembers comparable feelings on the way to Dave’s Market and while retrieving files in his university office. He fears that Stark is somehow present within him and watching, so that speaking carelessly could place someone else in danger. Although Thad apologizes to the officers, he still conceals what he knows; the lies come readily, and he cannot tell whether Stark has influenced them. The bond therefore compromises not only his sense of self but also his ability to speak openly to potential allies.

Trance, Knowledge, and Responsibility

During a later trance, Thad’s private vision returns to Ridgeway in Bergenfield in 1960. He sees his childhood neighborhood transformed into a dead landscape and the sparrows taking flight in a vast flock. At the same time, the birds outside his university window rise together, though Thad does not see that real-world movement. He sits at the IBM typewriter, convinced that Stark can make him take his place at the keys but cannot make him write the book. Thad believes that refusing to write will cause Stark to fall apart or disappear. His resistance is therefore directed not simply at a demand but at the words that sustain the other identity.

Thad’s interpretation of the birds changes as he considers the evidence of Stark’s return. Rawlie DeLesseps has described the sparrows as psychopomps, guides of the dead, but the explanation does not fully fit: Stark is alive again and yet dead and decaying, and he appears not to remember either the birds or the blood-written words, “THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN,” left at two apartments. Thad recalls that he wrote those words himself while in a trance. The separation between author and creation begins to break down: Stark may not know what Thad’s writing and the sparrows signify, but Thad is implicated in both.

The recognition becomes explicit in Thad’s journal-like questioning. Asked who brought Stark back to life, the answer is “The owner. The knower.” Thad understands that these names point back to him and cries that he did not mean to do it. The revelation does not make him a deliberate murderer or a conscious planner of Stark’s return; it establishes that his authorship and his altered states have a causal, frightening relation to the being he tried to keep separate from himself.

The Sparrows and the Final Conflict

Thad’s relationship to the flock is not simply one of mastery. When he and Rawlie reach Gold’s Junkyard and Auto Supply, the dead vehicles across the back acres are covered with sparrows that have arrived without Thad hearing them. Their silent, collective presence makes the birds seem at once like witnesses and agents, but it does not tell him what they intend. Rawlie agrees to lend Thad his car, and Thad is so relieved that his knees nearly buckle; Rawlie adds that Thad should pay for any repairs if the car comes back damaged. The practical negotiation briefly sits beside a crisis neither man can explain.

As Thad drives toward the Beaumont summer house, the flock forms a sharp boundary in the road. A bird lands on the hood of his Volkswagen and seems to regard him with detached curiosity. Thad realizes that the sparrows are not merely beside the route: they cover it, and reaching the house means driving over them. Their presence turns his approach to his family into a test in which forward movement has an immediate cost. The flock neither offers him a clear passage nor behaves like a force he can direct at will.

The sparrows’ agency is also apparent to Alan Pangborn. One lands on Alan’s shoulder, transfers to his hand, and then hops away without attacking him. When Alan tries to brush it off, he checks himself, uncertain what the birds might do. He retreats from the Williamses’ driveway and sees them covering his car, while Lake Lane remains clear. Alan reads their position as a possible staging area, but that remains his inference, not a confirmed explanation. The contrast between the birds’ immense numbers and their selective, quiet movements preserves their mystery even as they shape the characters’ choices.

At the climax, Thad understands the flock as Stark’s escort back to the land of the dead. As sparrows fill the air and settle on Stark, Thad drops his pencil and retreats toward his children. The birds strike and cover Stark as he struggles against them; their arrival converts the image of a death-guide into decisive action. Thad does not defeat Stark by simply reclaiming the pen name or asserting control over the flock. Rather, the creature he helped bring into being is carried toward its ending by an agency beyond either man’s command.

Narrative Significance

Thad’s arc binds literary invention to responsibility without reducing the supernatural conflict to a simple metaphor. Stark’s name begins as a practical solution to writer’s block, supported by a model of sharply differentiated authorial identities. Once Stark becomes physically present, however, the separation Thad sought becomes unstable: Thad’s trances, the blood-written phrase, and his realization that he is the owner and knower implicate him in the return he never intended.

The sparrows complete that pattern by resisting human ownership. They recur in Thad’s visions, gather at places connected to the conflict, and finally carry Stark away, yet neither Thad nor Alan can confidently explain or direct them. Thad’s significance lies in the movement from trying to separate the writer from his creation, to recognizing his own part in the creation’s return, and finally to confronting an ending he can witness but cannot wholly control.