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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 17 |
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No murders to solve, but Jesse Stone keeps busy
of TheColumnists.com
In his eighth Jesse Stone mystery, America's master of mystery, Robert B. Parker, manages to keep us turning pages as fast as we can without a single murder being committed or dead body being found.
In fact, this time out, Jesse, the police chief of the little island community of Paradise, Massachusetts, gets us all worked up over quite petty activities as far as crime in concerned: A female school principal who touches off a community uproar when she conducts a "panty inspection"of a large number of high school girls and then the case of a peeping tom who calls himself The Night Hawk, conducting several home invasions in which he takes nude pictures of his female victims, but never touches them.
Maybe Parker decided it would stretch our credulity if he kept having murders take place in this little town with only a 12-person police force. Or maybe he's just challenging himself to see if he can make the mundane really fascinating. Maybe next time he'll just have Jesse Stone track down a guy with too many outstanding parking tickets.
Actually, I don't really care. I happen to think Bob Parker could make anything interesting because he's such a good writer with such an arch sense of humor.
I'm also entranced by his ability to involve all the characters in his three ongoing mystery series--Boston P.I. Spenser, Paradise Police Chief Jesse Stone and Boston female P.I. Sunny Randall--in a sort of incestuous life together that never seems to run out of interesting permutations.
For example, in "Night and Day" (Putnam, $25.95), Jesse finally begins to close the book on his beautiful ex-wife Jenn, the TV weathergirl, and seems about to rekindle an on-again, off-again relationship with Sunny Randall from Parker's other series of mysteries. He also sends one character to see a psychiatrist--Susan Silverman from the "Spenser" novels--and has occasion to consult Rita Fiore, the lawyer who appears in both the Spenser and Jesse Stone mysteries. Sunny's friend, the muscular "Spike," also gets called upon to help Jesse settle one of his open cases.
Right now Jesse Stone may be the hottest of Parker's three mystery heroes because of the series of CBS-TV movies about Stone, starring Tom Selleck. Though the last Selleck/Stone movie, a ratings winner last month, was not based on one of Parker's novels, the other four in the TV movie series have been and it seems the series will go on, with or without books to adapt.
Personally, I really like the character--a former Los Angeles cop who was let go because of his growing alcoholism, now a small town police chief who seems to be falling back on the bottle despite the best efforts of the psychologist he's seeing. He has love affairs, but remains hung up on his promiscuous ex-wife.
This time the cases he's pursuing seem quite definitely linked to personal problems he can relate to because of his love-hate relationship with this ex-wife. For instance, the school principal who makes female students show her their underpants because she's conducting a one-woman campaign against the wearing of thongs and/or nothing under their skirts. At home, she's married to a high-power lawyer who pays little attention to her, but is a world class skirt chaser away from home.
In effect, this woman is having to deal with a spouse who conducts his life much the way Stone's ex-wife conducted hers during their marriage.
As for the peeping tom "Night Hawk," he may be linked to a wife-swapping club that's operating in Paradise and his criminal activities may be the outgrowth of his own domestic failures.
Altogether, I found it quite amusing and interesting and didn't miss the dead bodies NOT piling up at all. As a reward for getting immersed in the mundane, we also get to see some serious new development among the running characters.
So, I'm doing what I usually do with a Parker mystery--urging you to read it right away so you don't miss the latest from one of the genre's most entertaining masters.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The book cover illustration is courtesy of Putnam. This column first posted March 30, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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