“A Delicate Truth”

It is not axiomatic, that the ideal Vorleser of a work  should be its author.  (One would not wish to sit through a performance of Heart of Darkness, or A Brief History of Time, under those terms.)   But  David Cornwall turns out to be a perfect interpreter of John Le Carré, in a recent audiobook recording.

Three of the secondary characters have a distinct local accent:  Glaswegian, Welsh, and Irish.  His rendition of these  fixes in pleasure and memory, what are in any event well-sculpted personalities.  The Welshman, who shows up one day in a remote village, rickety caravan in tow, and with a mysterious past (and demons lying inside), is a reprise of the Jim Prideaux character, who so memorably opens Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Two of the central characters -- professional diplomats -- have professionally and personally  rather flat affect.  (Again, cf. TTSS's Smiley.)The author is sufficiently confident about his own work, to let that happen, without worrying that we’ll be bored.

The story-arc hangs together nicely, moreso than in most of the thrillers we have waded through.
The novel (published 2013) is quite in tune with the times, in selecting, as theme, the beating-up on contractors in the defense/intel field.

Footnote:  The title of the book is as smarmy as that of  An Inconvenient Truth.   But it is a sight better title than Our Kind of Traitor , which we critiqued here.   One wishes to believe that neither stemmed from the author, but were foisted upon the novels by some publisher's underling (chained  drooling  in the basement, and let loose only for such functions) who normally has the last word in such marketing-related decisions.

Hammett

 Four old stand-bys, which I read decades ago;  and now at last re-experience as audiobooks.  We won’t summarize the plots (which you can read in Wikipedia), but broadly characterize the work.
 

Red Harvest (1929)

Dashiell Hammett was long associated with Communist causes.  I first read his first novel, Red Harvest, while in Berkeley, surrounded by leftist radicals of every stripe and shade;  and rather looked forward  to a political roman à clef.  But there is no serious politics in the thing, not even a nod to it.  There’s a Wobbly guy, whom we meet briefly before he disappears without a trace;  but that is merely by way of local color, just like there’s a prize-fighter, a gambler, and a bootlegger.   The “Red” refers to blood, maybe;  nothing to do with Marxism.

Indeed, it’s amazing that some critics saw this as a communist yarn, even after reading the book. Personville is ostensibly a mining town (Anaconda), but we never meet an actual miner.  There is no mass-action -- indeed, no actual masses, nor even so much as a single active workingman.    They’re all just lumpen.   It’s not Marx/Lenin, it’s Marat/Sade.

No more than Marxism does realism apply to Red Harvest, though that term is often bestowed upon Hammett.   Actually the word is not worth fighting over;  it has been soiled by an ilk of critic who restrict its use to what is sordid.   Leaving that aside, Red Harvest has little in common with such realistic novels as Buddenbrooks, Effi Briest, or Esther Waters, being closer in spirit to German expressionism.

We don’t normally look for escapist fiction to be ‘realistic’ in the everyday sense.  And in terms of epistemology, Red Harvest is less believable than a ghost story.  The Op’s omniscience about the hidden dealings, covert alliances, and clandestine betrayals  of the local underworld (which is to say, everyone in town) far outsparkles the scraps possessed by the perps themselves, let alone the police, who (in accord with all genres of private-eye  thrillers)  are clueless.   There is not even a formal nod to ratiocinative elucidation -- no Little Grey Cells or “You know my methods, Watson”.   Rather, the Op just blunders along, shooting and getting shot at, landing haymakers and getting slugged on the kisser, then periodically comes out with some elaborate out-of-nowhere explanation of events, usually along the lines of “When Willsson was bumped off on MacSwain’s orders, Reno fingered Whisper to Noonan, until Pete the Finn dropped a dime on Dinah, who was secretly working for the Old Man.”

