When I saw Ilie Nastase's 1987 novel The Net on a table at the Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Book Fair for only $10, I didn't hesitate. I didn't know he'd written any novels but it looked like a must-read.
This turned out to be the second of two novels by Nastase and it was quite good. The front and back covers are both outrageously misleading. It's not sexy or salacious at all and what's advertised as the substance of the book—famous tennis star can't keep his hands off of his adopted daughter and protégé—is actually a plot development that only occurs at the very end and feels tacked on and unconvincing. The real story concerns how the Hungarian champion Istvan Horwat is getting too old to have too many more chances at winning tournaments. He's been living large and avoiding any commitments beyond tennis. He has a recurring nightmare in which the tennis net becomes a net that traps him like a fish underwater. In real life, it's simply age that will trap him and force some kind of reckoning. When his best friend and doubles partner dies in a plane crash, Horwat adopts his newly orphaned 10-year-old daughter. Most of the book is about how a very self-centered and indulgent celebrity attempts to alter the shape of his life to include this huge change. It's a balancing act that Horwat isn't especially good at, eventually realizing that there's more to being a father than paying for boarding school. His romantic life transforms as well, with his lovers not always getting along so well with his traumatized daughter, and everyone's emotions being raw and near the surface most of the time. There's absolutely nothing smutty or titillating in here. Even by the standards of, say,
the 1920s, the risqué factor is practically nonexistent. The real story is about maturity. The progress from child to young adult is paralleled by
a childish adult whose inner life eventually matches his age. But it's quite well written, at least in this translation from French to English by Ros Schwartz. It's an absorbing story with many felicities and interesting characters. Real-life characters such as Billie Jean King and Jimmy Connors are folded in among Nastase's inventions. And there are some curious tennis
professional insights such as Horwat's being "forbidden to swim" because "swimming sets up
the wrong muscles for tennis". Is this true? Is it or was it an instruction that professional tennis players follow? The Net was good enough that I'll look for his other novel. The first line is "A murmur of disappointment accompanied his interminably slow approach to the net".
2025 April 21 • Monday
Dwight Gustafson's music for Flame in the Wind is the 853rd Soundtrack of the Week.
The "Title Music" is a mixture of pageantry and lyricism and has some of the same stirring qualities as Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings music. Gustafson then establishes a three-note motif for "The Journey of the Inquisitors", surrounding it with strings and horns and a part for lower-pitched instruments that gives it an inexorable momentum. The feel gets more urgent in "The Birth of Carlos", with both speed and intensity increased, until a segue into a more romantic and relaxed mood for the end of the cue. The familiar motif opens "The Monks Escape" with staccato horn bursts and propulsive orchestral parts that end up giving way to smoother, longer tones.At times it's similar to Ernest Gold's Exodus score. Ominous playing from the cellos and other lower-pitched instruments establish an appropriately gloomy atmosphere for "The Dungeon", which is followed by a mixture of suspense, adventure and romance in "The Capture of Carlos". The image on the album cover shows someone being burned at the stake and "Processional for the Auto-Da-Fe" has a steady drum beat and horn fanfares as someone marches to their frightening fiery fate. "The Tribunal Hall" has some Herrmannesque ostinati and effectively conveys tension and dread, with the ostinati bleeding into the next cue, "The Torture", with more Herrmannesque swells and repeated figures. Strings present a reflective and sombre mood for "The Penitent Returns to Christ", with some satisfying harmonies and effective contrast with the wind instruments when they come in. Finally there's "The Burning of the Martyrs", straightforward underscore with short, sharp notes played by the horns while the strings keep everything on edge and moving forward.
