ROBERT CRAIS' DANGEROUS MAN

Isabel Roland is a bank teller, and one of her customers is Joe Pike. Pike, as ever, is a quiet enigma, but Isabel and especially her colleague Dana both think he's hot. After Pike leaves, Isabel goes to lunch, and as she hits the sidewalk, she's forced into a car and two men drive away with her. But Joe Pike had just got into his car across the street, and he's seen what happened. It was quick, but it didn't feel right. A few blocks later, at a light, Pike disables the men and rescues Isabel. Before he did, the men had told her 'we know your secret.' Which is more than she does, but it's enough to get Pike and Elvis Cole involved with some ruthless killers

Last year when I reviewed Robert Crais' The Wanted, I concentrated on the personal stories underneath the fast-paced thriller; contrasting stories of parents and children as well as two entertaining if cold-blooded killers. Dangerous Man is even faster-paced, a relentless series of track-downs and races against time which meant I was able to literally recapitulate the 'page-turner' and 'unputdownable' critics' cliches, because I read the book the day it arrived.

It's different from The Wanted, except perhaps for the beachside gunfight that climaxes the chase. Again there is a parental angle, but it's simply background. The villains don't have much in the way of personality, it's a bigger crew working for a second crew working for an anonymous villain off-stage. But after I finished Dangerous Man, I happened to watch the pilot episode of the overlooked Stephen J Cannell TV show Wise Guy. Elvis Cole had referenced himself to Jim Rockford (perhaps Cannell's best, see my obit in the Independent) at one point in the novel, and it occurred to me that Crais, who started writing TV crime shows during the Rockford era, had written this scene by scene, in what would have been an epic Rockford episode, if Rockford had come up with a partner like Joe Pike. The movement between the scenes, which buffers the fast pace, the relaxed dialogue even as the pressure intensifies, and the now-expected confrontation with federal marshals who are looking for the same killers, who tortured one of their retired colleagues at the start of their quest that roped in Roland.

You'd think Joe Pike is a bit too old for Isabel Roland, and she's a bit too much of an innocent civilian for him, but the strange prospect is also fun to consider, jarring as it is to hear the young tellers refer to Joe as a 'studburger' or 'manmeat on a stick'. With the right casting, this would be a hell of pilot for the Elvis and Joe Show. But I am more than content to have the story between covers, because how these days how many books do I simply sit down and read to the end before getting up? Not too many.

Dangerous Man by Robert Crais

Simon & Shuster, £16.99, ISBN 9781471157615

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ROBERT CRAIS' SUSPECT

There is a theme running through Robert Crais' work, whether it's the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novels or not, and that is relationships. Familial, romantic, partnerships are the currency of Crais' characters, and for him character is indeed, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed, action. Though his books often seem fast-paced, when you look at them closely you'll see him weave myriad plot strands together and, as befits someone who was a highly successful writer of episodic television, usually resolve them quickly. What isn't resolved quickly is whatever series of questions Crais has made his characters face about their relationships; sometimes that resolution mimics the high-speed finales, sometimes it runs parallel, and sometimes it is resolved in quite an opposite way altogether.

In Suspect, the relationship in question is between Scott James, an LA cop who lost his partner, was severely wounded himself, in a massive shootout, and his new partner, a German shepherd named Maggie who herself lost a partner and was severely wounded in Afghanistan.

It takes a brave writer to try not to have animals upstage his story, and Crais makes it work almost immediately; the prologue in Afghanistan is superbly judged. He makes Maggie a real character with some of the most touching writing I've read in the crime field in ages. Using animal point of view is equally risky, but again, Crais pulls it off, and it's necessary in the sense that we are dealing with two damaged beings, whose path to each other reflects that damage even as they heal. So Scott has to prove himself as a dog handler, in order to remain what he wants to be, a working cop, but he also has to try to solve the mystery of the shooting that killed his former partner, Stephanie, to stop his feeling he left her behind.

It works well. As Scott gets closer to the truth, he finds himself ensnared. Perhaps it would have been good to see the ultimate villain fleshed out a little more fully, or foreshadowed slightly more strongly, and perhaps Scott could have been left hanging out in the wind for a longer, more suspenseful, time. In an afterword, Crais acknowledges a certain amount of compression of time in the dog training, but it's easy to see why he wanted to maintain the pace as he does, to in effect force the new partnership to a point of crisis, to see if the bonding sticks, and to see if both partners can begin to trust the world again. It is a bravura piece of writing, and it seems a natural for a movie—after all, it's been too long since we've seen heroic dogs on our screens. 

Suspect by Robert Crais

Orion, £12.99, ISBN 9781409127703

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ROBERT CRAIS' TAKEN: THE 500TH POST

NOTE: This is the 500th post at Irresistible Targets. It may be worrying that it happens to be Friday 13th, but it is also auspicious that it happens to be a review of Bob Crais' latest novel, because he's one of those writers I've been following since the start, and one whom I've been fortunate enough to review frequently and meet up with regularly, but sadly less frequently.

IT will resume its more frequent service, I hope, now that I'm back from New Zealand and Nate is on the mend and on his way back soon. Sadly, on my way back via LA I just missed Bob and another of IT's favourite people, Michael Connelly, doing a joint appearance at the Santa Monica Library to discuss Raymond Chandler (see the photo bottom left).

Thanks to all of you who've followed IT so far--your comments are encouraged, and please pass the link onward if you do enjoy what you find here...


