Now that I'm finally finished with Engel's book, I am launching myself into three by Robert B. Parker. The first, Blue Screen, hit the bookstore shelves in 2006 and features his female protagonist, Sunny Randall. This is the first of the Randall books that I've read — it is apparently the fifth Parker's written (by the way, have you seen how many books this guy's published? holy cow!) — and I am enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. It makes for a nice break from painting my office, my other weekend task.

As I think I've mentioned in an earlier blog, I am a big fan of Parker's original series, featuring Spenser and his buddy Hawk. At least, I'm a big fan of the early books in the series; I started to lose interest about five years ago when Parker felt his detective had to start tackling international issues and not just good ol' Boston crimes. So I wasn't sure I'd like Blue Screen, even though it introduces me to a new detective. What I had forgotten is how good a writer Parker is when he is on. And in this book, he is definitely on. No, it's not a classic of the detective genre; it's just a well-written story that clicks right along, sweeping you up into it.

I'm more than a third of the way through after only one real sitting and I'm looking forward to getting back to it soon. The writing is so smooth, so polished, you just can't resist it.

The depiction of women, on the other hand? Well, I'll have more on that issue when I post my review.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, Blue Screen

I've finally finished reading Howard Engel's 1990 Cooperman novel, Dead and Buried. I promised everyone a review but now I'm not sure what to say. No, I don't believe in that old adage: If you don't have something good to say, don't say anything. I'm just at a loss for what to say.

I didn't enjoy this book. It was a tough slog for me every page of the way. I literally had to force myself to sit down to read it and it was a relief when I finally turned the last page.

I'm wondering if I've missed something, if Engel (a writer whom I admire) is up to something that I'm not quite catching. For a while, I tried to convince myself this book is a parody of the genre, that Engel deliberately builds towards hard-boiled standards, then goes in other (often, sorry Howard, silly) directions. If that's what he was trying to do, it didn't work for me. If he was writing this as another serious entry in the Cooperman series, that didn't work for me either.

The stage is set for the story when Cooperman receives a visit from a prospective new client, the wife of a truck driver who died in an "accident" on the job. The wife is unsympathetic and uninteresting and Cooper doesn't trust her from the start. He makes the usual references to his empty bank account to explain why he accepts the job in spite of his own reservations, then finds out very quickly the wife had lied to him about a key fact. What follows is a bizarre ramble through environmental issues, corporate realities and the lives of a warped leading local family. The original client all but disappears from the story and the resolution of her husband's death is both incomplete and an afterthought.

Despite Engel's best efforts, there is practically no tension in the book. At one point, an attempted kidnapping of our hero is spoiled when the three gun-toting nasties inexplicably choose the parking lot of a local restaurant to unload their terrified human cargo and run into, of all people, Cooperman's parents and their best friends. Five pages of build-up lead to a quick, "Hey Benny, are you going to join us for dinner?" and the tension disappears.

The "climax" of the story occurs when Cooperman is, yet again, dragged unwillingly into a mysterious car and driven off. This time, however, the kidnapping is merely a friend's "fun" way to get Cooperman to attend a wake for another friend.

Parody? I'm not sure.

The mystery is solved while Cooperman, his new girlfriend and two cops sit eating a feast at an all-night local spot. Our hero spins out for the mesmerised group (and for the reader) what actually happened and who killed whom. The police are convinced of the amazing outcome even though we, the readers, aren't.

Again, I'm at a loss. This book is a complete surprise for me. Engel is usually a sure-handed, effective mystery writer and Cooperman a grumblingly attractive, enjoyable hero. This book is a mess, to be honest (unless I'm really missing something), filled with sloppy writing that would have benefited from a very strong editor.

The plot makes no sense and Cooperman's motivations grow more questionable with each passing page. There is little suspense and what does come into play is undermined even further by the fact that we don't get to know the client, the victim nor any of the other people whose lives are trashed along the way. In other words, we don't care. And Cooperman comes across as such a slug in this book that we really don't care about him either.