2025 April 18 • Friday
It's been decades since I first heard that Ross Thomas wrote really good books. My memory was jogged by seeing a favorable Ross MacDonald blurb on the back of Raymond Obstfeld's The Goulden Fleece. But then it turned out that Ross Thomas had indeed also positively blurbed an Obstfeld novel, apparently one called Masked Dog. Somehow I ended up in San Diego with a copy of Ross Thomas's Cast a Yellow Shadow. I'm not sure where this book came from. I didn't buy it in San Diego and I have no memory of bringing it with me from Brooklyn. But there it was anyway so I read it. And it was great.
What's so great about it? First of all, the writing style. It's economical and understated but also wry and precisely descriptive. Word quality and quantity are both perfect. Second, plot. This has to be one of the most intricately and tirelessly plotted books I've ever encountered. All fiction is by definition contrived but we only complain about a book's being contrived when the seams show. Like we know what movie special effects are but we don't want to see the strings. Thomas is like a juggler who can keep a dozen different things in the air while also jumping rope. So what's the story? Our first-person narrator, McCorkle, is happily married to a journalist and quite content running a restaurant in Washington, D.C. But then his bookie calls him up, explaining that one of his partners in crime was attempting a pick-up down at the docks and got jumped by two other guys. This isn't any of McCorkle's business but a fourth man intervened on behalf of the first guy and got stabbed. When they searched him for ID, all they found was a piece of paper with McCorkle's address on it. The mystery man turns out to Michael Padillo, an old friend, business and combat partner. McCorkle is settled down now but he used to be a man of action. Padillo never stopped, jumping from espionage to arms dealing. McCorkle hasn't seen him in a long time but they're still best friends. It should be a pleasant reunion but, alas, the dominos start to fall now. When McCorkle brings Padillo back to his place, he finds that his wife, Fredl, has been kidnapped and the people holding her demand that Padillo assassinate their prime minister on his upcoming visit to Washington. They'd already tried to hire him for money and he'd refused. So now they're doing this. All of this is established extremely quickly. There are many moving parts in this story and Thomas is quite nimble at getting it down on the page. His touch as a writer is dazzlingly light and assured. McCorkle and Padillo don't kid themselves. They know that even if Padillo pulls off the assassination, McCorkle's wife will be killed. As will McCorkle and Padillo. So the idea is to play along and try to pull off a Mission: Impossible-type plan. Enlisting the bookie's gang of criminals and three extremely dangerous and untrustworthy agents that Padillo has leverage against, they'll try to locate and rescue Fredl, foil the assassination attempt and expose the guilty parties involved. There are a lot of twists and turns and double crosses as well as satisfyingly terse treatment of action and violence. It just zips along, suspenseful and amusing in equal measure, and as much as I wanted to find out what would happen, I also didn't want it to end. I'll be keeping an eye out for more Ross Thomas books for sure. The first line is "The call came while I was trying to persuade a lameduck Congressman to settle his tab before he burned his American Express card".
2025 April 16 • Wednesday
After reading the Invasion USA novelization by Raymond Obstfeld writing as Jason Frost, I decided to check out a novel with his real name on the cover. The Goulden Fleece is the first in a series about a thief and conman named Harry Gould. It's quite amusing, striking a tone somewhere between Donald Westlake's Dortmunder and something in the Wodehouse neighborhood.
The action starts in New York City where Gould, deep in gambling debt and behind on his rent, is getting beat up by a couple of guys who work for one of his bookies. Once he gets back to his apartment, which his landlord has locked, he has to finagle a way in so he can get his emergency stash of cash and flee. But first he'll have a fling with a sort-of girlfriend that he doesn't especially like but needs to manipulate so he can get back into his apartment. (He's always in the mood and he's a bit of a cad.) The story of how he and this woman met gives an idea of the tone. Harry is telling us the story in his voice and from his perspective. Unfortunately, I turnd out to be the drunk. Harry goes to Los Angeles and needs some money to tide him over until he can set up a new stolen cars and credit cards routine like he had back east. When he sees an ad in the paper for a bodyguard to a very wealthy man, he decides to apply for the job, telling numerous lies about all the experience he doesn't have, thinking that this will be a good take the money and run opportunity. Almost immediately things go very wrong, with a bomb exploding and Harry all of a sudden wanted for murder by the police, the FBI and the mob. Gould races around LA, falling in and out of the clutches of all three, trying to figure out what happened or at least just get the hell out of town, neither of those things being easy to do. The feel of the book is like one of those 1930s movies that just zips along and is thoroughly enjoyable and wastes no time. Obstfeld crafts a satisfying mystery while making sure there's something funny on every page. And Gould is an endearing character. I'll definitely check out the other books in the series. The first line is "After he hit me the first time, I figured for sure he was one of Harrison's men, but after he hit me the eighth time I began to have doubts".
