I think I may have to give up reading thrillers. The older I get, the more tender-hearted I seem to grow, and the harder it is to read about people in peril. Meanwhile, as I get older, the thriller writers get better and better at their job. Matthew Quirk’s Dead Man Switch was excellently written, and I thought it might kill me.
This is the second volume in a series starring a hero named John Hayes. Hayes previously worked for yet another (the recurrence of this theme in literature surely must indicate some public hunger) super-secret, deniable military unit tasked with assassinating the very worst terrorists in the world. The operation, called Cold Harvest, does not officially exist, and all its operatives know that if they’re caught they’ll be liable to capital punishment. But they also know the thing has to be done.
Hayes has retired, withdrawn to a secret location with his wife and stepdaughter. For strategic reasons he has agreed to be officially listed as a fugitive. In the eyes of the world he’s a traitor and a hunted man.
But he gets called back to Washington. Several members of the Cold Harvest unit have recently died in accidents. The accidents have been meticulously orchestrated, but they’re not coincidental. Someone is trying to wipe out the unit members.
But that, as it turns out, is the least of it. The real plan is much bigger than that, and diabolically organized by a master criminal choreographer.
Good plotting is a fine thing, and Dead Man Switch is marvelously plotted. But what impressed me even more was that the characters were extremely well drawn and psychologically complex. I cared about them – which made reading about their sufferings all the more difficult.
Author Quirk also has a knack for elevating suspense through withholding information from readers, only to spring it on them at the strategic moment. He writes very short chapters, which makes the story seem to move faster.
Dead Man Switch is a masterfully written novel, superior in style, in plotting, and in characterization. If you relish action, I’m sure you’ll like it. I’m not sure I could handle another.
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, HOWEVER IMPROBABLE, must be the truth?”
In 1889, Arthur Conan Doyle, struggling young London physician and aspiring writer, had one of those magical moments that save a career and change literary history. He’d already sold a detective story called A Study In Scarlet to an English publication, and now an American publisher, Joseph Marshall Stoddart of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, was asking for a follow-up. His company proposed to start an English version of their magazine, and they wanted the rights to a new story that would be printed both in Britain and America (music to a writer’s ears!). Stoddart invited Doyle, along with several other writers (Oscar Wilde was one of them, and would influence one of the characters in the final story), to a dinner at the Langham Hotel on August 30. Doyle agreed to bring Sherlock Holmes – who’d never been intended as more than a one-off character – to life again in a serialized novel to be called The Sign of the Four.
The story opens in Holmes’ and Dr. Watson’s lodgings, where Holmes is suffering a period ennui for lack of work. (This is the first time we learn of his cocaine use, to which Watson strenuously objects.) Then they are visited by Miss Mary Morstan, a young woman Watson finds extremely charming. She tells them that a mysterious benefactor has been sending her periodic gifts of valuable pearls. Now she has an invitation to visit a man named Thaddeus Sholto, who tells her she has been grievously wronged, and he wishes to put things right. Holmes and Watson agree to accompany her to see the man, who proves to be a hypochondriacal esthete (the Wilde influence). He says he is the son of a recently deceased retired officer from India, who was a close friend to Mary’s father. But his father, he says, cheated her father, taking possession of a treasure that should have been shared by both. Now his brother Bartholemew also refuses to divide the wealth. Thaddeus asks them to go with him to face Bartholemew and get Mary’s rights for her.
But when they all go together to see Bartholemew, they find him hideously murdered and the treasure missing. The police, when they arrive, arrest the hapless Thaddeus. Holmes and Watson take their own line in the case, following up Holmes’ scientific observations and deductions. Eventually it will all lead to a reckless chase down the Thames in steam launches, and a lurid confession from the true murderer.
One can discern an acquisitions editor’s hand in the framing of The Sign of the Four. To appeal to readers’ tastes, Doyle has added a couple elements missing from A Study In Scarlet. First there’s a romance (one is happy for Watson in finding a wife, though Doyle never knew what to do with her in later stories and fans have happily wasted tons of paper arguing back and forth how many times Watson was married). Secondly, there’s a chase, employing about the fastest transportation technology available at the time.
