Ah, the wonders of the modern world -- and it's interwebs! Yet another series prompted by something discovered on-line. In this case, a drawing by Alex Raymond (left). That the guy here is wearing glasses and has a pipe clenched between his teeth had me thinking "Hey! that looks like me! I could stage a shot like that!" Which might have been a fun project, but as I considered it, I thought that the archetypical "guy with a gun protecting the damsel in distress circa 1956" had been done enough.
So I flipped the idea.
What if the distressed one was the guy, and the one coming to the rescue was the gal? I kept the image in terms of the distressed one being on the ground (for what-ever reason) with the protector standing defensively above, and got that first image for Osterman & Sainsbury.
This was also a reaction to having seen Atomic Blonde (several times, in fact, as I bought a copy) and I really liked the eponymous, kick-ass character played by Cherlize Theron, so I had that kind of woman in mind when I was working on these. Plus Castle, and Bourne, of course.
And, wouldn't you know it, Robert Ludlum penned a novel entitled The Osterman Weekend? Yep, in 1972. I had no idea that there was an "Osterman" and "Ludlum" connection until I stumbled across it on (what else?) the internet. There's no other connection with these works, and no attempt at tying in to anything in Ludlum's works, I promise.
Where do I get the names I use for these characters and authors you ask? Movies! ironically enough. Pause the credit roll on some movie you've just watched and look at all the potential names just hanging up there waiting to be mixed and matched! That's what I've been doing for the last couple of years. Osterman was someone's name on some movie that I wrote down on a list, and Ludlum is known for writing espionage novels (the Bourne novels, for instance) and it seemed an apt name to "drop" in a reviewer's blurb.