Arlene and I had first met about two months ago in a scene straight out of a hundred "B" movies. She was sitting at a bar all alone when this drunk guy slides up next to her and tries to pick her up in the crudest possible way. She calmly attempts to ignore the guy, but he's so drunk that he's practically drooling in her drink. Finally, a tall stranger who's been watching the whole thing steps up to the drunk and suggests that he leave the lady alone. The drunk sneers at the stranger and tells him what he can do with his suggestion. The stranger then punches the drunk in the face, sending him sprawling to the floor.
2025 April 14 • Monday
For the 852nd Soundtrack of the Week we've got Dave Grusin's score for Murder by Death.
I remember really liking this movie when I was a kid but am kind of wary to watch it again now. It probably isn't nearly as good as the Charles Addams cover art. "Main Title/House of Twain/Sand and Wang" starts with a slightly ominous and mysterious bit before going into a peppy and humorous light orchestral section that clearly signals the intention for everything to be in good fun. Then there's a return to the mysterious and suspenseful so we can get the party started. Stereotypes—"Chinese", "French" (or maybe it's supposed to be Belgian)—kick off "M. Perrier/Mushroom Idiot/Sam and Tess". A gong and then an accordion, of course. But then Grusin has some fun with familiar idioms, like the muted trumpet private eye blues at the end of the cue. Conventional dramatic underscore with another gong hits and a return to the lighthearted feel of the first track provide context for that good ol' plot device, the "Broken Bridge". The main theme gets repeated for "Strange Weather", which opens with some nice harp playing, and continues the mood for "Angry Cat and Cozy Fire". Some of the wind instruments get short solo statements for "I'll Park the Car/Cobwebs" with harp and electric piano taking over at the end. "Yetta" returns us to suspense with a nice blending of different orchestral colors while "Trust and Change/No Kissing/Hands of Time/Wang Is Wrong" uses harpsichord and electric guitar to bring out some different textures. There's a passage for strings that's very nice too. A riff on "Rule Brittania" kicks off "Jessica Marbles/Death Mask/Toast to Lionel", continuing its ersatz anthem for a minute or so before switching to more eerie electric piano (or maybe it's a synthesizer) and strings. The bouncy main theme returns again for "Gather at Table", followed by string clusters and staccatos for "Swords and Beans". Some kind of tense and more powerful writing begins "Lockin' It Up/Twain Tango", then proceeds to a tip-toe creepy atmosphere. You wouldn't think that dread could be lighthearted but that's what "Mirrors" sounds like. More mystery/suspense creeping around music sets the stage for "Butler's Demise" and then there are some miniature suites that mostly shuffle around the various themes we've already heard. Then we take a break from swinging entirely for the slow, moody, atmospheric "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold". It's in 3/4 and has a chilly, damp feel to it, perfectly appropriate. When people did a record like this they tried to put an original piece of their own on it so they could get publishing royalties. Presumably that's what "Run Spy, Run" is, even though that's also the name of the first Nick Carter: Killmaster book, which came out the year before this record. It's a cool tune and would have done well as the theme for a secret agent movie or tv show. Probably the most famous 12/8 movie or tv theme in history (what are some others?) comes up next: "Get Smart". The rhythm section starts out having to keep things pretty straight, then suggest a "Peter Gunn" feel before there's an explosion of great guitar, saxophone and organ playing. Which was really needed. It wasn't especially exciting until that happened. My favorite of all Bond themes, "You Only Live Twice", happens now. The original will always be the greatest but there are several great covers. The one by The Quiets is maybe the best I've heard. This one is respectable but lacks intensity. "007" is a great action cue that's in many of the Bond films. I used to play it in my first band! Or at least I tried to. It's a nice feature for Strange's guitar, which always sounds great. But it's another one that sounds kind of watered down. It might have something to do with the recording or mixing or mastering. It goes into a kind of goofy saxophone solo too. The energy picks up a bit for "Goldfinger" and the guitar is bright and sharp and engaging. Finally there's "The Rockford Files" because... well, I don't know why. Different decade, different genre. But whatever. I always love to hear it and while this isn't as good as the original—it's a little too slow, for one thing—it's cool to hear Strange's low-toned and tremoloey guitar playing this terrific melody.