As a result, I would urge you to read any one of Engel's excellent Cooperman novels, except this one.

Unless I'm missing something.

Tags: Engel, cooperman, Mystery

I'm experimenting. I'm working on a Phillip Gold short story and I'm writing it in the third-person format — you know, "Gold stood there, looking at his toes" — rather than in first person: "I stood there, looking at my toes". This is the first time I've tried such a thing. It seems foreign to me, odd and different. So yesterday, when I found a half hour to work on the story, I had to fight the inclination to rewrite what I have into the more familiar first-person approach.

What worries me most is that I'm not sure that my inclination to change it is coming from a good place — this is what's best for the story — and not from a bad place: this is what's most comfortable for me.

And I'm also worried that I'm going to continue to use this ridiculous em-dash, em-dash, colon construction throughout this piece. That would be truly tragic.

The third-person approach gives me options, variety, the ability to move out of the main character's mind and into the world. I can even, if I'm really clever, create a personality for my third-person narrative voice and have him/her commenting (either subtly or not so subtly) on the action and the characters. I can describe scenes at which Gold is not present, thus, perhaps, bringing the antagonist to life more effectively or building higher levels of tension. And, let's face it, even Raymond Chandler started running out of ideas on how his first-person narrator (Philip Marlowe) could describe being knocked unconscious: "I heard a bang and a curtain fell."

The first-person approach, on the other hand, lends immediacy to the action. If done well, it can heighten the suspense and bring the reader closer to the protagonist. It also tends to simplify things from a structural standpoint: the reader experiences what the main character experiences. Sometimes it means the reader is solving the mystery alongside (on the shoulder of, in the pocket of) our hero.

So I'm not sure what to do. In reviewing what I've written, I have found that I've included a fairly long scene of dialogue between Gold and his client in order to fill in the background information. I think it's fairly well written but I am also conscious of the fact that, in first person, I could simply have Gold tell us everything in the space of a single paragraph.

And that's another problem. I'm not a big fan of third-person exposition, where the narrator provides the background information to the reader. You've read it: "Gold had heard it all before. She'd grown up on a farm and gotten to know a lot about crops and livestock. When she was sixteen, she left home to open her own grain shop in the city."

I even considered writing it both ways and then letting my writing friends decide. I don't know. I'll have to give it some more thought.

But that's the beauty of writing. You have the time to think things through. Okay, okay, that's the beauty, and the tragedy, of being an unpublished writer. No one's waiting on your manuscript.

Tags: Phillip Gold, Mystery

Do you ever read a published novel and wonder — how did this get published when I can't get my own work out there? Well, I'm a third of the way through Dead and Buried, Howard Engel's 1990 Benny Cooperman mystery, and I'm wondering exactly that. This is as lifeless a book as I have ever read. I keep waiting for it to pick up, to catch a spark. The reviews on the covers are really positive but I can't find much to recommend it so far.

Then I think of what my friend, Lesley, who at that time was involved in the publishing business, said to me after reading a draft of my own first novel. I don't know if she was just being kind but she said something like, "Mark, this is good enough to be published but it is not good enough to get you published." In other words, if you had a strong publishing record, this book would be fine. But it's not good enough to convince a publisher to take a risk by taking on an unproven writer like you.

So maybe that's what is at work here. Engel's book is publishable because his publisher knows there's already an established audience for Cooperman novels that will buy it no matter what. If this were Engel's first novel, it probably wouldn't be published.

So what do I learn from this? Well, I guess the first lesson is that Howard Engel has written at least one book that is better than anything I've written. But we knew that already. The real lesson is that the first breakthrough is the toughest and you have to convince the publisher that your first book is good enough to build an audience from scratch.

I'll be writing a fuller review of this book when (and if) I finish it. So stay tuned.

Tags: Engel, cooperman, Dead and Buried