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Past Tense by Lee Child

February 23, 2019 by Rob Thesman

Past Tense is the 23rd Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child. I’ve read all of them, starting with the original book, Killing Floor. Child follows a fairly simple storytelling formula, sticking closely to the Hero’s Journey as explained by Joseph Campbell. 

I say explained rather than invented by Joseph Campbell because, as was the point made by Campbell, no one “invented” the Hero’s Journey, it has always been – it’s a storytelling formula that resonates emotionally in humans across time and cultures. If you’re interested in reading about Campbell’s ideas, the starting point is probably The Hero With a Thousand Faces, although there is nearly an infinite amount of background material on the Hero’s Journey, explaining how it’s been used from Greek, Roman, Hindu, Christian, Japanese, etc. myths for all of recorded history. Most Hitchcock scripts can be charted out as following the Hero’s Journey conventions, as can the original canonical Star Wars movies (now known as IV, V, and VI), Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, most Pixar movies, and virtually all Disney movies.

Probably no literature genre adheres more closely to the Hero’s Journey conventions than mystery/thriller books, especially hard-boiled mysteries starting with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, which follow a subset of the Hero’s Journey stories often called knight-errant plots, where a lone figure protagonist wanders the earth (like Kane in Kung Fu), righting wrongs or rescuing (usually) women or children. [I’m skipping talking about the Dark Tower series by Stephen King and graphic novels.] I’ve never been able to find the original source for the definition of noir mysteries but it sounds like Chandler: “A flawed hero searches for some measure of justice in an unjust world.” Chandler’s extensive letter writing about literature in general and mystery stories in particular prompted academic reappraisals in the 1970s and 1980s of noir writing.

The zenith (or maybe the nadir, depending on your opinion of him) of knight-errant hard boiled mysteries may have been Mickey Spillane. Spillane was hugely successful (measure by sales) in the 1950s and 1960s and he’s one of the best-selling authors of all time. I’ll confess that I’m a Spillane fan and, at one point, had a copy of every one of his books. While contemporaneous reviews of his books almost universally savaged his work, his work is being reevaluated as a work of a particular political and cultural era.

Circling back to Lee Child – stories don’t get much more knight-errant-y than Jack Reacher. Like Kafka’s Odradek, Reacher has no fixed abode, although Reacher’s homelessness is by choice. Homeless, without assets other than a toothbrush, Reacher hitchhikes himself from one trouble spot to another.

I haven’t (and am probably too lazy to) gone back and read the early Reacher novels, but my impression is that the more recent ones aren’t as good as the earlier ones. That may be because the storyline was fresher then – it’s possible that I’m misremembering how good the first ones were. That said, Child’s fall off in quality is much less than Patricia Cornwell; I found her books starting with Point of Origin getting weirder and weirder and finally stopped reading her all together after the execrable Predator, her literary decline roughly coinciding with the start of the dumpster fires of her personal life.

Anyway, in this installment, Reacher ends up in New Hampshire, stopping for a few days to research some of the oral history he was told about his family. Coincidentally, a young couple from Canada on their way to a new life in Florida ends up in a motel nearby, only too late finding out that it’s like Hotel California– “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” The two plot lines merge as the story continues, but not smoothly – too much of the plot seems contrived and a little clumsy, especially the ending where one plot line is resolved in only a couple of pages with a (to my mind) unsatisfactory explanation.

Child depends a lot on the Reacher as a caricature and I think over the last ten books or so, Reacher has become more comic book hero than literary protagonist. He’s virtually indestructible, rarely personally in danger – basically a hitchhiking Superman clone in cheap clothes. Another not-completely-believable indestructible thriller protagonist is Mark Greaney’s Gray Man series, which was interesting for the first few books and has now gotten to be too much like a knockoff of Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series.

All that said, my main criticism of the more recent Reacher books is that Child doesn’t plot out stories in advance. Like, not at all. There’s an interesting article here about the writing of a book about Lee Child writing a book – a sort of recursive navel gazing exercise – but the article is interesting. Some authors who claim not to do detailed plots in advance at least start with an idea of what the story will be about and then develop a plot along the way. Lee Child however proudly claims to only do a single draft.

My current favorite thriller and mystery writers, Michael Connelly and Mark Dawson, clearly obsessively plot their books and in reading Past Tense it’s obvious that Child does not. What Child does amazingly well is control the pacing of the stories – for all my criticism of his lack of plotting, he makes up for it in the pacing of the stories. All of his books are fast and satisfying reads.

The publishing business has changed enormously in the last half century – best-selling authors can (and have) become billionaires. Besides an Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan, Child owns a mansion in the south of France. Although the business aspects of publishing have changed since Spillane’s day, is Reacher really the literary descendant of Mike Hammer?

Filed Under: Authors, Books Tagged With: Lee Child

Reckless Daughter by David Yaffe

February 2, 2019 by Rob Thesman

Reckless Daughter is a biography of singer Joni Mitchell written by David Yaffe. The book was published in 2017, so after Mitchell’s stroke and during her recovery. Yaffe is an unabashed fan of Mitchell and this is reflected in the book. Some of the reviews I’ve read about the book claim that Yaffe’s book amounts to an approved biography, which is reasonable given the number of hours Yaffe spent interviewing Mitchell over the course of several years.

