CLIVE CUSSLER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of the techno-thriller adventure writer Clive Cussler was published by the Guardian online
a few days ago; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It was an interesting one to write, because I had dipped into Cussler once or twice, but pulled my toe out of the water quickly. But I found it edifying to try to trace his influences: I had recognised Doc Savage right away (and have noticed some others noting that) but that led my critical eyes to Travis McGee and John D MacDonald, whom I was surprised no one else noted. McGee is a tall, bronzed hero who specialises in marine recovery, although most McGee novels don't actually involve that sort of work. But MacDonald's major best-sellers almost always did involve some bit of technology, or business, which he would explain to the reader in great detail, because the plot was often intertwined with the workings of the business. I thought this was something Cussler used to great advantage.

I would have liked to spend more time on his classic car collection, and a little on his career as an
ad man too, because his reputation as a writer was made, or at least maintained, in part by clever marketing of himself and his work as a brand, much like Warren Adler, whose obit I did for the Guardian last May (you can link to that here). I probably could have mentioned that. But I'll have to wait until my next trip to Colorado to see the cars.

LOU BERNEY'S NOVEMBER ROAD

It's November 1963, and in Dallas President Kennedy has just been shot. In New Orleans, Frank Guidry is thinking about a trip he made the other day, dropping off a clean Cadillac to a garage just a couple of blocks from Dealey Plaza. Guidry works for Carlos Marcello, the Godfather of the New Orleans mafia, and a confirmed Kennedy-hater. He's Rat Pack sharp and Sinatra smooth. And now Marcello's assistant, Seraphine, wants him to deliver another car, this time to Houston. It's not the kind of job Guidry, a smooth-talker who can get things done, would usually do, and he wonders if the boss isn't starting to take care of loose ends. Because it doesn't take a wise guy to figure out what has just gone down in Dallas, and who was involved. So what he fears is just what happens at the Rice hotel in Houston, but Guidry, sharp as ever, is just a step ahead, and now he's on the run, headed for Las Vegas, where his only possible help might be found.

In a small town in Oklahoma, Charlotte Dooley has a boring Sixties American life, which would be alright were she not married to a drunk. She works for the local photographer, and would like to do more, but she has two kids and a dog, and though her husband doesn't mistreat her or the kids, their common ground has disappeared, and on the Sunday Jack Ruby kills Lee Oswald, when her husband goes off on the kind of errand that lasts until he's drunk his fill, Charlotte puts her daughters and dog into the car, and heads west, aiming for the Los Angeles home of an aunt she hasn't seen in years.

And after another killer botched the hit on Guidry, Marcello has put his top button, Paul Barone, onto Guidry's trail, once he's eliminated the assassin who failed. 

Three people headed West, and their inevitable convergence, is the core of November Road, and its a core which Lou Berney orchestrates well and writes even better. Berney gets the pace and the feel of Sixties paperback originals, those raw, well-written Gold Medal novels by the likes of John D MacDonald, except there's a kind of balance between the characters, and an awareness that our contemporary perspective can provide. Thus we see that, although Guidry lives within the strict rules of his business, where everyone is out to protect themselves and will always act in their own best interest, but where you have to be sharp enough to know the angles and what that best interest is, Charlotte is in a similar world, where most of the decisions have been made for her, and although the payback is not so severe, straying from them is not easy.

Berney writes this with a flow that keeps you entrenched in the drama, in the choices, in the forks in the road, the way the best road fiction works. He also writes with beautiful touch. “Why,' Ed said, 'what have we here' seems a simple line, but ending a chapter as it does it is so full of portent I sat and stared at it for a while. As I did at the end of the story, which is moving and sad, but not sentimental. I had added three words, in my mind, to the penultimate line, then realised I was being too literal, and the words were already there, unsaid. It doesn't really matter what those words are (I don't want to drop a spoiler in) but the fact that the scene had been written with such accuracy and grace that those words were unncessary. You'll see when you read it, as you really ought to.

November Road by Lou Berney

Harper Collins, £8.99, ISBN 9780008309336

note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

LAWRENCE BLOCK'S GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES

Doak Miller is a former New York cop who's taken early retirement, moved to Florida and picked up a PI licence. He lives a quiet life in a small town, has occasional sex with the realtor who sold him his house, and does odd jobs for the local sheriff. One of these is to play a hit-man, and wear a wire when he meets a woman who wants her husband killed. But something about Lisa Yarrow Otterbein's eyes gets to Doak.

It's a familiar sort of noirish set-up, right down to the steamy Florida back-drop, the kind of thing that John D MacDonald (echoed by this book's title) or some of the great Gold Medal pulpsters might turn out. This should be no surprise because Lawrence Block may be the last of those writers who came up in the Fifties and early Sixties in New York, often via the Scott Meredith agency, people like Ed McBain and Donald Westlake, and these kind of novels were their stock in trade.

