Friday, September 26, 2014

Killing the Shadows (Val McDermid) Conclusion

This last quarter of the book finally picked up the pace enough to be what I’d call “gripping.”  There were some fairly lengthy passages that had me reading a little faster, maybe even breathing a little harder.  These passages are a good example of what a thriller reader looks for in a thriller … “thrills.”  It just would have been nice if they hadn’t all been saved until the end!  I know I whine too much about how long some books are, and when I started this “book club” I stated as my intention to include books that were not more than 300 or 400 pages.  But sure enough, the exceptions I have made to this guideline have turned out to be tedious for me, if not for anyone else.

Fiona’s thwarted attempts to get people to take her seriously, and to get some help finding Kit, are cleverly contrived, and the circumstances that lead to the necessity of her going it alone are quite believable; even sort of familiar to anyone who has had “one of those days.”  The plotting here struck me as quite intelligent, showing the strengths of this author that we, frankly, hadn’t seen all that much of yet.  This smart plotting continues throughout the climactic action of the book, even though the climax is a rather lengthy one, involving a rather cat-and-mouse game of second guessing between the protagonists and the murderer.  Very enjoyable.
One rather droll prose faux pas:  “’…Why don’t you come over and we’ll have a look?’  ‘Now?’ Joanne could hardly believe her luck.  ‘Sure … Get yourself over here and we’ll see what we can dig out.’  Joanne didn’t need asking twice.”  Well, okay, the second asking wasn’t really a question, but…  And after Fiona accidentally kills the murderer,  “[The police] had finally accepted that there had been nothing calculated in her actions; a few seconds either way and the outcome would have been quite different … Somehow, miraculously, she had landed [on his back] at precisely the right moment.”  Did we really need a “miracle” to resolve the climax?  The fact that she took a flying leap off the edge of a ravine to attack him before he could kill Kit was an act of unthinking courage – no miracle necessary.
There was a point earlier on where I had to wonder if we were going to see the mystery of the murderer’s identity solved by the use of the old “identical twin” trick.  We were spared that – sort of; “’It covers all the practical stuff of how he laid his plans and carried them out.  How he gave the Spanish police the slip when he was supposedly over there in Fuengirola.  It turns out he has a cousin who lives in Spain.  This cousin lent Blake his car, and simply stayed at the villa when Blake was over in the UK and Ireland … They looked similar, and as long as the Spanish cops saw someone answering Blake’s description when they cruised past the place a couple of times a day, it never occurred to them that it wasn’t him.’”  Sigh.
And then there’s that “riding into the sunset” scene at the end – always a difficult thing to pull off convincingly, getting botched more often than not; “’… we both reckon we should at least listen to what the other has to say, now the dust has settled.’  Fiona looked out over the Heath.  ‘Is that what’s happened?’  ‘Isn’t that always what happens after the world gets turned upside down?’ Steve said.  ‘Even if it takes a while, the dust always settles.’  Wow.  As if sensing that ending with a Humphrey Bogart-style set of clichés was not satisfying, our author wraps up by having Fiona write a letter to her dead sister, as assigned by her post-traumatic stress counselor to help rid herself of the irrational feelings of guilt she has felt ever since her sister’s murder.  This is well done –a very thoughtful and fitting end to the story, in my opinion.




October’s book of the month; “'Salem's Lot,” by the incomparable Stephen King!
Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot (1975)--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town . . . and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil.  Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary… - Amazon.com Review  

Before vampires became sympathetic characters with their own alternate worlds, complete with vampire coffee shops and vampire politics, they used to be bad guys, scary not sexy, and they preferred wreaking havoc in horror novels rather than exuding tortured sensitivity in YA coming-of-age fiction. Fortunately, we don’t need to go all the way back to Dracula and Boris Karloff to remember those halcyon days: we have Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, from 1975. - Booklist


Week 1:  Chapters 1-4 
(First post, 10-10-14)

Week 2:  Chapters 5-9
Week 3:  Chapters 10-13
Week 4:  Chapters 14-Epilogue 


Friday, September 19, 2014

Killing the Shadows (Val McDermid) Chapters 30-43

There are certainly enough words in this book to fill up the 600 pages.  But still not enough story.  The plot inches forward steadily, feeding out one small development at a time.  The more dramatic events that could have been stretched with more detail to good effect – such as the search and discovery of Georgia Lester’s body parts – don’t get any more play than the almost catty conversations between Fiona and Sarah Duvall.  It’s as if each plot development was given the same amount of space, regardless of the amount of interest it can generate.

