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

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