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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 13, No. 22 |
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WHY SOME MYSTERY WRITERS SHOULD RETIRE
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Some of the most popular authors have really lost it!
of TheColumnists.com
Is Sue Grafton at “Z”
yet? Has “Z is for Zebra” (or Zinnia, Zoophile or Zipideedoodah)
come out yet?
How about James Patterson? Have he and the multitude of his other
co-writers come up with “The 87th Hour,” “99 Bottles
of Beer on the Wall” or “101 Diving Divas” yet?
And don’t get me started on Mary Higgins Clark. By now she
must be, oh, 130 or so, and she and her writing twin, daughter
Carol, sound like two authors in search of something original
to write. Even their book titles are boring: “He Sees You
When You’re Sleeping,” “I’ll Walk Alone,”
“The Shadow of Your Smile,” “Moonlight Becomes
You,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “On the
Street Where You Live,” “Deck the Halls,” ad
nauseum. OK, I’ll give them credit for knowing a lot
of song titles, but, well, it takes more than that to make an
interesting book.
The truth is: I guess I’ve grown tired of mystery writers.
Not the really good ones, you understand, but the cadre of sound-alike
writers who churn out at least one or more of their copycat books
every year or so. That’s being generous. Some even manage
to write several a year!
John Grisham, Scott Turow, Nora Roberts, Janet Evanovich, Dick
Francis (well, not any more), Clark, Patterson, Grafton--all
started out with a clear vision and some pretty good story ideas.
Then, gradually, something happened. Their agents, and, indeed,
a big chunk of the mystery fiction-reading public, couldn’t
seem to get enough, so they kept tap, tap, tapping away on their
laptops without an original thought in their weary-but-wealthy
heads.
I have to admit I’ve been seduced by a number of these canny
writers. Grisham kept my attention though “The Firm,”
“A Time to Kill,” “The Pelican Brief,” even
“The Client.” But when he penned “The Runaway
Jury,” one of the most stupefying tomes ever written, it
was all over for me. That jury went in and out of the jury room
more often than my grandson goes to the bathroom daily.
Grafton was another early favorite, but if I have to read “My
name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a licensed private investigator,
typically working 12 to 15 cases that range in nature from background
checks to insurance fraud to erring spouses in the midst of acrimonious
divorces” one more time I think I’ll scream my
head off (or worse).
Patricia Cornwell is another mystery writer who started off great
with books like “Body of Evidence,” and “Postmortem,”
but then she went off the deep end with such bloody, gory detail
that I can’t stomach her anymore. The worst: “Portrait
of a Killer. Jack the Ripper Case Closed.” It goes into
miniscule detail about every death ever attributed to the infamous
Jack. My question: Why??
I have mixed feelings about Donna Leon’s series depicting
Commissario Guido Brunetti. Though I’ve been to Venice and
Verona, sometimes things happen in her books that make me feel
as if I’ve never been there. Perhaps it’s the cultural
differences, but overall I have to admit that following the seemingly
bumbling little commissario as he ambles through the city of
Venice early in the morning or very late at night is still rather
charming.
After “The 6th Target” (“A Women’s Murder
Club Novel”) by Patterson--and Maxine Paetro (she must be
a ‘silent partner’ because I don’t know a thing
about her), I decided I had had enough of Detective Lindsay Boxer
and her three musketeer friends. This, despite, the book’s
cover description: “Another masterpiece.”
But I made the mistake of deciding to go back to some of Patterson’s
earlier books, the Alex Cross “thrillers” (again, courtesy
of the book cover). Years ago I whipped through “Along Came
a Spider” and “Kiss the Girls,” and maybe one
other in this series.
So, when I happened to find a copy of the 2009 Alex Cross whodunit
mystery, “Cross Country” on a recent trip to Europe,
I jumped right into it. One of the first-page promotional squibs
reads: “'Cross Country 'is a novel that will live with
you for a long time after you’ve finished reading.”
This is courtesy of BestsellersWorld.com, which, no doubt, has
made a mint selling Patterson’s books.
Well, that quote was correct in one aspect. “Cross Country”
has stayed with me for a long time, but only because it is probably
the most ridiculous, incredulous, stupid and utterly unrealistic
story you could ever read. My one regret is that I wasted several
hours reading it.
Let’s start with this impossibly strong (6’ 6”,
250-pound) African man named the Tiger, who kills people willy
nilly but never gets caught or hurt. And he runs a gang of young
black men who are named, of course, the Tiger’s boys. Our
man Alex decides he must go after the Tiger because he killed
the family of his old college girlfriend. Despite the fact that
he’s merely a metro D.C. detective, Cross figures out that
the CIA is somehow involved and then devises a way to fly to
Nigeria to go after the Tiger. Oh, pllllllleeease!
And that’s only the first hundred pages.
From there it goes from improbable to unbelievable to implausible.
(Did I mention I really hated this book?)
I guess the reason I have such strong feelings about “Cross
County” is that it is dishonest. There’s no way on
earth the things that “happen” in this book could possibly
happen. Alex is jailed, tortured, starved, and a day or two later
he’s back in the fray, fighting a madman who nonchalantly
murders people whenever he feels like it.
Not a scintilla of it rings true. And yet the novels just keep
churning out of the Patterson factory of fantasy, and the residuals
keep rolling in. That’s just sad.
It’s not that I’ve sworn off
all mystery writers. For several years now my absolute favorite
has been John Dunning, most likely because I think he knows when
to quit. Actually, his last Cliff Janeway mystery, “The
Bookwoman’s Last Fling,” was not up to par (at least,
not up to MY par), and he hasn’t written another one since
then (it was published in 2006). But the four other books in
this series are ‘cherse,’ as Spencer Tracy used
to say about Katherine Hepburn.
I won’t say any more other than: If you’ve never read
Dunning’s Cliff Janeway novels, do yourself a huge favor
and check them out of the library now. In order (and it’s
best to read them in order), they are: “Booked To Die,”
his best-known title; “Bookman's Wake;” “The Bookman's
Promise,” and “The Sign of the Book.”
Notice the theme here? Yes, they’re predicated on books
and bookstores. Dunning, in fact, a former newspaper investigative
reporter, once owned a Denver antiquarian bookstore, so he knows
a lot about old books. He weaves his affection for books and
crime together in this series. It’s only when he adds a
third love of his, horseracing, into his last Janeway novel that
I lost interest.
On his bookshop website (<http://www.oldalgonquin.com/home.php>),
Dunning says he has had some medical problems including a benign
brain tumor, which resulted in loss of sight in one eye and a
long recovery process. He says he hopes to get a couple more
Janeway stories written, and I for one sure hope he can. His
distinctive writing voice is missed.
But until then, I’ll just move on. Maybe I’ll start
reading gardening books or biographies of Winston Churchill or
something.
Mysteries just aren’t much of a mystery to me anymore.
©2012 by Joanne Engelhardt. This column first posted July 9, 2012.
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