From time to time (not too often nowadays), I am seized by a
hankering for a whodunit, or (in a different mood) a thriller. Such a yen is as elemental and
sensuous as that for a milkshake or hamburger. Yet while the latter are a snap to satisfy, the only check
being a rather abstract concern about cholesterol and expanding waistlines, it has become increasingly difficult
even to half-satisfy the craving for thrillers or mysteries. We must sadly conclude that the chefs
and confectioners have done their
work better than have the authors.
Time was, in the 1950’s, myself a lad of eight and nine,
such satisfaction could as readily be had as that of a hamburger -- both being
limited only by my own exiguous financial resources, the principle income to
which was provided by a weekly allowance, first of a nickle, later of ten
cents. This happy
circumstance, which has proven unreproducible in later life, resulted from the
perfect intersection between my uncomplicated ladly desires, and the
workmanlike industry of the team of anonymous ghostscribblers at the Stratemeyer
Bookbarn, who regularly churned out the Hardy Boys.
Eheu! ubi sunt?
[Footnote:
Now even those simple pleasures, while of course subjectively unrecapturable,
cannot easily be objectively
reviewed, since the whole series was bowdlerized, dumbed-down, and politically
corrected, beginning just around the time I stopped reading them.]
Herewith, something in the forlorn spirit of A Guide to
Fine Dining in Oshkosh, or The Antiquities Museums of Gary, Indiana,
our attempts to provide anyhow a
bit of reflection and guidance.
*
Commercial Break
A private
detective confronts the uncanny;
an ecclesiastical
mystery:
Murphy Calls In a
Specialist
*
A Superior Thriller
[Well, at least, that was the title I started with, as I
began reading Michael Connelly’s Chasing the Dime. It flags midway; towards the end, I just wanted it to
wrap it up and get it over with -- the fewer arbitrary last-minute
plot-twists the better.]
The background to Connelly’s thriller is highly
promising: hi-tech industrial
espionage, such as has been brilliantly depicted in the movie “Duplicity”, and
the thriller Paranoia, by Joseph Finder, and (even better) Neil
Stephenson’s unclassifiable Cryptonomicon. And the immediate premise, the McGuffin as it were, is
likewise delightful: A sciency
guy, trying to make a killing in business, having moved into a bare apartment
after his divorce, and with (accordingly) a new landline, immediately gets a
host of calls for a mysterious “Lilly”;
the callers never leave their names, but hang up. Apparently he was assigned a
discontinued number previously used by a high-priced call-girl. Instead of simply asking the phone
company for a new number stat, he is
intrigued, and is drawn in deeper, and deeper, beyond his depth …
There are some excellent high-tech vignettes early on (I
once worked in that milieu, and can testify), but they peter out. The real disappointment, though,
is that the author, instead of trusting his instincts (for some voice
within was surely calling to him
here) and allowing his protagonist to pursue his ananke unfettered, trumps up some frigging dimestore-psychology
miniseries sentimental backstory,
“explaining” why the protagonist
reacted as he did. He
thus progressively abandons any engagement with the unconscious drives that
impel us, with results that are ultimately banal.
To be fair … The prose is literate, intermittently humorous;
and there is just one Chandleresque
fragment:
She had looped over her shoulder a purse that looked big enough to hold a pack of
cigarettes but not the matches.
~
C.S. Lewis somewhere (in time, in retirement, I might
recover the passage) surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines, and notes that that
of Orpheus retains its power to
spellbind, even in a bare-bones form, whereas that of almost all worthy modern
novels, become as dust upon such
summary.
We venture now
upon that territory where
words fail … We have ourselves
depicted the obsessive pursuit of das Ewig-Weibliche, in the story “Lost and Found”, reprinted in the
collection I Don’t Do Divorce Cases (available here).
~
[Update, 29 October 2013] People keep viewing this post, even though it doesn’t
really say anything interesting.
So at least I’ll say something more
along these lines, even though it won’t be especially interesting either.
Exhibit B: The
King of Torts, by John Grisham (2003).