2025 April 11 • Friday
When I impulse bought Jennifer Grey's autobiography I also bought this other autobiography: Amaryllis Fox's Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA.
Fox grew up bouncing between the UK and the US. Her father was an international economic adviser, almost always on the move to work with different governments around the world. A few events, personal and political, create stepping stones on her path to the CIA. Her aunt's suicide and her father's infidelity. Learning about Anne Frank and Harriet Tubman. Seeing Tiananmen Square on TV and the Soviet Union in person. A lecture by Huston Smith and then, serendipitously, a school assignment to learn about Aung San Suu Kyi. This last propels her, after graduating from high school, to go to Burma (as it was then called) herself, to meet with the resistance and eventually with Aung San Suu Kyi herself. It's a trip that involves a certain amount of danger and deception. And she's doing this on her own, voluntarily, as a teenager. At Oxford there's an attempt to recruit her to the secret world of intelligence—she doesn't know exactly which agency—but it's not appealing. She continues to follow her conscience and her hopes for a more peaceful world and While at Oxford she goes to Bosnia to work with children orphaned by way. After Oxford she goes to Georgetown to pursue a conflict and terrorism master's program. And it's there that she's approached by the CIA. It's a very good fit. She excels at the training, earning the nickname "the velvet hammer", and ascends levels of secrecy and responsibility. She's appalled at the cavalier attitude that some of her superiors have toward human life. When one of them tells her that they'd "rather say they rendered a hundred innocent assholes than tell them we let one fucking terrorist go free" Fox tells her that she's reversing Benjamin Franklin's famous statement, "Better one hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer". It isn't long before she's deployed to some of the world's most dangerous places where she creates networks with arms dealers and terrorists. While also getting married and having a child! It's a great book, really well written and with a constantly engaging and gripping story. You don't find passages like this in too many others: Another very satisfying impulse buy. The first line is "In the glass, I can see the man who's trailing me".
One of the men I know from the Farm. His name is Matt. His girlfriend is a friend of mine. He’s still married to someone else, as it turns out. He says it’s only paperwork. He’ll sort it all out when he gets home from war. Then he sends me a picture of his penis. And before I can decide what to do with my outrage, he gets shot on an evening patrol.
2025 April 09 • Wednesday
Call me crazy but I still think that the best place to buy a book is in a book store. A book store is also the best place to buy several books, especially on impulse. See it, pick it up, read a little bit, heed the impulse to buy it. And repeat. And that's how I ended up reading Jennifer Grey's autobiography, Out of the Corner.
