Monday, March 31, 2014

This Story Really Has Nothing to Do With Being Irish

Dead Irish
by John Lescroart
p. 1989




Needing to take a little break from science fiction after my letdown with the Trilogy of Disappointment, I pounded out a quick murder mystery I’d had lying around for ages, Dead Irish, by John Lescroart, whose name I still can’t pronounce for the life of me. Dead Irish is a crime/thriller novel with a wide cast of characters revolving around the untimely death of young Irish Catholic Eddie Cochran, allegedly a suicide until the truth is slowly unraveled.
The central character in Dead Irish is Dismas Hardy, a former cop, former lawyer, [former everything in the way that only serialized private eyes can be], who currently works as a bartender for Eddie’s brother-in-law. Hardy only obliquely knew Eddie, but he is roped into investigating the young man’s death, for the sake of his young, pregnant wife, who would receive no benefits if her husband’s death were declared a suicide, and Eddie’s despairing family, who cannot believe their eldest son would take his own life.

I initially had no idea that Dismas Hardy was a serialized character. When I thought that the book was a one-off, I assumed that Hardy was investigating the death because he wanted to get into the pretty widow’s pants, which was a little tacky, considering she was pregnant with the dead man’s child and all, and also a good 15 years younger than Hardy. It wasn’t until I caught on that Dead Irish was just the first in many investigations of Hardy and the LA detectives that I realized his motives weren’t self-serving.

The fact that Dismas Hardy and his detective friend Abe Glitzky both recur in many other Lescroart novels also excused the lack of culmination to their individual storylines. A lot of threads were introduced and Lescroart didn’t really do justice to them all. The ending itself was terribly rushed, but in the context of what Dead Irish is—one in a series of neo-noir style thrillers starring a hardened ex-cop—I guess I can excuse the slapped-together ending.

I’m not overly fond of Hardy as a protagonist. Early on in the novel, one of his methods of information-gathering involves vaguely threatening dead Eddie’s teenage brother. It was mildly effective, sure, but the kid really had nothing to do with the murder and smacking him around while he was grieving was a bit unnerving, even if he was being a bit surly. At the end, when the real killer is outed, Hardy encourages him to kill himself instead of turning himself in, for no discernible reason... and he does, screwing over his detective friend, Glitzky, in the process. Hardy also shows up at a ton of crime scenes when I feel he probably doesn’t have any business being there, but it was the eighties, so maybe the LAPD didn’t care that some dude who was only a beat cop for half a minute twenty years ago is hanging around telling them what to do. Maybe they would care if they knew Hardy was handing out guns to murderers and telling them to take care of it themselves...

I feel like all of this is supposed to make me think of Hardy as something of a maverick, but I really just thought he was kind of a self-serving jerk and the LAPD were all idiots for not being able to do the legwork themselves.

I also guessed the killer after like thirty pages (of a 400 page book), but then I subscribe to the school of televised crime procedurals, in which it is always the last person you should suspect, and after you cycle through all the more obvious suspects, only then the truth will out, so really, the last person you should suspect is actually the first person you should suspect. It’s like, why else would they spend all that time on that seemingly inconsequential character if he didn’t do in the dead guy? It’s really the only thing that makes sense, from a storyteller’s point of view.

Read this book. Read another Lescroart book. Read any crime thriller at all, really. I’ve got a feeling there won’t be much variation, when all is said and done.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

The League of Evil Should Stick to Mustache Twirling



Yay, a cover that looks NOTHING like the two before it!
The Golden City
by John Twelve Hawks
p. 2009
 



[There are a ton of spoilers in this review, to the extent that there was just no point in blacking them out, since the substance of this review primarily revolves around the events of the novel, so be warned.]



You can chart the evolution of the League of Evil with my reviews of:


Despite my lukewarm feelings about the first two books in John Twelve Hawks’ Fourth Realm Trilogy, I was eager to power through the final installment and find out what it all amounted to, to decide whether the story redeemed itself in its final act, to know that I hadn’t been wasting precious hours of my life investing myself in a story that goes nowhere...


... But some times, life disappoints.


I don’t know why I expected more; the complete lack of buzz surrounding this trilogy probably should have clued me in to its mediocrity. But I guess a small part of me hoped the trilogy would get better as it went along. The second book certainly hooked me better than the first, and there was a lot of potential, but in the end, the series just failed to satisfy on every level. The heroes never graduated beyond boring tropes delivering weary, wispy platitudes, the villains never emitted the remotest sense of true villainy (despite a great deal of proverbial mustache twirling), many of the plot points of the first two books (which had the potential to be interesting) are resolved with minimal payoff, if they’re resolved at all, and the whole thing ends on an open note that leaves you with far too many questions, the most important of which being WHY?