The couple of times I’ve tried to read a Grisham book, the
writing was so bad -- simply at the paragraph level -- that I had to toss it
aside. But this one begins
really well. Some tasty
phrasing (“He stutter-stepped forward, [ankle-]chains rattling.”), and
surprisingly likeable characters, with fine writerly observation of the family
dynamics in the country-club scene.
The ostensible plot premise is ridiculous, but I figured it was just a
ruse -- the first layer of the onion, which would be peeled,
Spanish-Prisoner-fashion, until we reached the center and either found the key
or (post-modern fashion) found it hollow.
The initial premise, which sets the action going, is
perfectly adequate for genre fiction:
A company has been testing an experimental drug to treat addiction ,
which alas turns some of its users temporarily into homicidal maniacs. Testing is discontinued and the
drug is never marketed. Fair
enough so far. Only now the
novelist adds: In addition to the
usual sort of testing in faraway hapless third-world countries, some testing
went on right in Washington , on hardcore addicts-- but in such secrecy that
there could not be, without inside information and enormous investigative
effort, any way of proving this.
And, the small handful of actual murderers having either died or
recovered from their drug-induced homicidal mania, and the victims being all of
them the usual lowlifes, the books have been closed on these cases, as being
just the sort of thing that goes on all the time among the marginal population
in D.C. -- Okay, a bit of a stretch, but we are
happy to pay out thus much rope to the author, and see where he will run with
it.
But then, Grisham
goes off on an absurd tangent:
A shady character contacts a burnt-out no-rep Public Defender, and
offers him wealth beyond the dreams of avarice if he will simply … Well, not so
simply, because it makes no sense, neither in Realityland nor in fiction.
The P.D. is supposed to go somehow snuffle-out the
‘families’, the ‘bereaved’, of the late lowlifes; whom-all, given their life-styles, were not exactly close.
Next, he is supposed to REVEAL THE WHOLE DASTARDLY
PLOT; and offer to pay them off,
with millions.
Now, by intra-novelistic hypothesis, the dark facts were a
priori unlikely to surface; whereas this ‘strategy’ is playing with
dynamite.
OK so, we who have been schooled on David Mamet and other
artisans of the scheme-within-a-scheme, will already have surmised …
-- No -- Cut;
life is too short; not even
worth dissecting to criticize.
At the point at which I bailed out, the novel threatened to become a Tendenz-roman -- an anti-tort tract:
“That’s outrageous!”
No, Clay, that’s mass tort
litigation at its finest. That’s
how the system works these days.”
Now, abuses of tort law are indeed worth fighting and even
satirizing; but fiction is not an
especially effective vehicle, especially if you start out with a plot that
seems to take place on Jupiter.
~
Relax with the Murphy brothers,
tough-talking, pistol-packing,
two-fisted private eyes:
http://murphybros.blogspot.com/
~
Relax with the Murphy brothers,
tough-talking, pistol-packing,
two-fisted private eyes:
http://murphybros.blogspot.com/
~
I won’t have anything to say about the works of Tom Clancy,
which are too well known to need notice, but merely advert to an apparent deep
cleavage in his oeuvre, and an odd publishing decision by Putnam. They put out a nice hardbound
edition boasting “Two Complete Novels”, with font large enough for these aging
eyes: Red Storm Rising, and
The Cardinal of the Kremlin.
Yet, offering these bound
together is like confecting footwear out of an oxford for the left foot, paired
with a wooden clog for the right.
For while The Cardinal of the Kremlin is quite in line with the
other Jack Ryan thrillers, with a solid plot and a scattering of excellent
lines, Red Storm Rising -- not one of the Ryan series -- seems to be written for
twelve-year-olds. I flipped
through the thing in increasing disbelief -- not a single good thing to say
about it anywhere. It read more
like the script for a video game than a real novel: and indeed, pursuing the thing into Wikipedia, I learned
that such is exactly what it has become.
The decent thing to do in a case like that, is to use a
separate pen-name for potboilers that are unlikely to appeal to readers of your
main line.