TSOTF has never been one of my favorite Holmes stories. Mainly (as I said in my previous review) I don’t much care for the foreign excursion; I like Holmes in his element – yellow fog and hansom cabs, top hats and bowlers. And Doyle generally does foreign cultures somewhat poorly – this story features three Sikhs in India named Mahomet Singh, Dost Akbar, and Abdullah Khan. Of all those name elements, only Singh would be used by actual Sikhs. The rest are Muslim names, absurd in context.
Doyle was not the first or last detective writer to distort police procedures for the sake of his plot, but the deviations seem pretty extreme here – would a police inspector actually allow a treasure box that’s material evidence in a homicide case to be carried to a private person’s home before examining it before witnesses? Whatever happened to chain of custody?
This is also the story where Doyle’s memory fails him, and he informs us Watson is suffering from a leg wound from Afghanistan, rather than the shoulder wound he had in A Study In Scarlet. More inexhaustible fuel for controversies among Holmes scholars.
Still, it’s a Holmes story, and not a bad one in its best parts. (The quotation at the top of this review, one of Holmes’ best-remembered lines, comes from TSOTF.) I always had the idea that it was this story that made Sherlock Holmes a public sensation, but that’s not true. It was the short stories, which Doyle would now begin writing, that would really put him on the literary map.
British police procedurals tend to be a tad more sedate than American ones. More brain work than gunplay. Author Neil Lancaster breaks that rule as much as possible in The Devil You Know, part of a series set in Edinburgh, Scotland, starring police detective Max Craigie and his mysterious friend Bruce Ferguson. They are both former military snipers. Bruce gives justice a nudge now and then by eliminating the occasional very bad criminal. Max is uncomfortable with this, but they owe each other their lives, and he can’t help sympathizing.
An incarcerated felon, heir to an important crime family, has come forward offering to provide the police with explosive information – information that will bring down a major political figure. In return he wants a transfer to a more comfortable prison – he also stipulates that Max Craigie must not be involved in any way. When the police attempt to carry out the deal, it goes spectacularly wrong. And then Max and his colleagues are in it full-bore, running down leads, hacking computers, and doing surveillance with drones. A lot of bullets will be fired and blood spilled, as well as dark secrets uncovered, before it’s all over.
What I liked best about The Devil You Know was the characters. Author Lancaster is good at painting vivid personalities. There’s quite a lot of cop humor here, which is not all that common in British crime novels – though the c.h. generally takes the form of simple insult, taken affectionately. The weakest aspect of the dialogue is the occasional awkward info dump. The author hasn’t quite mastered that.
An important plot turn involves the heroes’ lives being saved by pure coincidence. That’s a weakness in plotting.
Still, all in all, I found The Devil You Know an entertaining and suspenseful novel. The relationship between Max and Bruce, which is advertised as central to the series, actually plays very little role in this story.
I wonder about the increasing popularity of vigilante characters in contemporary crime fiction. Does it indicate a sense among the public – one too subversive to be plainly stated – that our justice system isn’t really doing its job?
Sam Archer, hero of One Way, is a New York City policeman, formerly a London policeman (it’s complicated). He’s on the counterterrorism squad, and in his last adventure (One Way is Book 5 in the series) he got injured badly enough to put him out of action for a while. It’s the last day before his much-anticipated return to work, and he’s relaxing on a park bench when he sees what he quickly identifies as a team of bodyguards moving a protected person. The protected person is a little girl, nine years old. Suddenly Sam spies a hit team attacking them, and he shouts a warning. Soon bullets are flying, one bodyguard (they’re federal marshals) is wounded, and Sam has no choice but to join the marshals in their escaping car. They end up taking cover in a 22-floor high rise building, whose ground floor is soon occupied by the attackers. The bad guys successfully cut off communications, and the little group of marshals, plus Sam and the protectee, are trying to find a safe hiding place – as the attackers begin hunting them down from room to room.
