I've been enjoying a good stretch of PI novels (one of them is pictured just to the left of the text here - go ahead, check it out) and it's encouraged me to pick stuff I've been putting off for one reason or another, but last week I got around to a book by a popular mystery writer whom I’d never read, but had felt for a while that I really should investigate. More than that, from the impressions I had of his work I was genuinely looking forward to it. Like I said, the PI books have been particularly satisfying lately even though it was a genre I felt I’d reached my saturation point with a couple years back. It felt good to have my enthusiasm for the form returning buoyed by the likes of characters named Cal Innes, Moe Prager, Jack Taylor and Boone Daniels, but that all came to an abrupt stop a single paragraph into the book by the big name. It looked to be fading from memory after a couple of pages and was like it had never happened when I put it down after the second chapter.
Ugghhh.
I’m not in the habit of encouraging people not to read and I harbor no ill-will toward the legions of fans of said best-selling writer (who will not be named), but it was like he was inviting me to forget everything I’d just read and treat his book like just so much elevator muzak – just one more vaguely familiar tinkling noise in the back of my mind that I could hum along with. And like elevator muzak there is only the tune, the words, frankly don’t matter. Why even bother writing them? The contempt for his audience was palpable and really hard not to pick up on. Every time somebody picks this title up, it scores another one for illiteracy.
Do I sound angry? That hardly covers it. First, I put it down with a great sigh of disappointment, but the anger? It's only built since then. This was the kind of book that all my snobby non-fiction-only friends trot out to illustrate the brain-rot that they perceive in our culture across the board. And you know what? They're right. I gotta give 'em that. And I hate to. I really, really love fiction and mystery fiction, PI fiction and it hurts so to concede their stupid point, but in this case, I have no choice.
There are plenty of bad books out there by sub-par writers failing honestly and plenty of good writers who’ve taken the occasional (sincere, I trust) misstep, and I'm not talking about them. This book was by a big name – someone supposed to be sitting atop the pile – one of the first tools you would use to evangelize the unfamiliar, but it was just so aggressively poor, so cynically constructed and bitterly wrought that the mind boggles at the thought of it representing (to a far too large slice of the reading public) what a ‘mystery’ is, what potential the medium holds and what a sincere practitioner can wring from the form (and formula for that matter) that is so appealing to so many people.
This is what happens when nobody cares. So stop settling for mediocrity for God’s sake. How is it that we allow some really top-shelf-quality stuff to simply disappear, washed out by the tide of this a-new-one-every-year-just-like-the-last-one cycle big publishing is so content with?
Vote with your wallets, folks and toss the bums out. You like PI fiction? So do I, here are some examples of current writers who care and it shows - check out The Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow, The Guards by Ken Bruen, Walking the Perfect Square by Reed Farrel Coleman, Saturday's Child by Ray Banks or hey, how about The Lost Sister by Russel D. McLean, that one's new, go for heaven's sake and find out.
I’m angry. I want a strong cup of coffee. Now. I also want to know your favorite PIs and yes, Dave Zeltserman, I will check Paul Tremblay very soon. I want to keep typing in bold print. Hulk smash.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