The setting for the action, an unspecifiable place nicknamed “Poisonville”, isn’t really like the situated urban landscapes that would later characterize noir.   The lawless burg is like nothing so much as Brecht’s Mahogonny -- you might even suspect an influence, except that the Brecht/Weil opera had its Uraufführung a year after Red Harvest was published.  There are also affinities with the landscape of the „Naturtheater von Oklahoma“ in Amerika, by Kafka (who had never visited America), written in the 1910’s and fragmentarily published posthumously.   A story-arc of the later radio series “Johnny Dollar”  reproduces the general sense of pervasive rot in an entire small-city or large-town.    The detective of Red Harvest is also more like Johnny Dollar (insurance investigator) than the later classic P.I.s, since the Continental Op, like Agent Dollar, only acts private; he is actually given assignments by the Continental Detective Agency, an echo of Hammett’s earlier employer, the Pinkertons.  (Another reason it’d be tough to put a Wobbly slant on Red Harvest.)

To call Hammett’s technique “realist” (and that, in a commendatory sense) is off-base.   The setting is more like a pinball-table, or (in later ages) a video game.  There is no more plot than in a game of pinball.   Hammett has taken the lawless landscape of a Wild West town, and overlaid it lightly with the urban aesthetic that would be perfected by his disciple Raymond Chandler.

The main other character  is a wised-up gal, who knows the score because she has males in her thrall.  If it were a Western, she would be named Dolly; in the event,   she is named Dinah.   She catches on quick that the Op doesn’t precisely know what he is doing, but is improvising -- winging it.  Stir up the pot, see what floats to the top.   She shrugs and accepts this, as she must the quirks of all the many quirky men she has known.  She joins him in the racket:

If stirring things up is your system, I’ve got a swell spoon for you.

-- Dinah, in Red Harvest (1929), to the Continental Op

(We have looked at this approach in a recent sketch, Simulated Annealing and the Art of Detection.)

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt "Poisonville"

The Dain Curse (1929)

The structure of this work is peculiar.  Narratively, it is a concatenation of three separate novelettes, each of which is brought to what, in other circumstances, would amount to a satisfactory mystery-story conclusion  within itself (the bar here being set  not especially high).  But they are tied together (would-be interwoven, though it doesn’t quite work) by the detective’s insistence  that the apparent individual solutions  are but mirages, that it all has to be interconnected at some deep level, the explanation of each isolated item  springing from the same deep taproot.   And in line with that, various characters we’d thought (and hoped) to have been done with, keep re-appearing out of nowhere.  Unfortunately, rather than leading to any genuine depth, this tout-se-tient (ou devrait se tenir) approach to his craft  involves the author in impossibly contorted explanations -- not even ingenious, just far-fetched.  And the abysmal upshot is that, instead of the classic scene in which the sleuth gathers the surviving house-guests around the fireplace and crisply lays out sequence and explanation of events, we get a long-winded tacked-on after-passage, in which brand-new plot-points are brought up for the first time in the course of the exegesis.    It is like an inverted shaggy-dog-story:  first we get the disappointing punch-line, and then the rambling anecdote-fleuve of the shaggy dog.

The book is also marred, especially towards the end, by the icky solicitude of the detective towards the girl (who has been nothing but trouble).   It’s not so much that it’s a December/June affair, as that the author himself is operating under obscure repressions -- which, however, briefly part in an allusion to algolagnia.   (An even more wince-making subplot weakens the Godfather novel, concerning a woman suffering from eurycolpia.  Mercifully, that part was omitted from the movie version.)

The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Sam Spade is voiced by Michael Madsen;  and as you might expect from his roles in “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill”,  he’s got a real rough edge to him, and a voice like coarse-grit sandpaper.  This differs from the Continental Op of the previous novel, who alternated awkwardly between a sort of rough draft of the tough-guy model, and a touchy-feely character mooning over the multiply-handicapped girl.

Whoever voices Gutman wisely decided that no-one can outGreenstreet Greenstreet, so he simply channels the latter, syllable for syllable and sebaceous chuckle as prescribed.  And again, it’s fun to listen to.  The pleasure of Greenstreet is mostly auditory anyway, not visual.

The novel, and the movie made from it, are satisfactory in every way.   At antipodes from the manie d’expliquer of the long-drawn-out, Hey-Jude conclusion to its predecessor from the year before, the dénouement is classic -- crisp and efficient, indeed scarcely even interested in explaining anything or getting at the truth, since “All the law wants is a fall-guy.”   And there --   stands --  Wilmer.