The two things that everyone knows about Jennifer Grey is that she was in Dirty Dancing and she had a nose job. What you'll learn from this book, though, is that she's a great writer who's had a fascinating life. She's also knowledgable and resourceful enough to know that she needs to get the two things everyone knows about her out of the way right up front. So the title references the famous line from Dirty Dancing, "Nobody puts Baby in the corner," which both she and Patrick Swayze, who delivers it, thought was ridiculous and apparently pleaded with the filmmakers to change. And the first chapter starts late in the chronology, walking us through why she had work on her nose done and what the disastrous results of it were. But her life story is a lot richer and more interesting than that. The daughter of Joel Grey, she used to sit in his dressing room while he transformed himself into the Master of Ceremonies for Cabaret. The granddaughter of great Borscht Belt musician and comedian Mickey Katz, she's a third generation performing arts star. She's also a teenager struggling with bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, with hippie mellowdom on the beach and high intensity demanding schedules back on the East Coast. There's a horrible account of sexual assault that the people she loves and trusts most simply dismiss. And her initiation into relationships has numerous dubious characters as participants. Older, abusive philanderers, starving artist-types who are good for hot sex on a lunch break, an engagement to Johnny Depp and a very serious love affair with Matthew Broderick, whom she met when they played siblings in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Her first movie job was in Coppola's The Cotton Club, dropped into the thick of it, as it were, with legendary, intense and high-powered actors and an equally intimidating director. The movie isn't really under anyone's control so a lot of her scenes don't make the final cut. She meets Patrick Swayze when they're both cast in Red Dawn but they didn't get along. When Dirty Dancing comes around, she wants her co-star to be anyone but him. But he pleads with her to let him make up for their previous past experience and part of what makes that movie work is this tension between them, their differences mapping onto their characters' differences. Their different skills and training in dance are also mirrored by their fictional counterparts. An adolescent in dangerous sex and drug situations, a child of Broadway and Hollywood royalty who pursues acting as a vocation, the star of a huge international hit movie that literally nobody expected would do more than shift a few videotape rentals... Once Grey gets married and has a daughter, the change in her reality is palpable to the reader. It's too bad that she doesn't have anything to say about the episode of House she was in, because she plays a new mother willing to sacrifice herself completely for her baby, and that's the person Grey describes herself as in real life. I never thought I would care about Dancing With the Stars but her account of working on that show was gripping. The whole books is beautifully written, with wonderful phrases and pithy observations on every page. The first line is "Whenever I found myself stuck in one of life's big dips, I could count on my ever-loving mother's familiar refrain, 'In case of emergency, break nose'".
2025 April 07 • Monday
Here's the great Billy Strange with the 851st Soundtrack of the Week: Secret Agent File.
This appears to be a CD reissue of a Billy Strange album but with a few extra tracks thrown in, which explains why Jim Rockford is thrown in with a bunch of movie and television spies. Billy Strange doesn't even get to open the record. Neil Norman does, with an instrumenal version of "All Time High" that segues into the "James Bond Theme". They call the whole thing "Octopussy". Then Strange gets to take on the theme from "I Spy" and it's really good, solid, hard to mess that up. But then we ditch Strange for the Olympic Orchestea's theme from "Reilly: Ace of Spies" and this really doesn't fit in at all. It's a nice, fake classical orchestral piece but musically clashes with the rest of the record and just comes across as dull. Next is Burt Bacharach's "Casino Royale", which feels a little sluggish compared to the original. Finally we get some killer electric guitar tone for John Barry's "The Ipcress File". Actually it might be baritone guitar. They throw in the famous drum beat that opens "Be My Baby" and also have a pretty tough backbeat throughout. "Thunderball" is, thankfully, another guitar feature, though this time the tone is snarly and sounds like just the bridge pick-up is being used. Some good sax playing in the background too. The guitar also sounds awesome on Jerry Goldsmith's theme from "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.". Again I suspect baritone. There's some cool keyboard playing but they changed the meter from 5/4 to 4/4 and that's a shame. A Neil Norman arrangement of the theme from "The Prisoner" follows this, another piece that wasn't on Strange's original album. It's a good-faith take on the original but lacks its energy. Now we get to hear the "James Bond Theme" for the second time and of course kills that famous guitar riff. Nothing's ever going to improve on the original recording, whether the soundtrack or album version, of Jerry Goldsmith's "Our Man Flint" theme, but I don't mind