Many of them also churned out porn, as well as soft-core crime fiction, like Block's Chip Harrison books, which is interesting because sex as well as death is the cornerstone of noir. And what Block is doing here is bringing the two together in a matter-of-fact way to suggest that these urges bleed into each other more than writers care to admit, or explain. What's most interesting is seeing the way Doak, rather than being manipulated like a classic noir bozo, is actually drawing himself in consciously, and with control (though of course we're always on the lookout for the usual inevitable betrayal) of the situation, and with a ruthlessness which sexuality has drawn out and intensified.

There's an almost tongue-in-cheek element to the sex here, as if Block were nodding back to those more outwardly innocent days, where the sin was just as heavy but the description was less graphic. If anything, you might see it as an old master doing what he might have wanted to do many years before. The key is Doak's experience with a pregnant woman he interviews as part of an insurance check. She's a reflection of Mildred Diedrichson, role reversed with Doak. And if Doak's inner self turns out to be worthy of Walter Neff (who is referenced specifically by Block, in what may be a slightly too cute playing of his story against some classic film noirs) there is a reason Block has attempted an hommage of Double Indemnity, reclaimed for the male. Block hands the book's killer ending to Lisa. 'That's the movies,' she said. 'This is life.'

The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes by Lawrence Block

Titan Books/Hard Case Crime £16.99 ISBN 9781783297504

BINARY: TWO BOOKS BY MICHAEL CRICHTON AS JOHN LANGE

Michael Crichton put himself through medical school writing paperback thrillers, under the pen name John Lange (a German pun on his 6-9 height). He wrote seven of them between 1966-70, but in 1969, the same year he received his MD, he published, under his own name, The Andromeda Strain, which was a best-seller and doomed his medical career. In that same year he published A Case Of Need, under another pen name, Jeffrey Hudson (a famous 17^th century dwarf) which won an Edgar award.

Before he died in 2008, Crichton had arranged for Hard Case Crime to bring the Lange books back into print, and had even done some revisions. It should be noted that there have been previous reissues of Lange books, from a number of publishers, but they are now out of print. Hard Case issued four of them in October, and another four this month. And that makes eight, because Crichton wrote one last Lange book, Binary, which was published in 1972 (along with The Terminal Man, under his own name), and which was crucial in providing him the opportunity to direct the film version—a surprisingly good made for TV movie called Pursuit, with Ben Gazzard, EG Marshall, and William Windom)

Perhaps because it was the last of the Lange books, Binary may be the best place to start, because it is a taut thriller that moves straightforwardly, and contains a confrontational puzzle at its center. It's anchored firmly in its time, as a right-wing millionaire plots to explode a canister of nerve gas over San Diego as the Republican party holds its convention there, and President Nixon arrives from the Western White House in nearby San Clemente. Interestingly, the convention in reality was moved to Miami Beach (not for reasons of terrorism) but in a brief note Lange explains he preferred to leave his book as it was).

The millionaire is John Wright, and John Graves is an agent for the State Department's Intelligence Division who has been tracking Wright and his extremist views, and is on alert because of the convention. Meanwhile, a shipment of nerve gas has been stolen from a train—the gas is transported in two canisters, each inert until they are mixed, hence the title of the book. What ensues is a cat and mouse battle between Wright and Graves, which Wright relishes, and in which Graves is always playing catch-up; it is a binary situation just as much as the deadly chemicals.

Crichton moves the pace along quickly, and handles the chess game between the two fairly, with Graves' more interesting battles coming with other government agencies. It's interesting, in light of the influences which are obvious in the earlier books, such as those detailed in Grave Descend, which is reviewed below, that Graves should be working for a man named Phelps—of course on Mission Impossible Peter Graves played Jim Phelps. Call it a hommage. It's also worth noting that Glen Orbik's cover is one of the best Hard Case covers, in the style of pulpy paperbacks, but the alluring femme fatale doesn't really appear in the story at all!

What makes Binary the most interesting of these releases is not so much Crichton's usual technical aplomb, but the way the story resonates with the present day. The use of nerve gas obviously prefigures modern WMD and terrorist worries, but in Wright Crichton creates a character right out of today's Ayn Rand reading Tea Partiers, the kinds of people who felt frustrated in the post-Goldwater Republican party, but who, in the years since Ronald Reagan have taken it over. The idea that they are the true terrorists wasn't completely ahead of its time, but it was in the James Bond category in those days, and here, in contrast to Grave Descend, Crichton saw through it to what it was.