Why ANY of it?


I thought it was a great idea when Book 2, The Dark River, sent the heroes on an international romp. The first book took place entirely on the east and west coasts of the United States, the second took us abroad, to parts of Ireland, England, Italy, Ethiopia. It seemed appropriate then that The Golden City would take it one step further and spend most of the time exploring the notorious otherworldly realms [that form the whole basis for the trilogy and yet have barely been touched upon...] Twelve Hawks had made us wait long enough; it was time to figure out what the big deal was. Plus, at the end of The Dark River, our Harlequin heroine Maya had been left stranded in the first realm. Surely now was the time to reveal the secrets of the five other realms, only two of which we’d gotten a glimpse of.


Nope. Maya’s vacation was cut short without much fuss and yet we still inexplicably had to deal with some half-assed attempt at what I suppose was meant to be a PTSD storyline, wherein Maya has a hard time dealing with her experiences, withdraws, and reverts a bit back to her old stoicism. But none of that even made sense to me. Maya only went to the first realm to rescue Gabriel, who had been imprisoned and tortured there for days, if not weeks, and yet he came back relatively well-adjusted (and actually a bit 'enlightened'). Maya, on the other hand, despite being a rigidly-trained and highly capable warrior, capable of defending herself, seemed to suffer way more, for no apparent reason. And no one ever talks about their experiences nor are they relevant, so what was the point?!


Speaking of things that don’t have a point, we finally meet the fabled Corrigan patriarch and fellow Traveler, Matthew Corrigan, in what you would think would be a turning point for the series and our hero. Instead, Gabriel improbably gets over his daddy abandonment issues in about thirty seconds and Matthew dumps a lot of dimestore philosophy on Gabriel, who has already become a bit of a smug tool after play-acting at revolutionary leader for so long. After playing Yoda to Gabriel’s Luke Skywalker for awhile, Matthew promptly vanishes, never to be a plot contrivance again, and not really accomplishing anything at all. Seriously. Absolutely nothing learned in the super special sixth realm (the realm of the Gods and the 'Golden City' after which this novel is named) does anything at all to further the plot.


Also doing pointless things this time around is Gabriel’s ally, Hollis, who—in The Dark River—lost his girlfriend to an untimely, violent death at the hands of the evil Bretheren. Hollis spends almost the entire final book traveling to Japan, and leaving a few bodies in his wake, JUST to talk to the spirit of his dead girlfriend for two minutes so she can chearlead him on to giving up his vengeance and converting to Harlequinism, or whatever the fuck they call it. It was at this point that I had to refrain from chucking the book across the room and limited myself to a simple eye roll and a muttered “Are you kidding me?!” so that I could soldier on in the vain hope that the story was leading somewhere.


And then there was the bullshit non-ending, where Gabriel ‘defeats’ his brother/nemesis by... what, exactly? No, I’m seriously asking, because it’s a truly ambiguous copout defeat. Micheal Corrigan, power-hungry and a bit psychotic, confronts his brother in the Golden City and Gabriel refuses to back down but also refuses to definitively defeat his brother, leaving the pair at a stalemate in another realm. We know they aren’t dead, but we also know they probably won’t ever come back, leaving our Traveler in an eternal limbo while his friends and unborn soon-to-be-a-Traveler baby (of COURSE there was one of those in this story; had you ever any doubt?!) try to move on without him. I kept waiting for the part where it is revealed that Gabriel—who learned to Travel through legitimate and natural ways, versus his brother’s drug-induced cheatin’ ways—has the edge and lays the smackdown on Michael, but this never happened. So what was the point of all that buildup?


I could honestly go on and on; there is so much here to disappoint the reader. I could see it all coming when I got down to the last thirty pages and I realized there was no way all the open threads were going to be tied off in a satisfying way. But in spite of the torture, I had to see it through to the bitter end. I guess I could validate my reading experience by using the Fourth Realm Trilogy as an example of how not to write; it’s the best I can do to justify the time I wasted reading these books, since I certainly won’t be taking anything substantive away from the experience.

Friday, March 21, 2014

Hard-Drinking Irish Jesus

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
p. 1962


[Aye, there be spoilers in this review. I have blacked them out accordingly and if you wish to read them, simply highlight the text.]




Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is an American literary staple, but it flew under my radar until just recently. I had never read the book, seen the Broadway musical or even the notorious 1975 film version starring Jack Nicholson (though, by the description I’ve read, it sounds like a fairly accurate adaptation). It’s really been my loss all these years, because this novel is an experience that you can sink your teeth into, and it’s easy to see not only why it’s so popular but also why it is so widely banned for its controversy.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the story of a psychiatric ward under the strict supervision of the emasculating ‘Big Nurse’ Mildred Ratched, who comes into conflict with brash, fast-talking, hard-drinking newcomer, R.P. McMurphy, a man faking insanity to escape from the work farm he’d been sentenced  to for gambling and fighting. It is clear from the start that McMurphy is not expecting the challenge brought before him by the harsh, disapproving Nurse Ratched, but it does not deter him from his goal.

McMurphy and Ratched really possess this novel, yet it is told entirely through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a Native American man who has spent over a decade on the ward pretending to be a deaf-mute and witnessing the inner workings of ward politics firsthand. Bromden, who ruminates often on the subjugation of his father and his people as their land is slowly taken over by what he refers to as the Combine, is the only one who is allowed to see through the secret window into the person McMurphy really is. The Irish rogue is at first a curiosity to the ward’s inhabitants, then a hero as he teaches them to stand up for themselves against the Big Nurse and learn to laugh again, bringing life to the ward where before any semblance of joy or disorder was immediately silenced. What ensues is a battle of wits and willpower as McMurphy and Ratched fight for control of the ward.

It took me a while to get into this book. I found Part 1 (over 100 pages and roughly half of the novel) to be a bit dull. Apart from eliciting a few laughs here and there at McMurphy and Ratched’s posturing, not much happens aside from your typical stage-setting. It isn’t until Part 2 when McMurphy realizes the reality of his predicament—that he could be kept long past his original sentence if he continues to get on Ratched’s bad side—and scales back his antics, that the story perks up. And it isn’t until the end of Part 2, when McMurphy makes the conscious decision to say ‘to Hell with it’ and continue his crusade against the nurse’s conformity, that the character truly comes alive. That McMurphy stayed on knowing his freedom was at stake because he knew the other patients needed to see his rebellion turned the jokester into a true hero, while still making him endearingly human.

I must admit, even though I saw McMurphy’s eventual fate coming from a mile away, it was still so devastating to see him martyred like that. The entire final act of this book is just demoralizing in general. I felt terrible for all the patients and furious at Big Nurse who defied the most basic rule of healthcare provider in order to maintain her aura of power. It’s all a very potent allegory for society and the book is rich with metaphor to be picked apart. It’s a shame that the idea of a hard-drinking, womanizing rogue as a Christlike figure is so offensive that the book has been widely banned over the years, because it would make an excellent teaching subject.

I strongly encourage fans of the movie and people who’ve never experienced either book or movie to read this novel. It is surprisingly satisfying and an American classic. It’ll make you laugh and cry and all the other emotions that the ‘Big Nurse’ would rather you just keep to yourself. But that’s exactly why we need characters like McMurphy in our lives—to remind us to never take life too seriously.

Monday, March 17, 2014

The League of Evil Needs a New Marketing Strategy

The Dark River:
Book Two of the Fourth Realm Trilogy
by John Twelve Hawks
p 2007



Back in the summer of 2012 I read the first book in a science fiction trilogy that capitalized on technoparanoia and fear of Big Government. I’d picked the book up off the discount rack at a Borders Books that was wheezing its last paper-thin breath and I gave it a go. 



Nonetheless, when I was browsing a used book store selection and I happened upon the second book in the Fourth Realm Trilogy by John Twelve Hawks (Yeah. Take a second to parse that one out, brain!), I decided it was just too coincidental to pass up. I tossed the book on the pile and didn’t touch it for about ten months until finally decided to give John Twelve Hawks a second chance.

I spent the better portion of my review of The Traveler explaining why I think that the trilogy is an example of the trend of collaborative fiction, which is to say that it was written by multiple authors under a ‘mysterious’ pseudonym to draw attention to an otherwise banal series. I still think that—or, at the very least, that the enigmatic, private ‘John Twelve Hawks’ is a fully created persona. His scant biography, his lack of interviews, and his insistence on ‘living off the grid’ (not unlike his main characters!) just jives a little too well with the main plot of his story to be anything but a gimmick to draw in readers. But there’s no point in rehashing a minor detail, so I will not be focusing on that in my review of The Dark River.