hearing this one. The guitar is great, of course, and there's some good flute playing and interesting use of horns. "Moonraker" is one of my favorite Bond themes and this is another Neil Norman addition. Eh, it's too fast and discoey for my taste. Then we take a break from swinging entirely for the slow, moody, atmospheric "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold". It's in 3/4 and has a chilly, damp feel to it, perfectly appropriate. When people did a record like this they tried to put an original piece of their own on it so they could get publishing royalties. Presumably that's what "Run Spy, Run" is, even though that's also the name of the first Nick Carter: Killmaster book, which came out the year before this record. It's a cool tune and would have done well as the theme for a secret agent movie or tv show. Probably the most famous 12/8 movie or tv theme in history (what are some others?) comes up next: "Get Smart". The rhythm section starts out having to keep things pretty straight, then suggest a "Peter Gunn" feel before there's an explosion of great guitar, saxophone and organ playing. Which was really needed. It wasn't especially exciting until that happened. My favorite of all Bond themes, "You Only Live Twice", happens now. The original will always be the greatest but there are several great covers. The one by The Quiets is maybe the best I've heard. This one is respectable but lacks intensity. "007" is a great action cue that's in many of the Bond films. I used to play it in my first band! Or at least I tried to. It's a nice feature for Strange's guitar, which always sounds great. But it's another one that sounds kind of watered down. It might have something to do with the recording or mixing or mastering. It goes into a kind of goofy saxophone solo too. The energy picks up a bit for "Goldfinger" and the guitar is bright and sharp and engaging. Finally there's "The Rockford Files" because... well, I don't know why. Different decade, different genre. But whatever. I always love to hear it and while this isn't as good as the original—it's a little too slow, for one thing—it's cool to hear Strange's low-toned and tremoloey guitar playing this terrific melody.
2025 April 04 • Friday
Here's another hefty thriller but unlike the first Jack Reacher novel, it's under 500 pages. Not much under, but still. William Diehl's Sharky's Machine was also his first novel but did not kick off a series.
It takes some time to get to Sharky. The action starts in Italy during World War 2, and an operation gone wrong that leaves four million dollars' worth of gold at the bottom of a lake. Then we're in Hong Kong in the 1950s for an assassination scene in a brothel that Trevanian probably wished he could have used in Shibumi. Finally we're in Atlanta in the 1970s for another murder, after which we meet undercover narcotics officer Sharky, who's in the middle of a big bust when some other police officer blunders onto the scene and ruins everything. Next thing you know there's a psycho drug dealer on a city bus at rush hour about to kill a bunch of kids and old people so Sharky blows him away, saving everyone's lives, but then in the newspapers the next day the story is that Sharky is somehow the jerk so his mean boss kicks him down to the vice squad. And I'm pretty sure this involves a continuity error but I'm not going to worry about it. So down in vice they think they've got a handle on a prostitution blackmail ring, featuring a practically superhumanly adroit and alluring woman named Domino, another one that probably made Trevanian jealous. She's involved with a presidential candidate and a mysterious rich guy who has a James Bond villain-worthy scheme to open this gigantic amusement park called Pachinko! which replicates a huge chunk of Hong Kong right here in Atlanta and has as its centerpiece a massive pachinko/pinball machine in which people get into the actual balls and zip through the game, being bounced off the bumpers. He has evil henchmen galore and most of them have impressive scars. So Sharky runs into Domino and there's a spark between them and then they run into each other again at the grocery store and there's more of a spark and so she invites him over for soup and they're basically in love. But then Sharky has to go up to the roof where he can listen to the hidden bugs in her apartment and he hears her having really intense sex with the mysterious rich guy and Sharky is so into her that up there on the roof all by himself he gets turned on and orgasms when she does. Diehl is not wasting our time here. This is a thriller and a police procedural that veers back and forth between plausible and ludicrous but offers non-stop action, distinct if not believable characters and no-nonsense sex and violence. It has a George Eliot epigraph. Sharky himself has a harrowing scene after getting captured by the bad guys at one point and, well, he will never be the same after. This is a book where bad things can happen to good people and not be fixed. Nobody writes books like this anymore, right? This is of its time. The last gasp of the thriller before horror novels became the thrill, I guess. I liked it. I'm going to watch the movie and I wouldn't mind reading something else by Diehl. The first line is "It had been dark less than an hour when Younger and the two sergeants finished loading their equipment on the three mules and prepared to head north toward Torbole and the rendezvous with La Volte".