Grave Descend was published in 1970, and nominated for an Edgar, which reflects the sure hand Crichton had developed writing the first six Lange thrillers. It;s very entertaining, but seems slight, and I wasn't quite sure why until I went back and looked at the other nominations and winners in the best paperback original category—Dan J Marlowe's Flashpoint, not one of his great ones, won the award that year (1971) but most books were still being reprinted from hardcover in those days; the pb original market was nowhere near as deep as it is today. I retrospect, it's far less slight than it seems by today's standards. Similarly, A Case Of Need won the Edgar for best novel, and it's odd looking back just how traditional in orientation that award was at the time.

James McGregor is a diver based in Jamaica who is hired to investigate the wreck of a luxury yacht, called Grave Descend, only he watches the ship blown up and sunk after he's hired to retrieve its cargo. Crichton's influences come through very clearly here: there's more than a little John D MacDonald here. I wrote on this blog when I linked to the obituary of Crichton that I wrote for the Guardian (follow the link here), that Crichton had obviously learned from MacDonald's bigger, mainstream novels, more than the Travis McGee ones. But here McGregor, like McGee, specialises in salvage,and also has McGee's attitudes toward women—a combination of 50s old fashioned morality and 60s sexual freedom, as well as the classic hard-boiled suspicion of affection offered. This is a major part of most of MacDonald's non-McGee hard-boiled thrillers. MacDonald was expert on getting just enough technology and detail into his books to make them seem realistic, and more importantly to make the plot grow from that reality; this was the way he constructed those later, major novels, which often seem very close to what Crichton was doing.

There's also a lot of Ian Fleming here—the island setting, and its enigmatic cop, and the master-villain sort of set-up in the isolated mansion and classy yacht. McGregor's local helper, Chingnachook to McGregor's Hawkeye, is there to provide the necessary deus ex machina, and it all comes to a rousing climax, with a surprisingly downbeat and nicely written anti-climax. It is a fine example of Crichton's innate story-telling ability—how he was able to distill the familiar tropes of the time, and give them freshness. He would find his own niche in medical and scientific thrillers, but never settle for just that, and these books are a good indication of why.

Grave Descend (ISBN 9781783291243) and Binary (ISBN 9781783291250)

are published at £7.99 by Titan/Hard Case Crime

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

GEORGE PELECANOS' CUT

When I reviewed The Way Home in 2009 (you can link to it here), I suggested that, since so much of his work falls into the series framework, it might be grouped with George Pelecanos' previous two novels, The Night Gardener and The Turnaround, into a trilogy I dubbed 'Fathers and Sons'. His new novel, The Cut, in one sense might be considered the fourth book in what would then become a quartet, but it also marks a departure in style from the trilogy which precedes it, and also introduces a character who seems poised to begin a series of novels all his own. Spero Lucas does the investigating that gets a major drug dealer's nephew off a stolen car/traffic accident beef, and winds up working for the dealer to trace a leak in his marijuana supply chain. Things get complicated from there, and there's an interesting twist in the end, which helps confirm Spero's lone-wolf status.

In one sense, Spero's story continues the concerns of the 'Fathers and Sons' trilogy, with family values, in the old-fashioned, core sense of that phrase, being at their centre. Lucas is one of four children, two natural, two adopted, raised by hard-working Greek parents. He and his brother Leo are the adopted ones, and Leo is black. Of the two older children, one is a successful lawyer and the other is a ne'er do well; neither has much to do with their widowed mother. Leo is a teacher, Spero a war-hero home from Iraq, working as a casual investigator for a criminal defense attorney. The Cut features sub-plots; one of Leo's students is a witness to one of the central crimes, and is a bright boy in need of a father figure; a crooked cop turns out to have a criminal father of the worst sort—the contrasts between nature and nurture are never sharper than when Pelecanos approaches them through the prism of crime.

But looked at from another angle, The Cut does a couple of things differently from most of his previous fiction. There is a feeling in the way the book is structured around Spero that reminded me of Robert B Parker's fiction, how quickly he constructs a scene and the characters within it, and then moves on. Like so many of Parker's novels, this one also moves very quickly toward one big action scene, a structure not unlike the westerns which Pelecanos admires and which have been reflected before in his work.

The other new thing is Spero himself, who, unlikely as it seems, reminds me of John D MacDonald's Travis McGee, the 'salvage consultant'. That's the nature of Spero's work for the defense attorney. Like McGee, he possesses superior and well-honed skills that make him more formidable than he might seem (and like McGee's, those skills were acquired in the military). But most striking is Spero's attitude toward the opposite sex: though firmly on the side of families and raising children properly, he is, like McGee, a confirmed bachelor and unwilling (or unable) to commit to a relationship—though he is a lot of fun even without that. Being the 21st century, this attitude runs afoul of one of the women in the story, but being McGee-like that is, in effect, her problem. Admittedly, it has been a long time since I read a Travis McGee, but I was hearing definite echoes of his pop psychology in the narrative.

