I had an epiphany as I read High Profile, Robert B. Parker's 2007 Jesse Stone "novel".

The first inkling I had came when I got confused as to who was speaking in a long passage of dialogue between two characters. This shouldn't be so confusing, I thought to myself. It's just two characters. So I started trying to figure out why. I read the passage over again, then a third time. I got confused each time. And then it hit me. It's the paragraphing that is throwing me off. Parker starts a new paragraph every line. Here's what I mean (and I'm making up this passage since I can't be bothered to track down a real example).

Sunny smiled.

"Why do you say that?"

"I don't know."

"You've got to have a reason."

Jesse looked over her shoulder at the lake.

"I don't have a reason."

"But you have to. People don't do things for no reason."

Sunny checked over her shoulder in case a bird was about to land on her.

"I guess I had a reason."

Jesse nodded.

"But I don't know what it is."

Did you see it? Parker puts the line of dialogue in a separate paragraph from the speaking character's physical action. Whereas most writers would, as my friend John would say, do an SPSP (same person, same paragraph), Parker separates action from dialogue. And it's confusing.

Why does he do it?

I didn't know. But then I registered how little text there is on each page. And how short his chapters are. And how little exposition there is as opposed to dialogue.

And it hit me. Parker's writing short stories —novellas at best —and passing them off to his unsuspecting readers as real life novels. I mean, the book is 290 pages long. That's fairly substantial, you would think.

So, my curiosity piqued, I decided to do a little test. First, I chose a similar book to which to compare Parker's tome: Dick Francis' Break In, a 272-page novel of which I have a hard-cover copy. The books seem to be about the same size. In fact, once I measured them (yes, I'm that anal), I realised that they are exactly the same size and that Francis' book has just 18 fewer pages than Parker's.

A good set to compare.

So then I opened High Profile at a random page — page 146, in fact — and counted the words on the page. Page 146 of the hard cover version of High Profile in my possession has 213 words on it. Then I counted the words on the next 9 pages in order to establish a reasonable sample from which to draw an average. 76, 66, 176, 185, 188, 182, 66, 94 and 166. The total over 10 pages was 1412, for an average per page of 141.2 words. Multiply that by 290 pages and the book contains 40,948 words in total. Yikes. I've been taught that a novel MUST be at least 60,000 words to be considered for publication and that 80,000 or more is a much safer bet. But Robert B. Parker's High Stakes is only 40,948 words long. No wonder I could read it so fast!

What about my comparison book, Break In? In order to be as fair as possible, I counted the words on the same ten pages —146 to 155 — to get my average and total. 307, 363, 394, 388, 372, 157, 254, 374, 356, and 370, for a total of 3335. That's an average of 333.5 words per page. Multiply by 272 pages and the Francis book includes 90,712 words in total.

Aha.

I can't help but feel that Parker and/or his publisher is/are playing fast and loose with his readers' money. They're charging us regular book prices for half a book and using every trick in the... ahem, book to fool us into thinking we're getting a full-length novel: breaking single paragraphs in two to create more lines, putting more space between lines of type, breaking the book into more chapters so that more pages are half empty, and such like.

And, of course, in counting Francis' words, I couldn't help but read them as well. And I realised that Parker couldn't hold a candle to "Dick Francis" (whether it's actually Dick who did the writing or his wife or somebody else) as a writer, no matter how much I seem to enjoy Parker's novellas. Francis' plots are more intricate and creative, his villains more complex and his action sequences much more breathtaking. I still have one more Parker on my Bed-Side Table but I swear, when that's done, I'm going to go back and enjoy Francis' entire run of novels again.

After all that, how was High Profile, you ask. Witty writing. All the characters are the same (as in other books and as each other) and the portrayal of women is just as bad as in the last book. The plot is paper thin and you can't even bank on Parker for riveting action sequences any more. In this book, there is no action. Sure, Stone attacks one man and beats him senseless. But it's not much of a fight. The man had just opened the door when Stone attacked him. And the climax of the book comes when Stone shoots the villain three times in the chest in what he rightly refers to as a "suicide by cop". All in the last 27 pages. The rest of the book is talk, talk, talk and half the time you have no idea who's doing the talking.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, High Profile