I didn’t talk much about the plot in my first review, so I will attempt to here, however briefly. The Fourth Realm trilogy supposes that there are these people called Travelers, who are the only ones who can spiritually travel through realms. For some reason not yet touched upon, this is a much coveted power and a group called The Bretheren (John Twelve Hawks’ take on Big Brother and the aforementioned League of Evil People Doing Evil Things) want to first put a stop to then harness it for themselves. Most Travelers have been killed off, but for two adult brothers who knew nothing about their potential prior to the novel. Luckily there is a third group, the Harlequins, a class of stoic warrior types who believe they have a lifelong debt to protect Travelers, even laying down their lives to do so. Our male and female leads are, respectively, Gabriel, the younger of the two brothers, and Maya, one of the few remaining Harlequins, reluctantly roped back into her duties after attempting to escape the life. As you can imagine, romantic tension ensues, but—graciously due to the lack of the ever popular love triangle—it doesn’t feel tedious, just obligatory.

And that’s the main thing keeping this trilogy from being something I can’t be more excited about. Everything just feels... obligatory. Every character is beyond cliché, and none more so than the villains. I just cannot get over the villains. They are simply so evil, and for nothing but the pure sake of being evil. I’m not saying that when I write books I will avoid all clichés, because I won’t (in this day and age, it is downright impossible not to hit on common tropes here and there), but at the very least I’d like to think that my villains will at least have some purpose in being villains. Nobody just wakes up one day and decides to be evil; there has to be some motivation for their actions. Hell, even Hitler thought he was doing the right thing at some point down the line. The Bretheren just sort of run around laughing at civilian naïveté and drinking expensive whiskey just before their board meetings at their gloomy Gothic castle on DARK ISLAND.

I shit you not. That’s what they call it!

I have no problem buying the dystopian mantra that Big Brother is bad news. But you’re going to have to try harder to make me feel for the heroes. There’s too much running around and pontificating on the evils of Big Brother and not enough characterization. As a consequence, these heroes don’t feel like real people, just means to an end. I didn’t care at all when the several strategically-placed-to-maximize-drama deaths occurred in The Dark River because I realized I didn’t know a damn thing about these characters.

But—

I would be lying if I said I didn’t still enjoy the book in spite of all this. The Dark River is much better than its predecessor. It has the perfect blend of action and dialogue and introspection. You never had to go very far before things were stirred up with a fight scene and said fight scenes never felt forced. I got through this book a lot faster and it was about a hundred pages before the end that I realized I wanted to get my hands on the third book right away so I can finish the trilogy off. The characters’ motives may be vague and prosaic, but it makes the story much more digestible and accessible.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the book ends on a massive cliffhanger. The first book may have left the door wide open for the story to continue, but it certainly lacked the urgency of The Dark River’s ultimate chapter. I look forward to seeing how the whole thing concludes just as soon as I get my copy of The Golden City.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Murder! Conspiracy! Spies! Costumes! And Other Exploits of Richard Hannay

The 39 Steps
by John Buchan
p. 1915





I decided to branch out a little bit and try out an older book that was neither science fiction or a classic and came up with John Buchan’s The 39 Steps. Ostensibly it is a mystery novel (at least, that is the section I found it in at the used book store), but I think ‘thriller’ is a more appropriate description, as it is the adventurous tale of Richard Hannay, an ordinary expatriate Scot living in London, who is caught up in a web of intrigue when he meets and is later framed for the murder of an international spy.

Hitchcock fans might be familiar with the story, as per his 1935 movie adaptation, but The 39 Steps, Richard Hannay, and John Buchan were all new to me, so I got to experience the unfolding of the mystery alongside Hannay himself. One aspect of this story that was not new to me is the method used to tell Hannay’s story. I knew without even looking it up that The 39 Steps was originally published as a serial novel. Serialized novels are stories that were published in segments over the course of some weeks or months. The format became popular in the Victorian era and stayed popular for quite some time before dying out, which is a damn shame, if you ask me. I’ve been saying for years that serials need to make a comeback because the short, intrigue-filled segments are perfect for hooking today’s readers. We do everything on the go and live in a world filled with distractions. Having short stories published weekly would string readers along and build a fanbase over a long stretch of time without asking for too much commitment from the reader, like a weekly TV drama. The melodramatic nature of serials is perfect for grabbing people’s attention and generating talk; it could be only a matter of time before people are discussing serial novels by the water cooler instead of the latest episode of Revenge or Scandal.

All that aside, The 39 Steps was a fun story to read. Richard Hannay is the perfect representation of the everyman caught up in an unlikely situation, one that calls on his intelligence, cleverness and bravery. The man-on-the-run aspect of Buchan’s novel was an early example of a trope that would be replicated over and over again, even today, almost 100 years after its publication. Apparently Hannay continued to have adventures in several more novels after his debut here, and his adventures (as well as his inherent patriotism) were enjoyed by those in WWI trenches. It’s easy to see why; Hannay embodies the ingenuity and fortitude that any man imagines he could possess in defense of his homeland, qualities that were replicated in traditional heroes for the decades to come.