Appointment with Susan

I have written about Steve Jackson's Appointment with F.E.A.R., the seventeenth entry in the Fighting Fantasy series, before. But to recap, it departs from the series' usual swords-and-sorcery based books to provide a superhero adventure heavily influenced by the Golden Age of Comic Books, and provides unparalleled replay value by hiding the information you need to find the titular meeting in different places depending on which of four superpowers you choose to play with.

One thing Appointment also contains is this encounter, at section 410:

You arrive at Parker Airport and ask the nearest security guard whether anything is happening. "The Silver Crusader!" he gasps. "Thank goodness you're here! Follow me. I'll take you to the Control Tower." You follow him up into the Control Tower where you find the place buzzing with activity. The Air-Traffic Controller greets you nervously. "Have you heard? No? The police are on their way. Some guy calling himself 'the Tormentor' has hijacked a DC10 full of passengers to London. He's mad! No demands; nothing. Says he'll crash the plane. Blames it all on 'Susan'. We don't know what to do. A complete nutter! Is there anything you can do?"

As with many of the book's puzzles, there are several possible ways to resolve this encounter, but the easiest is if you earlier bought a newspaper and read a message in the personal column from someone called Susan to Richard Storm (which one of the possible clues you started the adventure with told you was the real identity of the Tormentor); dialling Susan's telephone number brings her to the airport, where she talks the Tormentor/Richard out of his plan.

Something about this encounter has always sat a little oddly with me, but I wasn't sure why. In a book full of superhero parodies and homages, it just seems a bit of a strange way for the encounter to resolve itself by the supervillain's girlfriend talking him out of the plan (with the implied explanation that the girl she thought he was cheating on her with was actually a private nurse). (There is also a rather strange disconnect between the Tormentor earlier being described as "one of the world's greatest supervillains" and his actual appearance.)

Last year, however, Ian Livingstone published his history of Games Workshop, Dice Men (written with occasional interjections from Steve Jackson) -- needless to say, a book that is absolutely essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in role-playing games, and quite possibly still essential even if you're not. And in early 1977, Livingstone describes an encounter in the tiny top-floor flat consisting of two bedrooms and a small kitchen off a landing area at the top of the stairs on the Uxbridge Road he and Jackson lived in whilst trying to start the Workshop up:

Since our flat wasn't self-contained, anybody could come up the stairs and walk in. And one night, somebody did. My long-suffering girlfriend Lizzie had come over, reminding me as usual that she would never ever consider living with me in such a hovel. At about midnight we heard a loud banging sound coming from downstairs. Somebody had kicked in the front door and was coming upstairs, shouting and swearing: "I'm coming to get her! I know she's in there with you!" I jumped up, grabbed the baseball bat I'd bought in New York, and opened my bedroom door, heart pounding. Below on the stairwell was an angry-looking man propped up against the wall, his head lolling about. He was completely drunk, and he hurled a barrage of expletives at me. With my baseball bat raised, I told him not to come any closer. It was a stand-off, but for how long? "She's coming back with me. Now!" he snarled. I asked him who he was looking for. "Susan!" he screamed. "I know she's in there with you!" I told him that there was nobody by the name of Susan in the flat. Wondering who Susan might be, Lizzie popped her head around the bedroom door. The intruder stared at her, looking both puzzled and annoyed. "Who the fuck are you?" he asked angrily. Without waiting for a reply, he continued, "What's the number of this house?" "161," I replied. "Fuck, wrong house," he grunted before stumbling down the stairs and disappearing into the night.

Livingstone does not mention it, but this has to be the inspiration for the F.E.A.R. encounter, published some eight years later, and perhaps explains why it seems a little odd -- it was based on a real-life encounter, but Jackson never found out who the real "Susan" was!