2025 April 02 • Wednesday
I've been hearing about Lee Child's Jack Reacher for years now but not in any persuasive way. The people who enthuse about the series tend not to be the people whose recommendations for tough action novels would carry much weight. My mother, for one example. A Times Literary Supplement editor for another. So this is a bit like Martin Amis going nuts for Elmore Leonard. Elmore Leonard did actually write a lot of really good books and Amis is correct to admire them. But he was almost certainly an ignoramus when it came to the genre itself and I suspect he was at least partly just relieved to be on vacation from so-called literary fiction. Which is all fine. But as someone who has been seeking out and enjoying examples of the genre for practically my entire life, I was suspicious. I assumed we were talking about tough lone wolf violence for people who don't like that sort of thing. Quoted passages from the books left me unmoved. A Lee Child opinion piece about writing was also unimpressive. But I found a copy of Killing Floor, the first Reacher novel, in a Little Free Library and took it home with me. Several years later—I have a lot of books—I took it with me on a trip to the west coast.
Jack Reacher walks into a small town in Georgia and is immediately arrested for a murder he doesn't even know anything about, let alone have anything to do with. As the story is told from his point of view, he's able to tell the reader a lot about himself by how he handles the situation. He could easily disarm and overpower the police officers taking him to jail but he doesn't because he's innocent and this will all work itself out. In addition to a life in the military that's made him almost superhumanly strong and trained in, I'm going to predict, practically infinite methods of violent attack and defense, he was in the military police for years, so he also knows about police procedures and psychology. So his confidence is understandable.
What's not understandable is why,
after 100 pages of being an ex-Army,
badass Sherlock Holmes—he does the
old deduce a complete stranger's life
from his clothing and mannerisms—he's
baffled when the
warden of the jail tries to have
him killed. "I couldn't begin to figure it out," he tells us, but it's clear that this uncharacteristic cluelessness is simply there so this book can be over 500 pages long. There's been a violent murder that involved at least three people. There's a conspiracy involving a local rich banker. And Reacher himself has been set up and framed by the chief of police! When the chief of police is lying to make you take the fall for a murder and then the warden of the prison tries to set you up as the next vicitm, this is a clear case of adding two and two together to get four. Your fake murder suspect gets killed, you get to say he did it, case closed. But even though Reacher has, until this point, known everything about everything and been way more than merely competent in every situation, this plot point, which wouldn't stump a child, is all of a sudden a baffling mystery to him. And that's a shame because so far this has been a pleasant sort of spin on In the Heat of the Night, with an out-of-town Sherlock Holmes-type being falsely arrested for murder and then having to solve the crime himself. (Reacher's older brother is eventually introduced and he turns out to have some shades of Mycroft.) And the mystery part is pretty well drawn out, even though the reader is also frustrated by the old "character who could clear up everything by speaking a few sentences to the hero but just won't do it" device. There are also the helpful "information dump" characters, complete strangers who open up and regurgitate huge amounts of information to help Reacher when Child just needs to get him somewhere. Which is super convenient because Reacher is frequently making it harder on himself. At one point, he has no more leads. Just a dead end. And it's time sensitive. He only has a few days to discover what's going on. But then these two bad guys show up in town asking where Reacher is and, when they find him, start following him. Well, this could be a lead, right? Get the drop on these guys, force them to answer some questions. Sure, maybe it'll be another dead end, maybe they don't know anything. But, hey, then again, maybe not. But Reacher just kills them both without a word. I'm guessing