We’re operating generally on the Die Hard model here. Our intrepid hero, outgunned (joined here by a kick-butt female sidekick, for the sake of diversity), faces increasingly long odds, as their opponents turn out to be a lot better prepared than you’d expect – and to have surprising backup resources. Secrets are revealed, only to be topped by deeper, darker secrets. Betrayals are disclosed and further betrayals perpetrated. It all culminates in a rooftop showdown, with a bomb ticking in the basement.
For me, it was all a little much.
I’ve bellyached about the Cinematic Thriller Formula before. This formula dictates that the novel must work like a contemporary action movie – the drama has to ratchet up constantly (nothing wrong with that), and the limits of human physical endurance (as well as the laws of physics) can be generally ignored. Each narrow escape may be plausible in itself, but cumulatively they defy credulity. The strategy is to keep the audience so excited they don’t have time to engage their critical brains.
The problem with that is that novels are, by nature, a slower medium than movies. Most readers can, and do, pause for a break frequently. When we pause, some of us ponder – which conflicts with the author’s purpose.
Also, a movie usually doesn’t last much more than two hours. But a novel can take many hours to read. Being old and weak of heart, I dislike being kept in a state of fight or flight for ten hours straight. It wearies me, and I had a rough weekend.
For all that, I can’t deny that One Way did its job effectively. It was a little odd to read an American story written with English spelling and orthography – “kerb” for “curb,” for instance. But the author did a good job. His prose could use some pruning, but it worked.
Over the past week, I watched the first three original Planet of the Apes movies. I didn’t know the stories. I knew only what anyone familiar with sci-fi over the years would know, a plot point even the sequel spoils in its own trailer. But the whole movie doesn’t turn on that revelation. It was just an interesting surprise to 1968 moviegoers–no doubt part of what made it a successful movie.
You’ve heard that the original Star Wars and Jaws movies were blockbusters that changed moviemaking ever since. You probably know parts of the score from those movies. They have a tone of adventure that feels like a movie. Planet of the Apes leans into the strange and alien. This trailer captures that tone with minimal spoilers. The score invokes the wild unknown of 1960s sci-fi. It isn’t the music of adventure but of survival.
The director, Franklin J. Schaffner, wants us to experience the space crew’s voyage and their crash landing in a sea. We see water breaking through ship’s seems as if in the crew cabin ourselves. The three-man crew drag themselves to shore, and the first real cynicism comes for Taylor (Charlton Heston) laughing loudly at his earnest crewmate planting a pocket-sized US flag next to the water. The crew treks through a canyon wilderness, afraid that, though the air is fine, there may be no drinkable water or living plant life.
The first 30 minutes follows this track. Will they survive or won’t they? This kind of story tension gets me scratching my head, because if you tell viewers upfront the apes rule the planet, how long will they tolerate the main characters scrambling along on their own? Maybe if we were learning about the crew as well-rounded men, it would be more interesting. But we only get the wilderness and three men looking for water.
On the other hand, Richard Schickel wrote in Life Magazine, May 10, 1968, it was the best American movie he’d seen that year–“faint praise,” he says, “considering the competition,” but still he and his four-year-old daughter loved it.
I had thought the first film was going to focus on racial tolerance or bigotry, but it’s really an anti-war movie. The ape society is governed by religious zealots who won’t tolerate evolutionary theories and stamp out any hints of civilization beyond their own. God made apes in his own image, they say. Humans are just mute wildlife. Most of the hostility is in apes treating humans as non-sentient animals, and the story is driven by the threat Taylor poses to their carefully managed social order. The overarching theme, which starts with questions from the crew after they abandon ship and resumes with chimpanzee Cornelius revealing his exploration of ancient human ruins, is the question of what happened to humanity. The authorities won’t tolerate open discussion of humans once having civilization or being anything more than they are today. For viewers, though, if humans were more on this planet, what happened to them?
That’s what the famous scene at the movie’s end hammers home. Taylor realizes he didn’t crash on another planet. He returned to Earth 2000 years later, long after mankind had destroyed civilization through endless warmongering and the A-bomb.