Bye-bye, Wilmer.

The Thin Man (1934)

All the characters are voiced by William Dufris.   He does a creditable job at all of them, especially the detective (Nick Charles); but, oddly, his female characters sound, not like real females (hard to do for a man) but like contemporary twenty-something meta- or metro-sexual males  with that weird drawl that some of them fancy.

The detective here is as different as can be from the ones in the two earlier novels.  He is droll;  an inveterate tippler (like Hammett himself);  and by no means a loner, but married to a woman with whom he can exchange quips.  That is a perfect formula for Hollywood; the resulting movie was successful, and had many sequels, all of which used “The Thin Man” in their titles.   Unfortunately, the “thin man” of the original novel  was not the continuing detective-hero, but a murder victim we never actually lay eyes on.   He is, in fact, a classic example of l’Arlésienne -- oft referred-to, but always “off”;  the novel might have been titled “Six Characters in Search of a McGuffin”.   Since the mysterious unseen figure that all the characters orbit, like planets around a dark star, no longer actually exists at the time of the action,  the tale is almost a shaggy-dog story.   Indeed, the novel contains (pointlessly) a shaggy-dog-story within the shaggy-dog-story:  a tale of cannibalism in the Old West, supposed to illustrate the morbid psychosexual interests of the Thin Man’s adolescent son (and thus, presumably, mark him for the reader  as some kind of suspect), but which never amounts to anything, nor figures later in the book.

For notes on other mysteries & thriller, try this:
=>  The Thriller Literature

Simulated Annealing and the Art of Detection

“My way of learning  is to heave a wild & unpredictable monkey-wrench  into the machinery.”
-- shamus Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon (1929)

Dashiel Hammett’s P.I.’s find themselves in large, chaotic situations, in which the methodical self-discipline of, say, Dragnet, won’t get you anywhere.   Joe Friday is scrupulous, professional, polite;  Hammett’s guys  are none of those things.

Nor do they follow the cool, cold-blooded approach of what we might dub “Newton’s method “of successive triangulations and approximations.  Instead it’s: stir up the pot. Stir and observe, stir and observe;  add bullets to taste, p.r.n.

cf. Newton’s method of repeatedly refining an initial guess.

~

The police want to grill a man they suspect of having abused and murdered his step-daughter, but have no tangible evidence.

“I don’t know.  What are we going to ask him?”
“If he reads the Evening News. … Christ, Tommy, we can ask him what his favourite colour is.  I just want him in here, under pressure, so we can see what happens.”

-- Val McDermid, A Place of Execution (1999), p. 205

~

And thus it is with Murphy, Private Eye.  He is no master of empirics nor of ratiocination, like Holmes;  nor of intuition into souls, like Father Brown;  but he’s got heart, and he can take a punch, and he’s got a gun;  plus what’s a fella to do?  He’s got a Mission.

So Murphy has what starts out as yet another hopeless case:  His so-called “client” is a ditsy dame with no simoleons to pay him;  plus she gets bumped off practically at the outset;  but he soldiers on.  Because that’s what soldiers do, when they’re on a Mission.

And so it looks hopeless but, he stirs the pot a little, tries this and that, and the next thing you know …

To follow this sobering  yet inspiriting  adventure, simply click here.

For more from Murphy -- philosopher and P.I. -- check out his blog:

=>   http://murphybros.blogspot.com/

~

In sum:   Jiggle the system, let it settle into a local equilibrium;  then jiggle again.  Repeat (with decreasing strength of perturbations as the ideal is neared).

Related to this is an epistemological principle, valid for scientists and detectives alike:   Don’t jump to conclusions.   Or, in a quantum-computing metaphor, don’t provoke a premature collapse of the wave-function.  Keep the various possibilities  juggling in the air, until one or more can be definitively ruled out.

 

The Pelican -- Briefer please

This week, John Grisham has  not one  but two novels  on the NYTimes bestseller list.  And the whole back page of this week’s New Yorker is taken up with an ad for these:  suggesting that an audience of (relatively discriminating) New Yorker calibre  might be interested.  What is the attraction?

