Damned If You Do--Book Review: If You Read It, You're [see title]

 Photo: Book's hardcover, from robertbparker.net. 

The real title is Robert B. Parker's Damned If You Do, but if you read my reviews, you know how I feel about using a name as part of the title, especially if he's dead, so I won't further go at it here.  But...argh...

And that's pretty much what I have to say about this book itself, as well.  This is a giant step back from the other two Brandman novels, neither of which were exemplary to begin with.  What a horribly written story!  The dialogue is wooden and preposterous.  The story is tired and distant.  It's told and not shown.  And it's got little writer edits at the end of some sentences, like Brandman's explaining it to us.  (Note to Brandman: Mystery and procedural readers like to remember such things for themselves.  Even if they're unimportant--because you don't know until the end what was important and what wasn't, right?)

There are too many examples to cite them all.  There were so many that I had to put the book down and do something else.  I actually groaned and complained out loud.  And I can't find the one now I really wanted to put here, so...From page 247, after Jesse Stone saw a character, who he'd liked, die: "He hoped that the scotch would accomplish what he was unable to achieve himself...He wanted it to erase the haunting look in her dying eyes from his mind and his heart."

First, that's just bad writing.  Second, that's telling, not showing.  Third, if you've read Parker's--and even Brandman's--Jesse Stone works before, Stone (and the 3rd person narrator) would never think or speak like this.  Fourth, we all know why people drink after they've seen someone they like die.  Fifth, we all know why borderline alcoholics (or former alcoholics, which Stone is) drink after such an event.  Sixth, that last sentence--melodrama, anyone?  And Stone, and Parker--well, they're so anti-melodrama that this is just blasphemy, in of itself.  And I know that comparing Brandman and Parker is unfair because they're different people--but Brandman is so obviously trying to emulate Parker's sparse style, and failing so miserably at it, that the comparison is just here.  I feel certain that Parker would be upset with this book.

And the action sequences are just as bad.  This from page 239: "Suddenly everyone was on the move.  Chairs scraped loudly and tables were overturned as people began to anxiously respond.  There were shouts of panic.  The crowd began a confused surge towards the exits."

Again, this is just bad writing.  The word "suddenly" was used tons of times in this book.  That's bad.  When chairs scrape, it's loud.  So that's redundant--and it tells.  And it overuses adverbs, which I learned in high school and college is bad to do.  When people are "on the move," what is that, exactly?  When settlers are on the move, they're just walking along, and slowly.  There's probably lots of dust.  And when there are "shouts of panic" and scraping chairs and overturning tables--that's not how people "anxiously respond."  That's chaos.  Stuttering is anxiously responding.  And notice the word "began" is used twice in this one short paragraph.  Nobody begins to do something.  That's a huge pet peeve of mine, and it's used a million times in this book.  You're either doing that thing, or you're not doing that thing.  In this image, the people were well beyond the "began to anxiously respond" stage, whatever that is.  They were panicked and running over each other.  By definition, a surge is an action in progress, so there's no "began" there, either.

Literally almost every sentence and every paragraph has an instance of lazy writing, bad writing, passive writing, and...Oh, man, it was just plain horrible.  What a disappointment!  I don't want the reader to think I'm just nitpicking here, or in a bad mood, or whatever.  I'm telling it straight--the writing of this book is that bad.

So bad I was shocked at its badness.

So bad it gives hope to all unpublished writers out there--if this can find its way into Barnes & Noble, your book can, too.

So bad I pictured Parker rolling over in his grave.

So bad it was a blight on all the Jesse Stone books I've bought and read before--all in hardcover, too.

So bad that if someone else hadn't bought this book for me for Christmas, I would've stopped reading it.

So bad that I can't even say to save it for bathroom reading, which is the advice I usually give for bearably bad books.  But this isn't even bathroom reading--unless you need to use its paper.  Which you probably should.

This is so bad that it reminded me of Dorothy Parker's quip: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force."

By the way, the characters and story are bad, too.  Stone, a police chief, tells a mass murderer that he feels "surprisingly comfortable" that he's watching his back.  I'm not kidding.  I actually disliked Stone at the end.

The best things about this book are the title, and the cover.  And that it ended.

Skip it, even if you have all the others.  It is worth having a hole in your collection so you don't have to put yourself through this.  It is that bad.

Don't even buy it in the remainder bin.  Don't start off the new year with this.  Don't do that to yourself.
   

Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

Photo: Book's cover, from its Wikipedia page.  Great cover!

Very specifically-written account of the murders committed by Dr. Marcel Petoit, of which there may have been 27, or 150, or anything in between, by David King.  In Nazi-occupied Paris, he would advertize his services as a Resistance-fighter, as a man who could get Jews and others out of the country, to Argentina and to freedom.  His orders were to not tell anyone.  To carry as much money as possible, sewn into their clothes.  To remove all identifying tags.  To pack all of their most valuable belongings into two suitcases and to bring them on the day they were to get away.  He'd have them meet him at an address, at an apartment condo affixed with a gas chamber, a scope that allowed him to see the suffering from the gas, or from the poison he might've injected them with.  He became very rich.