Planet of the Apes (1968) is good period sci-fi. There are things to complain about (like the fact the humans are described as being unable to speak but in fact they are completely mute —they never make a sound), but it’s a good story. I laughed at the scene of government leaders being confronted with facts and ideas they rejected.
Sometimes, especially in English crime fiction, your run across what I’m inclined to call a “Police Cozy.” It’s a story about cops, but low on the action and violence. That kind of story suits me very well.
Author David Carter is producing a series about Chester (England) detective Walter Darriteau. He works in a sex-balanced headquarters (they’re always sex-balanced these days, at least in fiction), and cooperates well with his colleagues. His partner, Karen, is an attractive blonde, but they both have outside romantic relationships. The Missing Man (one of the least charismatic book titles I’ve ever come across) is a novella featuring the regular characters.
A middle-aged woman calls the police and informs them, matter-of-factly, that she wants to confess to a murder. Nearly 25 years ago, she says, she killed her philandering husband. Now she wants to come clean.
Walter and Karen go to her home to interview her, and she tells them she didn’t actually commit the murder herself. She hired a couple criminals to do the job. She doesn’t in fact have any evidence of a crime. The perpetrators are dead, and even the purported burial site is under a concrete overpass (called a “flyover” in England), so it would be difficult to dig up. But her husband disappeared and hasn’t been heard from since, so she’s confident he’s dead.
Walter’s and Karen’s bizarre job is to try to ferret out any evidence or witnesses that might still be around after a quarter of a century. In time all will be revealed – and I have to admit it was a surprise.
The writing in The Missing Man was good. I enjoyed the story. Based on this short sample, the series appears worth checking out.
The voice on the other end was like dark chocolate that smoked and drank too much and didn’t give a d**n.
If you crossed Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin with Ian Fleming’s James Bond, you’d pretty much get Alex Mason, hero of Odin, the first volume in a series by David Archer and Blake Banner.
Alex Mason is an agent for “Odin,” an officially nonexistent espionage agency operating for the US government. Its head is known as the Chief, but he’s sometimes called “Nero,” an obvious hat-tip to Nero Wolfe, of whom he is a near clone. He summons Alex to his office as Odin begins, telling him that he’s concerned about an agent he’s had in place in Manila, who has suddenly disappeared. That agent was part of a small, strategically placed cell of assets working against the Chinese. And now it seems they’ve been discovered.
In fact, as Alex arrives, Chinese agents are already moving against the cell. Quickly one is murdered, two go on the run together, and another is captured. Alex needs to find the two fleeing assets and get them to safety. As he begins that task, he is joined by a friendly – and gorgeous – female Mossad agent.
In terms of writing craftsmanship, I find no fault with Odin. The characters were sharp and interesting, and the dramatic tension escalated steadily. The prose was often delicious, with lines like, “He turned and strutted over on crisp little feet.”
The plotting impressed me very much. A plot development that looked like implausible coincidence turned out to be perfectly plausible, by neat authorial jujitsu. An apparent contradiction resolved itself, paying off in heightened suspense for the reader.
I was less happy with a moment of justification of adultery, but I’ve overlooked worse moral sins in a novel.
Bottom line – Odin was a superior thriller, crafted with high professionalism. It was a good time with a book, well worth the purchase price.
The “Leveller” trilogy rounds itself off in a satisfying way in Dan Wheatcroft’s No Room for the Innocent.
This series, as you may recall, involves intertwining plots centered on two main characters – Inspector Thurstan Baddeley of the Liverpool police and a man known as Nicks, who is a top-level assassin dispatched by a high-level, secret government organization to kill the worst criminals the police can’t touch. The two men know each other, and share a grudging respect, though Nicks is always one step ahead of investigators.
But now there’s a problem. Nicks’ handler, Don, has been murdered. Because Don is his only contact in the organization, he’s suddenly out in the cold and vulnerable. When he learns that his controllers have been less than altruistic in their operational aims, he can think of only one person to go to for help – Inspector Baddeley.