And so, despite a recent bad experience with another Grisham potboiler (panned here), like Charlie Brown having just one more whack at the football held by (reliably) unreliable Lucy,  I reached down a well-known title from my wife’s discard shelf:  The Pelican Brief (1992).

It’s kind of a catchy title;  further, the basic premise of the thriller -- the murder of multiple Supreme-Court justices -- has a compelling logic to it:  such an Eingreifen into the politico-legal landscape would indeed have much more far-reaching and long-lasting consequences than most assassinations.   And at the hands of a former lawyer (like Grisham) an engrossing glimpse into the ins and outs of Constitutional theory and practice  should be central to the plot, and quite instructive.  

And what a movie it might have made!   Had I the good fortune to have directed it, a good third of the screentime would have been devoted to courtroom drama:  but this time, not to the sordid details of some random murder case (as in most such dramas) but to matters of weight to the Republic; to the (generally high-level, non-grandstanding) pleadings before the Supreme Court; and to serious discussions of all sides of the issues  in chambers, among Justices and clerks:  fine legal minds  grappling with crucial conundrums.  Only once the reader had been drawn in to caring about the issues at hand, and familiarized with the stances (well-founded or otherwise)  of each of the Justices, would one, and later another, be bumped off.   It is the basic principle of the classic dinner-party murder:   The reader has to be skillfully introduced to each of the potential victims (and suspects!), so that he cares about them or at least can recognize them, before the foul deed is done.   Otherwise we’re simply down amid the muck of the police-blotter.

Not only does he do absolutely nothing of that, but, amazingly for a reputed professional, Grisham makes what should count as an authorial Rookie Error:   First comes the slaying of a character we don’t know from Adam (one of the Justices, barely sketched-in);  then, before the blood is dry, and before reader has had time to assimilate that atrocity (one cannot call it tragedy, in Aristotle’s sense;  genuine tragedy has to be built-up-to) and attempt to care about it, another Justice is slain (in grotesquely pornographic circumstances  that itself is an authorial offence against the dignity of the Court), thus “stepping on” the original effect.  So that it feels more like a fairgrounds cockshy  than like anything which might have interested Sophocles.

(For a while it seems as though, despite having skimped on the victims, Grisham intends to make good via due diligence on the suspects:  there are extended Oval Office scenes, featuring a phony unprincipled President, a scheming power-hungry Chief of Staff, plus the heads of FBI and CIA, who, to any properly-brought-up progressive, are villains ex officio.  But nothing ever comes of it.)

The central character is a law-student who gets interested in the case.   In accord with the socio-literary pieties of our times, it is a she, and quickly introduced as a gorgeous athletic brilliant self-possessed do-it-all feminist heroine (“cheerleader … graduated magna cum laude with a degree in biology … planned to graduate magna cum laude with a degree in law, and then make a nice living suing chemical companies for trashing the environment”), and is given a scene in which (though arriving late to class) she effortlessly shows up all the boys  who have been clownishly  ducking and dodging, unable to answer the lecturer’s trenchant questions.   Well, fine (sigh);  and useful for the movies.   Dramatically, the choice of such an outsider to get drawn in to lethal and unsuspected depths, is an excellent old chestnut of the Man Who Knew Too Much school  (cinematically brilliantly depicted in, for example, “Six Days of the Condor”).   Why such a person, with no especial connections, working alone, and stranded out in Louisiana or somewhere, is able almost instantly to penetrate to the solution to the case (and this, without leaving the library), where the police, the White House, the FBI, the CIA, and a special spontaneous Let’s-Put-On-a-Play scratch-team of Supreme Court employees who throw themselves as amateurs  into their own investigation (in another kind of movie, of the Bad News Bears motif, these junior sherlocks would have been the ones to crack the case, though here this wrinkle is immediately forgotten) all mill around  spinning their wheels and getting nowhere,  is left unexplained (and puts the plot down into the adolescent-wet-dream subbasement of Superhero fantasies, quite foreign to the taste of Eustace Tilly’s cognoscenti).

