{"id":18803,"date":"2023-10-11T20:08:27","date_gmt":"2023-10-12T00:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=18803"},"modified":"2023-10-11T20:08:27","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T00:08:27","slug":"detective-by-arthur-hailey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=18803","title":{"rendered":"‘Detective,’ by Arthur Hailey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I\u2019m old enough to remember<\/strong> when the late Arthur Hailey was riding high on a string of bestsellers, some of which (like Airport<\/em>) were made into big movies. I never read any of his books myself, though. When his final novel, Detective<\/a><\/em>, became available cheap, I figured I\u2019d give him a try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Final judgment: By all accounts this is his weakest novel, but even so it leaves me with no desire whatever to read any more of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Malcolm Ainslie is a Miami police detective. He\u2019s headed out of the station to start a much-needed family vacation one day, when he gets an urgent call. Elroy Doil, a convicted serial killer Malcolm helped to put away, is scheduled for execution that evening. He\u2019s announced that he wants to make a confession, but he\u2019ll only talk to Malcolm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The timing is terrible, and it demands a long, fast drive up to the prison in Raiford. But Malcolm can\u2019t resist going. When he and his partner arrive, they have just a half hour to talk to Doil, who admits he committed most of the vicious torture killings he was accused of. But he swears one of them wasn\u2019t his work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before being led to execution, Doil begs Malcolm for absolution, knowing that Malcolm is an ex-Catholic priest. Malcolm no longer has any faith, but he says a few words to comfort him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sets Malcolm on a course of investigation to learn whether one of the killings was actually a copycat. The answer to that will be a shock to the city and the nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Okay, what was good about Detective<\/em>? I guess I\u2019d have to say it\u2019s educational. This is a police procedural and a half. Hailey was famous for researching the bejeebers out of a profession and then describing all its facets in detail in a book. He does this here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s about all I have to say positive about the book (though I did finish it). First of all, Hailey was a dull stylist. There\u2019s not a spark of wit or lyricism in the whole manuscript. There were moments of excitement, but that was pure plotting, without the benefit of prose effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fulsome, overstuffed quality extends to character descriptions. Whenever a character of any importance is introduced, we get treated to a few paragraphs of info dump about them. We learn, all in one gulp, about their childhoods, their careers, and what traumas made them what they are. This is an industrial, interchangeable-parts approach to storytelling \u2013 and it\u2019s boring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The big thing that annoyed me was that the book was preachy \u2013 from the negative side. The author has satisfied himself that all religion is bunk \u2013 though important, for some reason. But all sensible people have rejected organized religion. He wants you to understand that. The one priest in the book who actually believes the Faith is \u2013 of course \u2013 a strident caricature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, the self-conscious political liberalism of the narrative is kind of amusing, considering what\u2019s happened in the decades since the book was published in the 1990s. We\u2019re treated to a sort of old Disney fantasy of an egalitarian society where racial integration is succeeding beautifully, and everybody coexists happily. Little did Hailey expect that this model would not satisfy the Left, who\u2019d soon be calling for the whole cultural edifice to be incinerated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Detective <\/em>was not a very good book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m old enough to remember when the late Arthur Hailey was riding high on a string of bestsellers, some of which (like Airport) were made into big movies. I never read any of his books myself, though. When his final novel, Detective, became available cheap, I figured I\u2019d give him a try. Final judgment: By … Continue reading ‘Detective,’ by Arthur Hailey<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[4914,751],"class_list":["post-18803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-arthur-hailey","tag-detective"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18803"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18805,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18803\/revisions\/18805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}