In his last novel, The Sentry, Elvis Cole protected his friend and partner Joe Pike. It didn't take long to pay the favour back. In Taken Cole is hired to find a young woman who has gone missing, and, as it turns out, she's been tkidnapped by bajadores, modern-day bandits who steal whatever the Mexican cartels are smuggling across the border. In this case, it's people, and they extort money from the families, no matter how poor, then kill their victims rather than return them. As Cole notes, it's a business dependent on quantity of kidnappings, not quality. And with Cole involved and turning over stones, the case grows to include both the cartels and the Korean mafia, the ATF, and eventually, Cole himself, when he too becomes one of the taken. But that brings Joe Pike into play.

Taken is one of Robert Crais' most ambitious novels. It begins like a classic Cole—we've almost forgotten how irreverent about hard-boiled conventions the early Elvis was, and indeed here, when he is hired, it is as the 'World's Greatest Detective'--an ironic part of his personality which has pretty much disappeared over the years. With Cole a prisoner, the novel flips, and then becomes a Joe Pike story—but not in the 50/50 mix you might expect. Because Crais does something very daring, shifting not only between multiple points of view, but also multiple timelines, moving back and forth between not only his two protagonists, but also the kidnapped girl, her boyfriend, their fellow captives and their captors. It truly is the story of all the taken.

And a brutal story it is. Last time I interviewed Bob (for Shots, on publication of The Sentry last year; you can link to it via here) we talked about Don Winslow and Savages, his exceptional and very brutal cross-border story. It seems inevitable that the excellent crime writers Los Angeles can boast would begin to focus south, and on the border, and Crais has moved adeptly into territory worked so well by Winslow and Jeff Parker. And for him, it's a difficult tightrope to walk: Pike is a character who can deal with violence and keep even huge body counts on an even keel for the reader, but Cole's character is different. Over his past few novels, Crais has brought the characters closer together, and here he's got the tone right throughout, balancing brutality with humanity. And it ends with a simple scene that is so Californian in its metaphor, yet so touching as well, that it re-validates the whole concept of the book (validate, of course, is a key Californian word).

Along the way we also see characters who seem poised to recur: Joe Pike's mercenary colleague Jon Stone and ATF bigwig Nancie Stendahl, who seems a worthy friend/foil for either Cole or Pike or both. It struck me as I raced through this compulsive story that Crais has come a long way since The Monkey's Raincoat, and so have his characters. They've grown together and the books are better for it.

TAKEN by Robert Crais
Orion £12.99 ISBN 9781409116035

ON WATCH FOR ROBERT CRAIS' SENTRY

It was almost 25 years ago that Robert Crais' Elvis Cole made his debut, which means we (but not Crais) are getting older. So is Cole. He came along in the second-wave of neo-Chandler private eyes, full of irreverence and wise-cracking, like Fletch or Moses Wine. But as the Cole series progressed the books grew deeper and more layered, and after three exceptional Cole novels (LA Requiem, The Last Detective, and Forgotten Man) whose titles reflect their growing darkness, Crais changed gears, with his first novel making Cole's partner Joe Pike the main character. The first Pike novel, The Watchman, set the tone: its title reflecting Pike's character, but the book itself driven primarily by plot, a play by play of the relentless Pike on his quest, with most of the characterisation provided by the cast who play off Pike's stoic silences.

The Sentry is the third Pike novel (just published in the US, out in the UK in March), and its title reflects the first, defining Pike and his character. The story is simple: Pike interrupts what looks like a gang-banger shakedown at Wilson's Po' Boys, a touch of pre-Katrina New Orleans transplanted to a Venice cafe, and falls for something in the manner of Dru Rayne, the niece of the strangely uappreciative Wilson, who runs the cafe and whom Pike has saved from a more severe beating. Of course, it turns out there is more going on that just a small-time protection racket, and soon Dru has disappeared and Pike, who said he would protect her and her uncle, is on a mission to rescue her.

The beauty of the Pike books is that Crais can indulge in thriller writing, the kind of thing he did to an extent in television, and in Pike he has the perfect kind of hero to do that. Pike may be somewhat utilitarian as a character, but because he remains so constant, so true to that character, and because he remains almost unaffected by the way 'normal' characters interact, he provides a certain amount of freedom. Where Elvis Cole becomes the centre of every scene he was in, and we understand characters through his own, limited in some ways, perspective, with Pike the other characters become the focus, and we understand them as Pike does, and perhaps better.

That's certainly the case here, as a femme fatale shows Pike's own vulnerability, the way he is trapped within his own code of behaviour, which is almost existential apart from when it is cracked open by a woman. In that sense, Crais' take on a classic film noir situation is made even more stark by Cole's presence, as alter-ego to Pike.You would actually like to see more interaction between Pike and Dru, because she's a strong character but primarily off-stage; in fact, her most chilling scene is probably whe Pike observes her from afar, and ought to realise what the score is at that point, since we do, but may be reluctant to believe the evidence of his eyes.

It's also interesting because the story actually starts, as Wilson and Dru do, in New Orleans, and the most frightening of the book's many villains, Daniel, a self-described werewolf, is drawn with strong overtones of horror, sort of John Connolly on the bayou. But there is a twist to the werewolf's behaviour, one whose success depends on how much you sense it coming; which is why I won't mention what it is. If it works for you, it provides the book with an odd moment of sympathetic frisson. But for a full-bore, fast-paced thriller, which it most certainly is, The Sentry is a suprisingly soft-centered and sensitive story. Crais has come a long way since The Monkey's Raincoat, never boring and often surprising. Twenty-five years? Really?

The Sentry by Robert Crais

Orion Books, £12.99 ISBN 9781409116004

NOTE: This review will also appear at crimetime.co.uk