As a side-thread, she is having an affair with her ConLaw professor (author checks off that box;  naturally the silver screen will require a bit of that sort of thing).  But sociopolitically (in the current climate), the matter is dicey.   The reader is supposed to sympathize with everything that WonderDamsel does, including her choices for her love-life.  But the professor is male, and superordinate in the power-structure, and several years her elder, and therefore (as dictated by the pieties, vid. sup.)  scum.  What to do?   Well, the author makes him a grotesque drunkard, so that we can all righteously sneer down at him (and, interrestingly, though at a semi-conscious subtext level, suggestive of impotence, hence he is merely a toy  and never an actual sexual threat  -- the figure of the Castrated Rapist, as it were),  and then -- startlingly early from a narrative standpoint, given the man’s prominence in the early sections (thus, a structural defect) -- summarily yanked from the stage, as though by the proverbial shepherd’s-crook of the cartoons:  somebody smashes his lecherous head like a watermelon, or whatever.    Cross out politically-incorrect love-interest;  call Casting for a socially acceptable replacement.

This arrives in the form of a crusading Bob Woodward-style newsman (he even works for WaPo),  who, despite his journalistic eminence, takes orders from her meekly, like a little boy  (for she had suddenly, after a few days on the run, become an expert in clandestine tradecraft).  And though he is of course attracted to her (like the entire world, Princess), and though he is repeatedly (at her invitation -- she calls all the shots) drawn into potentially libidinous situations, he ever and again simply sleeps on the couch, dutifully neutered  in line with the requirements of present dogma (at which later ages will gape).

*

The featured blurb, from the NYTimes Book Review, atop the cover of the paperback edition my wife initially fished out from some remainder-bin (“Half off all titles”), stated:   

“A genuine page-turner.”

And here I must concur, in both a good sense  and a bad.

It is the sort of book which is best consumed in circumstances where you do not invest overmuch attention or insight:  either amid the hectic distractions of air-travel, or, on the contrary, late on a tired Friday, before bedtime, the brandy-glass sampled, then emptied, then re-filled, mind wandering off the page and lazily back to it, the depictions of campus affairs evoking fond (or frightful) memories of one’s own, the chase-scenes allowing you to lie back and close your eyes, imagining how your favorite director might stage them -- nothing much riding on all this  one way or the other.   Amid the general background murmur of workmanlike prose, there is the occasional phrase (“They power-schmoozed with senators”) felicitous by the relaxed standards of the post-prandial, pre-somnial bedside reading-lamp, or cinematic imagery (“She draped her legs across his lap” -- the later screenwriter will bite his lip, wondering whether to swipe the trope, or to can it and come up with his own take), so that  for the first hundred pages or so  the pages really did turn effortlessly, as by themselves, requiring no more digital exertion than the text did mental. 

But in time, it dawns on the reader  that the mainspring of the killings really is that blasted pelican -- endangered down in the bayou, thus foiling the envirocidal plottings of an oilman (boo!) whom we eventually meet as a cartoonish melding of Mr Kurtz and late-life Howard Hughes, who is somehow able to recruit a host of killers including a Carlos-the-Jackal lookalike -- ah but the plot is too stupid to summarize.  By then we are no longer turning the pages, but flipping them, faster and faster, like those day-calendar sheets blowing rapidly off in a cinematic wind to symbolize the passing of time.   The thing drags, and bogs down…  It is as though Grisham had received a contract for a 400-pp. novel, but had misread it as “300”, and only after he had expended his last twist and least idea, did his agent inform him that, per contract, a further hundred pages were required, so that Grisham had to grind grind grind, or perhaps hand the task off to some uncredited amanuensis, like the apprentices who finished-in the details after Michaelangelo had drawn the main scheme and toddled off to the winehouse.

*

Ah well, the man continues to get away with it, and to bank the results, as ever new generations of unilluminati are born-yesterday.   No doubt his latest efforts will make it to the screen as well -- or, in accord with continuing developments, perhaps becomes comic-books or video-games.

Bait and Switch

John le Carré’s  Our Kind of Traitor (2010)  begins as auspiciously as any mystery-thriller in memory.

