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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 4, No. 12 |
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NEXT STEP  LAURIE R. KING |
King's new thriller lifts
her to a new plateau
of TheColumnists.com
What a pleasure it always is to discover the latest novel by one of your favorite mystery writers has blazed a new trail for an already-exalted literary career. This time I'm talking about Laurie R. King's "Keeping Watch" (Bantam, $23.95), which may be the best book she's written to date.
Though King has never seemed to be much impressed when a movie or TV producer takes an interest in one of her novels, I can easily understand why this is the first of her many novels that has been optioned by a producer and is almost certain to be turned into a movie real soon.
"Keeping Watch" has just about everything going for it: A gallery of really compelling characters, a thriller storyline and genuine social significance. In the right hands, it could be a big, popular motion picture that not only entertains people, but gets them involved in a very serious modern problem: The abuse of children.
The book takes a minor character--Vietnam veteran Allen Carmichael--from her recent novel "Folly" and makes him the central character in a haunting--and, ultimately, riveting thriller. It's the latest of King's "stand alone" novels that are leading her away from her two popular series of detective novels about Mary Russell, the brilliant young wife of the immortal Sherlock Holmes, and Kate Martinelli, the lesbian police detective from the San Francisco P.D.
Carmichael is a psychologically-damaged war veteran in his mid-50s who has rehabilitated himself physically and mentally by spending the last couple of decades helping battered wives spirit their threatened children away from abusive husbands. An expert at surveillance and escape, Carmichael has worked outside the law for years. When we first meet him in "Keeping Watch," he's planning to complete his final job, then take refuge in his retreat in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington state, perhaps to enjoy the rest of his years with Rae, the wood carving artist who was the heroine of "Folly."
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her previous novel "Folly," but isn't strictly a sequel. |
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But that last case is a doozie: He must kidnap 11-year-old Jamie from his home in San Jose, California, and take him to his new "parents" on a remote Montana farm before the boy's vengeful father kills him. And this dad isn't just your typical child-beating parent. He's a trained antagonist, skilled in weapons and loaded with money, who's very likely the most dangerous man Carmichael has ever encountered, in or out of a war zone.
As if that weren't problem enough, Carmichael also has to worry that the strange, troubled boy he's "rescuing" may have been abused so badly already that he's now a ticking time bomb, ready to explode and destroy the new family Carmichael has found for him.
King might have written "Keeping Watch" as a straight thriller and been very successful. Instead, she invests it with layer after layer of character development, starting first with Carmichael's "back story" as a witness to some of the Vietnam war's most heinous episodes of human cruelty. When we live through those years in the jungle with Carmichael, we fully understand why he needs to spend the rest of his life trying to reclaim his soul.
But King also gives us great detail about the pattern of abuse that is warping the development of young Jamie, a brilliant computer geek who discovers the bloodsoaked corpse of his own mother, the apparent victim of her own shotgun suicide. The boy then becomes the grisly experimental lab rat of his twisted dad, who seems intent on turning his son into a sociopath who eventually will become inured to the pain of others.
Once Carmichael takes the boy and lights the fuse on the powderkeg that's his psychopathic father, the final chapters of the book turn into a death hunt that eventually leads to a "last stand" on the edge of the American continent in the rain forests of Washington's Olympic peninsula.
In my most recent chat with Laurie R. King, when she stopped in my territory for a book-signing in Bellingham, WA, she explained that "Keeping Watch" resulted from her listening to the "voices" that kept speaking to her from the pages of "Folly," another book with a protagonist--Rae the wood artist--whose goal is the redemption of her own soul after several failed suicide attempts. For Rae, it meant burying herself in a difficult home-building project on her remote island near the Canadian border--and confronting all the demons of her life.
By choosing Allen Carmichael as the "Folly" character she would explore and extend into his own story, King also knew she'd be tackling a new challenge: Writing a novel with a male protagonist. Even more intimidating was the fact that King already had identified him as what she calls "a product of Vietnam, turned into a killing machine."
But King found people she could distill the Vietnam experience from and also relied upon numerous Vietnam war memoirs she could locate through her primary research facility, the library at the University of California at Santa Cruz, not far from her home in the hills between Santa Cruz and Watsonville in Northern California.
The result is a long and ruthlessly grim "flashback" section of the book that covers Carmichael's war years. I've read many, many war novels set in that same time period in Vietnam and can assure you this is no white gloves edition of the story. King tells it down and dirty. Once you read about what happens to one young soldier, snatched by the Viet Cong during a long patrol in nearly impenetrable tall grass and tortured each night within earshot of his buddies, you'll be ready to believe King did her time in Vietnam, too.
King doesn't just rub our noses in that Vietnam stuff to better set up Carmichael's character. She also plants several scenes that remind us how the Viet Cong used little children to do their evil deeds. This makes us wonder, as Carmichael eventually does, if little Jamie is really only the victim of his father's cruelty--or perhaps his accomplice.
Because King brings so much intelligence and such fine craft to this novel, I'm tempted to believe she has started to step away from the narrower confines of the mystery genre into the broader avenues of the mainstream thriller.
But I've learned from personal experience that King really doesn't like to have others define her paths for her. She resists attempts to classify her and, though diplomatic about it, usually bristles a bit when anyone suggests she's a master of the pastiche because of her novels about Sherlock Holmes.
"I don't write pastiches," she told the crowd at her Bellingham booksigning, "because you can't develop the characters that way. I pick up where Conan Doyle finished."
That's true. Her Holmes books are really Mary Russell books. Russell is her protagonist and Doyle's character, Holmes, is a supporting player. She doesn't imitate Doyle, which is what writers of pastiches would do. She extends his concept of the character. And, I might add, humanizes him a great deal.
King definitely intends to continue the Russell series, which is very popular, even though she now writes "stand alone" novels like "Folly," "A Darker Place" and "Keeping Watch." Her next book will be the seventh in the series--and it will be set in India.
"The last three Russell books were set in places where she's miserably cold," King jokes, "so I wanted to take her some place where she could be warm."
She's also working on a new Russell mystery which will be set in San Francisco, circa 1924. She's "a book person," says King, so the prospect of doing the deep historical research the Russell books requires is catnip to her.
King is less sanguine about the prospects for additional Kate Martintelli mysteries, though she concedes Kate's story still has chapters to go. She has no new books outlined for that series, which so far contains four novels. And, although "Keeping Watch" carries on the stories of several characters from "Folly," she says she doesn't plan a series about either Rae or Carmichael.
However, King did acknowledge that many of her books, series and "stand alones," have dealt with children in trouble--a theme that she relates to and undoubtedly will go back to again and again.
"Lots of kids are left alone with nobody to defend them," she says, "so I do."
Meanwhile, King's books seem to be getting more and more respectful and enthusiastic reviews, especially her "stand alones."
When I suggested to her that "Folly" and "Keeping Watch" seemed to be books that might turn her toward a much wider, more mainstream readership, King wasn't ready to go there with me. I suspect she's still writing what pleases her--and not particularly wasting any time wondering where she fits into the literary scale of things.
"When you start a book, you always think this is the one you'll be remembered for," she says.
Only time will tell, of course, but I kind of think Laurie R. King has reached the point where she's such a superb storyteller that she'll be remembered for everything, so she might as well write whatever she pleases. Works for me, anyway, because I wouldn't dream of missing any of her books to come.
©2003 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The Laurie
R. King photo is ©2000 by Seth Affoumado. The "Keeping
Watch" book cover is ©2003 by Bantam Books.
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
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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