This is not meant to deflate the impact of this book. There is no one writing crime fiction who deals more realistically or more tellingly with the situation of working class people in American cities, and the degradation of life within those cities caused by the disappearance of jobs and the downscaling of education as a government priority for those people. He makes the problem personal, and that works. In The Cut, he has adapted those concerns to a faster-paced, more hero-centered story. If it's Parker and MacDonald with a conscience and a soul, that is not a bad thing to be.

The Cut by George Pelecanos
Orion Books, £12.99 ISBN 9781409114567

ROBERT B PARKER'S PROFESSIONAL

If you were looking for a book to sum up all the strengths and weaknesses of Robert B Parker's Spenser novels, The Professional might well be it. On the surface, it's a perfect set-up for the tough yet sensitive private eye whom almost all women seem to find irresistible; Spenser is hired by a group of four trophy wives, all of whom are being blackmailed by a gigolo, and none of whom wants their husbands to know. But when Spenser finally tracks down the stud in question, whose name is Gary Eisenhower, aka any number of more sophisticated aliases, things don't go quite the way he planned. First off, he feels a certain amount of sympathy for Gary, which appears to arise from an instinctive understanding of Gary's almost sociopathological disorder. It doesn't take Spenser long to figure out Gary likes the feeling of outdoing the big men who keep the trophy wives, and he also finds that Gary is relatively honest, within the framework of being a blackmailing gigolo. Then one of the wives, Beth Jackson, gets threatened. And her husband, Chet, who's on the shadier side of business, turns up dead. And Gary turns up as the prime suspect.

What's most interesting here is the way Spenser treats Gary, almost professional to professional, men who follow the codes of their chosen professions, by which I don't mean irrresistible stud. It doesn't quite work that way, but there seems to be an element of moralising going on here; Gary's blackmail is not such a bad thing because people need to be responsible for their actions—the most noble character in the book is a college president who stood up to Gary when he blackmailed her and faced down the consequences. I was wondering if Eisenhower was supposed to refer us back to the up-tight Fifties, when blackmail was rife. And where Beth Jackson might have stepped right out of a John D MacDonald novel, as longtime Spenser readers might imagine, Gary's neurosis provides plenty of fodder for Spenser and Susan Silverman to discuss, and thus prove to us that their relationship transcends such things. And that is where the weak points begin.

The Gang of Four wives are portrayed with a fairly shallow touch of caricature, their stories irrelevant apart from one wife who's protecting her gay husband's secret. Chet, it turns out, is in the classic film noir scenario, in love with a woman he knows is no good; he even confesses to Spenser that he's had therapy for this, before asking Spenser in another scene if he thinks he's a psychiatrist himself. Of course he does, Chet! There is a hugely funny scene where Chet tells Beth she can go off with Gary, except he'll cut her off completely from his cash, and she looks at Gary for advice and he says 'take the money, that's what I'd do.'

But the biggest problem with the story is Beth, who turns out to be a less than compelling femme fatale. Parker even goes as far as providing her with a semi-sympathetic back story, but it isn't enough; her character remains one dimensional (two, if you include sex, or the promise thereof). Beth needs to manipulate men to get what she wants, and, it occurs to me she might well be the professional of the title. But athough she's not a compelling character herself, Parker has set up a compelling end. It's not particularly original, and one gets the sense that the story has been constructed to get us to that place, but it works particularly well for two reasons. One is that the story has also been constructed to set this relationship off against many of the others, and the contrast is powerful. The other is that Parker remains a master of tone. Usually that tone is flippant, lightly entertaining, wise-crakcing; Chandler with a degree in psych. Detectives and shrinks are the real professionals of his books. But sometimes, his tone can be exactly right for the emotional effect he wants to convey, and that's what it is here. It's a moving ending, in a downbeat way, and all the better because Parker doesn't try to make it louder.

MICHAEL CRICHTON OBITUARY

My obituary of Michael Crichton is in today's Guardian; you can read it here. It occured to me afterwards, thinking about the success of his work, that a major influence on his formula might have been John D MacDonald, whose novels, especially the later, non Travis McGee, 'big' books always took a specific 'technical' theme and researched it thoroughly, framing the story around that issue.

The praise for Eaters Of The Dead was genuine. I remember being surprised by how good I thought it was, when I read it, probably in my first year in Britain...and it stayed on my shelves for almost 30 years before I moved out of my flat. I had somehow missed the release of the movie 13th Warrior, but I suppose I will have to chase it down now!