Among the chief pleasures of the mystery genre, is that the reader walks through its world with heightened senses:   Every oddity, each detail, may be a clue;  and the mind gathers them up  like a squirrel stashing-away nuts.    Ultimately, these clues need to cohere in some plausible way, or the reader feels cheated -- we have wasted our time.  But getting there is half the fun.

The old Cold War master’s recent novel  deftly adds another layer to that.

First, we meet an English academic couple, vacationing on a Caribbean island.   They meet a seemingly rich but rather louche Russian -- or rather, he scrapes acquaintance, via a dubiously ingratiating resort manager.   They agree to a game of tennis.  From there, things get a little strange, but not in a way that you can quite put your finger on.

So far so good -- the set-up is reminiscent of those superb opening scenes in David Mamet’s movie thriller-cum-puzzlebox “The Spanish Prisoner”.

But now comes the next narrative layer.

In the second chapter, the story suddenly breaks off, and we unexpectedly find ourselves amid the brick walls of a basement room, where our vacation-pair is being patiently, expertly interrogated;  it is unclear by whom.   This interlude lasts but a paragraph, as though a mental fugue, then we are back on the island, to resume the game.

Then again, we are back in that blank basement room.  Narratively, it is a flash-forward. The two interrogators have acquired names;  the interrogees  are wary but cooperative.   Are they themselves suspected of wrongdoing?  -- At this point, the rather dreamlike switching between the original “real-time” tennis-story, and this eerie alternate venue, is atmospherically quite effective, and reminiscent of William Kotzwinkle’s elegantly structured  The Exile.

Evidently the interrogators already somehow know a vast though lacunary amount  about some equally vast but perplexing conspiracy  that centers on, or at least involves, the Russian.   As in a police procedural, they proceed through the recounting of a seemingly innocent random tennis-match,  whose (bored) spectators consisted of the Russian’s friends and relations.  The female interrogator asks the wife:

“So where were the wee girls located at this point?  Below you?  Along the row from you?  Where, please.”  (Urgent italics in original.)

Somehow, such details are ineffably important.  The reader grows increasingly intrigued.

~

Only, it turns out the whole thing is an authorial scam.  None of those details come to really matter, most are unexplained;  and the only reason the interrogators even have a clue about the island events  is that the vacationers brought them a tape made by the Russian.   In other words, there was not some intricate pre-existing intelligence project, with Analyst-Notebook-style webs of interconnections  lining the walls;  so all that guff about where the wee girls sat  and the like, was just flimflam.

At that point, the only twist that might have saved the plot  would be if the interrogators turned out not to be MI5  (as we, and the vacationers, had assumed), but rather (in a false-flag situation) some sinister group connected to the Russian.   But no such luck.

In the end, the book does not deserve the category of mystery-thriller, but merely thriller (generally a lesser genre, except in cinema),  and not a very thrilling one at that.

Post-scriptum:
Given that le Carré spent decades writing about British counterintelligence, and given the history of Kim Philby and his fellow-moles, the title Our Kind of Traitor quite definitely should point to a Cambridge Five kind of scenario, in which an English agent covertly working for the nation’s enemies  is tolerated far too long, since he is “our kind”, one of the Old Boys, the Right Sort.   But nothing of it.  There are no traitors here, Cantabridgian or otherwise;  the title seems to have been imposed by the publisher, on a whim or by mistake.

~     ~     ~

By way of somewhat compensating  for even having taken up your time with all this,  here are a couple of snatches of “found poetry”  quarried from the course of three hundred pages of prose.

In the road above the basement,    an ambulance tears past,

and the howl of its siren

is like a scream for the whole world’s pain.

~

The rain was rattling like hailstones   on the car’s roof.

The windscreen wipers   groaned and sobbed

as they tried to keep up.

~

Holidaymakers   with sticks and sunhats

peered into windows   of souvenir  shops.

Tableau!

[For additional reviews, see  The Thriller Literature.]