author or editor or both decided there needed to be some action in this section of the book so a little bit of cat and mouse was thrown in. To sum up, it's not bad. It's not very good either. But it seems to me that, like many an author, Child hadn't really figured it out in the first book of the series. The biggest problem is that it's over-written, and in what quickly becomes a faux naif first-person voice. (In the second and I assume all other books, Child corrects this, switching to third person, and it reads much, much better.) Killing Floor is over 500 pages long and could have been half that length if Reacher were a more consistent character and a lot less verbose. Here's a typical example, one of hundreds of descriptive paragraphs, setting a scene that's neither important nor revisited: On its own it might not seem like a big deal but this happens more than once a page. So much describing that it quickly becomes blather. There are five sentences about the path to this person's door. Four sentences about the door itself! (Or sentence fragments, if you want to be punctilious.) And it's like that all the time. Here's a paragraph that could have been cut entirely: All that could have been cut and we just skip to the next paragraph where it says they made some phone calls and confirmed his alibi. Reacher's done it a thousand times and we've all seen it or read it a thousand times too. It's a tableau of cliché. Also, is that really the story she told him? "Yeah, Finlay and I started work on your alibi late Friday evening. We were in the squad room. It was dark but we turned on a couple of desk lights. We had pads of paper and cups of coffee. Telephone books, too, and we were looking up numbers and calling them while cradling the phones and chewing pencils. We kept our voices low and our enquiries patient." You see the problem? Why is Reacher always yammering on so pointlessly? It's the text equivalent of empty calories. And of course for a lot of people, a book like this, probably the entire genre, is presumed to be junk food. What's the point of criticizing the nutritional value of something like Doritos? The point is that Doritos could be good if they were made to be good. And if you like what you get from Doritos and wish that they were actually "good", you can find something better if you try. Anyway, back to Killing Floor. There's a real howler of a scene set at the Atlanta airport, which is wildly unbelievable even by the conventions of the genre. Child describes Reacher as "six feet five inches tall, and around two hundred pounds, all of it muscle". And yet he's completely unable to cope with walking against the current of passengers leaving a commercial airplane, despite his size, strength and formidable training in, well, just about everything. I'm five feet ten inches tall, about a hundred and ninety pounds, a lot of it not muscle, comfortable with a bicycle and a tennis racket but not much else, and this would not be a problem for me at all. And once the thing that happens in this scene happens, if you pause for a moment to consider the logistics of it, it gets even more ridiculous. But... first book. I'm cutting it some slack. The excerpt from the second book was enough of an improvement that I'll give it a shot. If I find it as serendipitously as I found the first one. I have a lot of other books waiting at home. The first line in this one is "I was arrested in Eno's diner".
Stoller's building was way in back. Probably the first phase to have been built. The old man in the poor part of town had said his son moved out years ago. That could be about right. This first block could be about two years old. We threaded through walkways and around raised-up flower beds. Walked up a path to Sherman Stoller's door. The path was stepping stones set in the wiry lawn. Forced an unnatural gait. I had to step short. Roscoe had to stretch her stride from one flagstone to the next. We reached the door. It was blue. No shine on it. Old-fashioned paint.
She told me a pretty straightforward story. They'd started work on my alibi late Friday evening. She and Finlay. A dark squad room. A couple of desk lights on. Pads of paper. Cups of coffee. Telephone books. The two of them cradling phones and chewing pencils. Low voices. Patient enquiries. A scene I'd been in myself a thousand times.
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