The writing in these books is adequate, with occasional grammatical lapses. But the author’s knowledge of police work (he’s a former cop himself) makes the settings and procedures authentic, and I liked the characters a lot.
I enjoyed this series, and recommend it, with only minor cautions for grown-up themes and violence. Conservative opinions are occasionally hinted at.
My city is a midsized metropolitan area in the middle of the middle of the United States. It’s flat and sprawling and a lot like a lot of other places, with no distinguishing characteristics geographic or otherwise. If my city was a suspect in a crime, the eyewitnesses would have a tough time describing it. You could probably say the same thing about me.
Think of The Big Lebowski. But imagine it, not as a dark parody, but as a full-on, dead-serious 21st Century Noir novel. That’s more or less the ambience of Lou Berney’s Dark Ride.
I’ve reviewed a couple Lou Berney novels before, and I liked them very much. I haven’t read one in a while now because the publisher prices them high, but I got a deal on Dark Ride. And it’s very, very good.
Hardy “Hardly” Reed is a classic slacker. Long, shaggy hair, tee-shirts, board shorts, flip-flops. He holds a minimum wage job as a “frightener” at a horror-themed amusement park, and the rest of his time is spent playing video games and getting stoned with his slacker friends.
Until one particular day, when he’s at the Department of Motor Vehicles, getting an extension on a parking ticket. He notices a pair of small children sitting on a bench outside of an office. He’s puzzled by how quiet they are. They don’t laugh, they don’t play, they don’t talk. They just sit staring, like commuters on a bus. He approaches them to say hello, and then notices small, perfectly circular marks on their bodies. Someone has burned these children with cigarettes.
Something comes over Hardly then that he’s never experienced before. He discovers he cares. He tries to get help from a DMV worker, then from Child Protective Services. Nobody seems greatly concerned. The bureaucracy is snowed under with work. Hardly decides that if nobody else will help, he will. He can’t afford to hire a private detective, so he’ll learn to investigate on his own. Usually in his life, he’s given up on any task that seemed difficult or dangerous. But he can’t let go of this one.
Will Hardly, just this once in his life, be good enough?
I read Dark Ride almost in one sitting. It proved to be a grimmer story than I expected, but that only pulled me in. This is an excellent and original thriller. I recommend it. Cautions for language, sex, and drug use.
Installment Two of Dan Wheatcroft’s “Leveller” series. I still haven’t entirely made up my mind what I think about Wheatcroft’s work, but I have to say I enjoyed reading Ask the River.
Like the previous volume, this books follows two different main characters – Inspector Thurstan Baddeley of the Liverpool police, and “Nicks,” the mysterious hit man who eliminates very bad criminals under the direction – and protection – of some shadowy, unnamed authority.
The main problem with Wheatcroft’s books is their complexity. No doubt this mirrors real police work where – in contrast to the average cop show – detectives work on many cases simultaneously. It does tax the reader’s memory at times, though.
There’s the case of an old man, a Polish Holocaust survivor, who dies in his bed, overdosed on sleeping pills – it might be natural causes, but Baddeley is suspicious. There’s a neighborhood terrorized by punks on motorcycles, whom the police can never catch or stop. There’s a crooked businessman found hanging from a bridge abutment. Among others.
Meanwhile, Nicks (he doesn’t really advance the plot much in this book) dispatches several monsters by untraceable means.
This book was ultimately something of a downer, though there’s a nice rescue scene toward the end. But – as I keep saying – I just like these characters and enjoy following them. (Also, the books are free on Kindle right now.)
As always, I have quibbles. Wheatcroft is not at his best with grammar. He uses the word “intercede” wrong, speaks of someone being “in the throws of” something, and has never figured out how to conjugate the verb “sat.”
He makes a firearms error when he assumes a revolver can be effectively silenced. He mentions some of the CIA’s more unsavory accomplishments, which might indicate a political sentiment – though, on the other side, numerous jabs are taken at political correctness.
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