The book shows a lot of the Paris of the time, from existentialists Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir (it was cool to hear about them; I studied them while getting my philosophy degree, but I didn't get to learn a lot about their daily lives), to the daily struggles of everyone else at the time, to the way the police department worked in its tug of war with the Nazis in power, to many other things.  Petoit's crimes over so long proved the maxim of the best way to get away with something huge and terrible: To do so in the wide open, because nobody will believe it, and those who do will willfully ignore it.

It covers the trial, which was a farce of the highest order.  In a French trial, the judge, the accused, the prosecution, and any lawyer of any of the other civil defendants can all ask a question, interrupt, and say anything at any time.  So can the judge, and any of the assistant judges he has next to him.  So can any member of the jury.  This, as you may imagine, would create a chaos that I still have trouble understanding.  How anything is proven, or disproven, and judged upon is a mystery.  But Petoit was found guilty, and guillotined.  His last moments exhibit a perhaps-psychotic calm that is also beyond belief.

The subject matter saves the book, in a way, because the author displays a very dry, matter-of-fact writing style that could bore had the subject been more pedestrian.  I had no trouble putting it down, though I did want to continue.  A better job could perhaps be done with all this, though I do understand, perhaps, that the author may have felt such an approach was necessary in order to make sense and order out of all the chaos.  I have not read any of his other work, so I can't say if this is just his style, or not.

Worth a read, though Petoit's manic behavior, and his apparent ability to impress so many very well-educated and otherwise hard to impress people, may turn the reader off a little.  A Jekyll-and-Hyde person, Petoit was both a celebrated and altruistic doctor, and a mass-murderer, serial-killer-for-profit, and perhaps fifty other types of person, all at the same time, and was in and out of institutions frequently.  It was also clear that he worked for the Gestapo, and that he may have started this killing spree getting rid of other Gestapo workers--and then started killing everyone, including Jews desperate to get out of France.

Sickening, yet compulsively readable.

A Mistaken Premise--ADHD America

I mentioned in a Red Room comment to someone that I'll bet that Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe would not be successful characters in today's publishing world.  Not as they were initially created.  The reason I gave was that the American public is seen as too ADHD, too hyper, too bent on immediate gratification, to accept a work that takes a while to build its characters and crimes.  Chandler's novels are, first and foremost, about Philip Marlowe (and, one suspects, Raymond Chandler at the same time) and about the L.A. of the time.  The crimes and plots are so secondary that the novels often seem plotless, actually.  In fact, the plots were stitched together from many of Chandler's short stories, published in pulps like Black Mask, and they often don't hold up very well as plots.

But the novels, taken in their entirety, work very well, mostly due to the Chandler style and Marlowe's Voice (which are practically the same, but not completely).  Could such a work do well today?  Can a mystery noir be first about character, secondly about writing style, and thirdly about plot and actual mystery?  I thought so, which is why my ms. works the same way, but I can tell you that agents--and, perhaps, the entire publishing business--does not think so.  At all.  Readers don't have the patience.  Crime on page one.  All mysteries up front, with more to follow consistently.  Suspense on every page.  Crime, mystery, suspense, repeat.

Character and setting?  Writing style and Voice?  Fine, they'd say, but first: crime, mystery, suspense.

The publishing business isn't the only one to feel this way.  The education business does, too, I assure you.  The teaching colleges push the law of entertaining lessons so hard today that you'd swear they expect their teachers to be singers and dancers, too.  They really believe that if the lesson is super-duper-interesting, the teacher will never have a behavior problem, and everyone will love learning, and everything's rosy.  I've seen a lot of student teachers crash-and-burn because they believed this to the bitter end, only to learn---

But I digress.  Or do I?  Are the American Readers--and the American Youth--that ADHD, that hyper, that demanding, that needy for immediate gratification?  Are they, or does everyone think that they are?  Which came first, the supposed ADHD American Reader, or the publishing industry that's based on the model of immediate gratification for its readers?  You can ask the same about the education industry.

I propose that the whole thing's a mess.  With the state of both industries today, someone needs to step back and re-think this initial premise.  It's a chicken-and-egg scenario that did not exist in my student and first-reading days.  I don't know when it started, but what if the whole concept is a mistake?  I don't know about the publishing industry, but I can tell you that it's a disservice to many students, and that it's actually insulting and offensive to many of them.

Editing = Style

A quick word about editing:

All writers are wordy in drafts.  You edit.  You slice.  You nip and tuck.  Sometimes you bludgeon and take out whole paragraphs.  But I've come across some writers lately who forgot, maybe, why you do this.

1.  Well, because you have to omit needless words.  Period.  Wordiness creates passivity; it turns off readers--and agents.  It's the first sign of a bad writer--and it's the easiest thing to fix and control.

2.  But writers sometimes forget that wordiness needs editing because it is in the editing that writers create their style.  Editing writing is like editing film; that's where the style is.  Without it--if you have too many words--you don't just have an avalanche of unnecessary words, you also lack the style your narration needs to tell the story.

3.  Finally, unless you're Shakespeare writing the Nurse's lines--unless your character or narrator is necessarily wordy--you should not be writing too many words.  This is especially true for dialogue.  Most real people do not speak too much.  When they do, they're treated just like the writings such unrealistic characters will inhabit: they're ignored.  Just as in narration, the first sign of a bad writer is bad dialogue--which is created by stilted or overwordy speakers.

So don't forget to edit.  And don't forget that you're not just editing to get rid of unnecessary words.