Yaffe has written other nonfiction books about music, including a 2011 biography of Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan: Like A Complete Unknown) and the role of jazz music in American literature (Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing). His writing is solid and very detailed – he interviewed hundreds of people in researching Reckless Daughter and the book seems like a fair portrait of Mitchell, inarguably one of the most influential musicians and composers of the last half of the 20thcentury.

The book details her childhood, the start of her musical career, the recognition of her place in music history, her career difficulties in gaining acceptance while shifting gears to a more jazz-like musical oeuvre, and her own attempts at managing her musical legacy. The book also covers her difficult relationships with virtually every person she’s ever met: her parents, her first husband, her second husband, “rival” female musicians, her many romantic partners, producers, other musicians, music company executives and on and on and on. 

Like I said, I think the Yaffe meant the book to be a fair but sympathetic look at Mitchell, but the feeling I came away with is that while I enjoy most of her music, I’m really glad I don’t know her or live near her. She got career help from everyone from Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, James Taylor, Graham Nash and many others. In her conversations with Yaffe, she dismissed all of them (save Graham Nash, whom she apparently still cares for) as lesser talents and diminishes their assistance. And she reallydoesn’t like Jackson Brown and Joan Baez. Her difficult relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption and then reconnected with decades later is examined in detail and Mitchell doesn’t come out appearing less than a monster.

Anyway, the book is interest reading, especially if you’re curious about her songwriting or why she uses myriad guitar tunings. And to reaffirm why you’re probably glad you don’t know her personally.

Filed Under: Authors, Books Tagged With: Reckless Daughter

Thirteen by Steve Cavanagh

February 2, 2019 by Rob Thesman

Thirteen is the third book in a series by Belfast author Steve Cavanagh with Eddie Flynn as the protagonist. Cavanagh is an attorney in Northern Ireland, Eddie Flynn is a con man, hustler, and criminal defense attorney in New York City.

Cavanagh is also half (along with Luca Veste of Liverpool) of the irregular podcasting team that does Two Crime Writers and a Microphone, which is a pretty funny podcast.

Cavanagh does an excellent job with New Yorker style dialog – his ear is accurate, especially for someone who says he never traveled to New York City until after the first two books in the series were published.

Anyway, the premise of the book is that a celebrity actor named Bobby Solomon is on trial for capital murder. One of the jurors who’s been seated for the trial is certain that Bobby isn’t guilty. He knows this because he’s the murderer.

The real murderer, Joshua Kane, goes through a complex (and body strewn) process, often using different guises, to ensure that he’s selected for the jury and, once the trial starts, he begins influencing the other jurors. Up to and including “pruning” the juror ranks.

Cavanagh does an excellent job setting traps for the reader to assume we know which juror is actually Kane; the final reveal is surprising.

It’s a fast paced, well plotted read. All of the Eddie Flynn books are good, but Cavanagh keeps getting better as the series goes on.

Filed Under: Authors, Books Tagged With: Steve Cavanagh

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

October 10, 2018 by Rob Thesman

I finished the 2017 book by British spy novelist John le Carré a few weeks ago. In the late 70s I read every book he’d written up to that time while I was pretending to be a Lit major in college. So, up through Smiley’s People all in the space of a few months. If he’d stopped writing then, the novels he’d written so far would have been a remarkable body of work. Over the years I read most of his other books when they came out or shortly after.

Le Carré started going seriously off the rails politically by that point in the late 70s and the next batch of books often reflected his his hatred of Israel and the United States. Some observers have noted that Le Carré has the worst characteristics of the old British political establishment: a lingering resentment of the United State supposedly usurping British world political hegemony in the post-WW II era, leaving the UK as America’s lap dog. His obsession with Jews and Israel is, I think, his way of coloring in the supposed evils of America – that the US is simply a puppet on strings pulled by Israeli politicians. All of that said, Le Carré is a towering figure in the writing world and still has the ability to describe a vision of a better England (and a better England on the world stage) than most of the British politicians.

Not that all of this post Smiley’s People work is anti-American and anti-Semitic – The Night Manager (from 1993) being one example of an amazingly well crafted and well written story.

I was eager to read Legacy of Spies if only because the reviews indicated the main character was Peter Guillam, one of Smiley’s devoted assistants and one of the minor characters in the very first Le Carré spy novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), and later on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).  The premise of Legacy of Spies is that Guillam, elderly and retired to Brittany, is called back to London to be interviewed/interrogated about events that happened leading up to the death of Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and the aftermath of that operation. It is revealed that Leamas had a child with an East German woman at the time of his death – that son, now an adult, has appeared and may be trying to claim that the British government is responsible for his father’s death. Or he may not be. 

What I found very interesting about the book is that there were obvious plot gaps and unexplained plot twists in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Legacy of Spies (written more than fifty years later) is Le Carré’s attempt to revisit that story and fill in the gaps.

The story alternates between scenes in present day Brittany and London juxtaposed against numerous flashbacks to the failed operation that lead to and resulted in Alec Leamas death. Or was it a failed operation?

Even in his mid 80s, le Carré is a formidably talented writer and this story was a great re-visit to Guillam and Smiley and the closing of the story once and for all of Alec Leamas. I enjoyed this book tremendously.

 

Filed Under: Authors, Books Tagged With: A Legacy of Spies, le Carré

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