"C" is for Corpse, (Chapters 7-14)

One interesting anomaly about Grafton’s writing, at least in this book, is that it seems that a lot happens in just a few pages, and yet each scene seems to take plenty of time to unfold.  Kinsey covers several “interviewees” in one short chapter, and it doesn’t take long to read, but it’s startling to look back and see that it all happened in about eight pages.  Grafton appears to respect her readers’ time – or, very professionally, realizes that today’s reader is impatient with long-winded paragraphs full of conjecture or description.  By contrast, I very recently read a book by Sir Walter Scott, which I liked very much, but took a lot more patience to get through. 

This book has a copyright date of 1986; to those of us whose college days pre-dated that, it doesn’t seem that long ago, until you do the math and see it was 27 years.  It’s interesting to stumble across a passage that tells us just how dated the story could seem.  Looking for a telephone booth?  Where’s your cell phone?  Oh, yeah.  Even in older movies it can take us a second to wonder why a character doesn’t just whip out their cell phone, or microwave a Hot Pocket and get on with the action.  Another recent read, copyrighted 2004, was also devoid of cell phones, but the first-person-writer heroine explained that on her income, she just couldn’t afford it.  No, she wasn’t on welfare, but we won’t get into that. 

Twice now, our heroine has “flipped off” a machine.  I’m thinking the author probably wouldn’t use that phrase today, even if the machine in question did have an up-down toggle-type switch instead of a push button or pressure sensitive pad.  But this phrase may itself become history before too long; I have heard some of my youngest acquaintances refer to it as “flicked off” which, viewed objectively, might be an improvement.  After all, you “flick” your finger to remove any unwanted…you know…debris, right?  “Flipping” someone off might start to sound to the younger generations like “a broken record.”  A broken what? 

What did the phrase “global warming” mean to anyone in 1986?  Grafton writes:  “The weather in Santa Teresa has been straying from the norm of late.  It used to be that you could count on clear sunny skies and a tamed and temperate sea … The shift is baffling, the sort of climatic alteration associated with the eruption of South Sea volcanoes and rumors about the ozone being penetrated by hair sprays.”  From rumors about the ozone to polar bears stranded on lonely blocks of ice and international summits on carbon footprints we’ve come a long way!  Kinsey does have an answering machine, though, that she listened to after the “tape rewound itself” and hears the last message left by her now-dead client Bobby – a voice from the “grave.”

 

Yes, the client who hired our detective has died (murdered?) in a car crash similar to the one he was mangled in to begin with.  Our narrator had warned us this was going to happen in the very first paragraph in the book, but it didn’t transpire until about a third of the way through.  I’m trying to imagine why this fact was given to us up front, what is accomplished from a story-crafting point of view.  Wouldn’t it have been more of a shock, a major highpoint in the story if we hadn’t been forewarned?  Did Grafton originally plan for it to be a major surprise and then change her mind?  Did her editor feel that readers would just give up on the book and toss it aside in disappointment if such a major character was suddenly removed from the plot at this point?  If the book had been written today, would the same decision have been made?  Am I reading way too much into this?  Probably.



Next week's chapters: 15-20.