Seeking a book suitable for a bedtime story, I picked up a "Grantchester" novel by James Runcie, specifically Sydney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (consciously echoing titles from the Harry Potter series). It has two things going for it: a not-quite-contemporary English setting; and an ecclesiastical detective protagonist (the cover calls him a "clergyman-sleuth", rather recalling the old designation of gentleman-cambrioleur).
[Update 18 July 2015]
I thoroughly enjoyed Joseph Finder’s 2014 thriller Suspicion. The only other book of his I’ve
read -- likewise excellent -- is his industrial-espionage thriller Paranoia
(2004). Only after-the-fact did I realize that the books share
an identical premise to trigger the action.
In both cases, a likeable protagonist engages in a piece of
legally sketchy behavior, not for selfish reasons, but to aid another. And in both cases, another party, with
a sinister agenda of their own, discovering his role, use that leverage to grab
him by the short-hairs and force him into extremely delicate and dangerous
behavior.
The fact that I didn’t realize until afterwards that, to
that extent, I was reading the same book over again, simply illustrates the
role of motifs in literature. It
is no crime to swipe them, to reuse them consciously or unconsciously. In the Middle Ages, that was taken for
granted. And even today, in
genre fiction, it is recognized to be no harm no foul if the book or movie
employs such tried-and-true vignettes as the Spy Called Out of Retirement (the Cincinnatus motif), or car chases, or femmes fatales.
About halfway through, though, Buried Secrets begins to unravel. Oh well.
[Update 19 July 2015]
By an accident of meteorology, I found myself in the atrium of the local
library, a lethal heat outside, and A/C like an ice-blanket within. Seeking an excuse to remain amid the
soothing cool, I browsed a bit, and stumbled upon another Joseph Finder -- Buried
Secrets (2011).
Today, sheltering indoors, I curled up with the book. This time, parallels to Suspicion leap to the eye immediately.
*
Both novels focus on a teen daughter, product of swank New England
boarding schools, abducted by a sinister crime organization (in one case
genuinely, in the other only initially-supposedly, a Latino drug cartel).
Now, I myself never had a daughter, and didn’t
attend prep school: but with the
slightest tip of the die, I might well have done so. Therefore these themes are of personal interest, as being
might-have-beens, real in a closely adjoining alternate universe.
So, I read and imagine. Along the way, I meet the slang that
has come into currency since the Beatles broke up.
*
The central target of elaborate blackmail is a very wealthy man who made
his pile in high-finance, hedge-fund type activity. In either case, he has an over-manicured tarty trophy bride,
whom we see in her “soapstone-topped” sparkly kitchen. In both cases, in addition to his
criminal pursuers, the magnate is being closely monitored by Federal law
enforcement (FBI bzw. DEA), who are wise to his game.
~
Seeking a book suitable for a bedtime story, I picked up a "Grantchester" novel by James Runcie, specifically Sydney Chambers and the Shadow of Death (consciously echoing titles from the Harry Potter series). It has two things going for it: a not-quite-contemporary English setting; and an ecclesiastical detective protagonist (the cover calls him a "clergyman-sleuth", rather recalling the old designation of gentleman-cambrioleur).
Unfortunately, the plotting is weak, the style merely
workmanlike, and the theological content -- which made the Father Brown stories
so uniquely fine -- nonexistent. (I
tried my hand at one of those -- Father Brown meets Sherlock Holmes -- here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-narrow-escape.html
)
Only in the very last story does the author comes up with a
nice ‘high-concept’ premise:
During a performance of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, when the actors
all stab Caesar, apparently one of the knives was real, and the gentleman
playing Caesar dies for real. Only
-- that plot isn’t really pursued, even along such elementary lines as
autopsy. Instead, Runcie
goes in for a spate of virtue-signalling, loftily condemning those who, in
1953, failed to adhere to the politically-correct line on homosexuals prevailing
2012. He makes the murderer
be a homophobe; boo.
No comments:
Post a Comment