[Update] In 2019,  le Carré published a better novel, though again with a bad and ambiguous title:  Agent Running in the Field. That could be read with run as either transitive or intransitive: "Agent-running in the field"; "Agent, running in the field".  And neither fits the plot.
Once again we begin with a court game, in this case badminton; and once again, the Russkies figure prominently.   Only, this time he got it right.

Does the President go slithering through Russian “back channels”?

Once more, no, no reference to current events.   Just a bit of history here.

Dark doings in October of 1961, a time of crisis:

Folded inside the day’s New York Times, Bolshakov carried a twenty-six-page letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy -- a personal letter … Khrushchev proposed that the two leaders deal one-on-one,  using private letters to bypass old bureaucracies …
Khrushchev had written that Kennedy could ignore the letter  and that would be the end of it,  no one would ever know it happened.  But Kennedy answered with ten pages of his own ….

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p. 238-9

And, after the crisis had been resolved:

There the negotiating stopped,  but the secret personal correspondence  between the leaders  continued,  often in pretty chummy terms.

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p. 456

(In diplomatic history, “back channels” are a traditional and appropriate way of doing business, as are back rooms.)

The Thriller Literature (expanded)

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, somewhat 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

[Kindle] [Nook]

*

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).

~

Blogspot for detective fiction:

http://discretionassured.blogspot.com/

~

[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/

~

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.

[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.

[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.

 About halfway through, though, Buried Secrets begins to unravel.  Oh well.

~

 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.

 

 ~

E. Phillips Oppenheim was once an extraordinarily popular author.  His The Spy Paramount (1935) was recently re-issued in a handsome paperback, in the series “British Library Spy Classics”, for a song -- or, remaindered at Daedalus, for a snatch.  The back-jacket copy accurately describes the book as a forerunner of Ian Fleming’s “James Bond” series -- a debonnair spy, of no particular politics, who zips from locale to locale as though in a movie.  Since the book was published shortly after the Machtergreifung, and is set in western Europe, I had high hopes, for a period feel at least.

The book is terrible.   Plot, dialogue, characterization, sense of period or place, all are throwaway.   Where Raymond Chandler’s advice to thriller authors whose muse had fallen mum, was to “have someone come through the door with a gun” (after which, you’ll think of something), the earmark of this school is to have bigwig snarl or splutter something --

“That is all very well, General,” the Prime Minister declared impatiently.

The titular character is never shown actually doing or saying anything intelligent, nor as displaying genuine bravery as opposed to bravura, but he gets praised constantly:

“Fawley is the only man in Europe today who can save us from war.”

It’s like the fantasy of a nine-year-old.  From the psycho-developmental perspective, the book represents a case of arrested development, well below the level of, say, the Hardy Boys, who are modest, resourceful, brave but not foolhardy, respectful towards their detective father from whom they learn much.

 

~

John Grisham, The King of Torts (2003).  (Rescued from my wife’s throwaway-pile, retained to some period of cerebral insufficiency and rainy days.)

(1) The novel begins with a hapless Public Defender, who is stuck with the case of a typical pointless young black D.C. murderer.   Only, it turns out there’s a funny drug angle --  prescription drug that might have homicidal side-effects.

(2) Later, a Man of Mystery  enters the scene from nowhere, and (unaccountably) gives the P.D. inside dope, that leads him on towards fortune.

(3)  Later still, an old-hand superstar tort-lawyer takes our erstwhile P.D. into his confidence, proposing a partnership.

So far, nothing much of interest.  But I stuck with it, imagining developments that really would not have been than difficult to unroll:

(1’) Manchurian Candidate scenario.  International implications.  The random D.C. shooting was only an experiment.  Ultimate target:  The President.

(2’) M. of M. is working for …. (shadowy entity  too numinous to name).

(3’) A “Spanish Prisoner” scenario -- obviously the superstar is playing the P.D., maybe even working for the company P.D. is suing.

Only … None of that comes to pass.  Instead, it’s all just more of the same -- this lawsuit and that lawsuit, ultimately descending to the level of some mismixed bricks in Baltimore.  It is like reading the Baltimore police blotter for a year -- nothing is significant in itself, and nothing relates to anything else.

How could the author bother to write such drivel?  Why do people buy it and read it?