Speaking of Sarah Duvall; what a superb portrayal of professionalism and solid police work!  The admiration we might be expected to reserve for Fiona has shifted to Sarah, and I find myself rooting for this “supporting role” character over the protagonist.  Is this intentional?  Are we being set up to find that Duvall is deeply flawed after all?  That would be interesting.  At Sarah’s introduction to the reader, it is mentioned that she is Black, but then almost carefully avoided for some reason.  The combination of traits reminded me of Queen Latifah’s role in the movie Stranger Than Fiction, in which the actress plays a very strong-minded, down-to-earth assistant to Emma Thompson’s portrayal of the fiction writer (excellent movie!  See it if you haven’t!)  I love Queen Latifah, and she would fill the role in this book beautifully!
Writing idiosyncrasies continue to stick out glaringly.  I don’t like to criticize these too harshly, because they don’t really mar the book that much, but the observation that So-and-so “pulled a face” is overused to the point of annoyance.  Maybe in McDermid’s Scotland, “pulling a face” is more than just a quaint colloquialism, I don’t know.  I’m not even sure I can pin down what it means with any precision.  I just hope she’s finished using it.
Fiona’s inability to remain professional in the light of danger to her Significant Other, Kit, continues to be grating.  The author probably means to show how vulnerably human Fiona is, which is fine, but it has become more than that – it has become a glaring flaw in the psychologically adept protagonist’s own psychological makeup.  Steve points out to her that her judgment is being compromised; “‘If this didn’t touch Kit, you’d be the first to say we should avoid giving this killer the oxygen of publicity.’  ‘Yes, Steve, I probably would,’ Fiona said angrily.  ‘But it does touch Kit, and I owe him far more than I owe the City of London Police.’”  Being willfully illogical doesn’t endear her to us.  Oh well, there are still 150 long pages left to redeem our attachment to her…
I like a colorful metaphor as much as anyone; Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and Dean Koontz, to give three examples, have made me pause mid-paragraph many times to admire a particularly well-constructed metaphor or comparison.  This author is not as adept as some.  (Again, I feel so petty pointing these things out, because there is so much about McDermid’s prose that is good.  But these things stick out, at least to an American Southwesterner like myself.)  Example: “Steve Preston, claiming there was more to life than the job?  It was about as likely as Bart Simpson joining the diplomatic service.”  Hmmm.  Maybe in some parts of Scotland, Bart Simpson is known chiefly for his lack of diplomatic skills; again, I don’t know.  If so, I think maybe a lot of Scots may be missing the point of the characterization of Bart Simpson.  Maybe The Hulk would have been a better choice for this metaphor?



Next Week: Chapters 44-Epilogue 






October’s book of the month; “'Salem's Lot,” by the incomparable Stephen King!
Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot (1975)--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town . . . and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil.  Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary… - Amazon.com Review  

Before vampires became sympathetic characters with their own alternate worlds, complete with vampire coffee shops and vampire politics, they used to be bad guys, scary not sexy, and they preferred wreaking havoc in horror novels rather than exuding tortured sensitivity in YA coming-of-age fiction. Fortunately, we don’t need to go all the way back to Dracula and Boris Karloff to remember those halcyon days: we have Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, from 1975. - Booklist


Week 1:  Chapters 1-4 
(First post, 10-10-14)

Week 2:  Chapters 5-9
Week 3:  Chapters 10-13
Week 4:  Chapters 14-Epilogue 

 
 


 

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Killing the Shadows (Val McDermid) Chapters 15-29

Okay, now the book is beginning to drag just a little.  Not badly; the page-to-page writing is still engaging enough, though the author might be over-estimating the degree to which we have identified with the characters.  The problem is a very old one; in an effort to give the readers a lot of book for their money, we’ve crammed a 400-hundred-pager into 600 pages.  During the 17th and 18th centuries, this was appreciated and considered a smart marketing move; people didn’t buy many books back then and the market wasn’t saturated with new best-selling novels every twenty minutes.  Today, however, especially to a somewhat “plodding” reader like me, it almost feels like an imposition to stretch a book beyond its best natural length.

Sub-plots are a good way to justify “filler” in a novel like this, and the different cases that are occupying Fiona’s mind – besides the main mystery of the killing of crime thriller novelists – serve an extra function of showing just what Fiona, with her modern forensic techniques, is capable of.  But it is all too easy to over-do the sub-plot action, causing some of us to get impatient with the constant side-tracking.  The occasional diary-like entries written by the killer that we get a peek at from time to time are kept short and sweet, and they add a lot without distracting from the main story-line.  The constant re-hashing of references to the Francis Blake/Susan Blanchard case, however, is wearing thin if it doesn’t eventually link in to the rest of the plot.

The author is portraying Fiona as a tough-minded, logic-guided, no-nonsense kind of crime specialist while, at the same time attempting to show how this same individual can be misled by her feelings when her husband is involved in the case.  Fiona originally brought up the idea that the killer might be focusing on writers, and then, when Kit starts to get worried, she seems to want to do everything she can to rationalize it away.  This portrayal of how our humanity is a weakness even in our heroes and heroines is admirable, but here it is emphasized to the point that Fiona actually loses just a little of the reader’s respect – not what an author normally intends to accomplish.
The relationships between Fiona, Kit and Steve are an interesting mix.  Steve and Fiona were an item before Kit entered the picture, and now that Kit and Fiona are married, Steve is not only still Fiona’s very good friend, but one of Kit’s as well.  Isn’t it nice that we’re all such well-balanced adults that we can rise above the feelings of the past this way?  Well, yes, but how often does this happen in real life.  These three even joke about it a little.  In a discussion of Steve’s current love life Fiona points out the main issue;  “ ’The trouble with the three of us is that in our own ways we all have a morbid fascination with violent death.’ Fiona said.  ‘Maybe Kit should fix you up with a sexy crime writer.’  Kit spluttered.  ‘Easier said than done.  When you cross off the ones who are already attached, the ones who have a serious interest in recreational drugs and the dykes, there’s not a lot left over.’ ”
This reference to “dykes” is particularly interesting because our author, Val McDermid, is frequently referred to as a “lesbian crime writer” herself.  For her to portray Kit using the (derogatory?) term “dyke” is intriguing – Ms. McDermid certainly knows the field of such writers in Great Britain, and is probably on a first-name basis with most of them, so she is apparently revealing a real fact here.  Like they say, “Write about what you know.”  That is certainly happening in this novel!






Next Week:  Chapters 30-43
Week 4:  Chapters 44-Epilogue 

Friday, September 5, 2014

Killing the Shadows (Val McDermid) Chapters 1-14

Val McDermid is one of the so-called “Tartan Noir” writers: Scottish crime suspense novelists who write in a particularly “dark” vein, for those of us who like that kind of thing.  This term may have been coined by Alexander McCall Smith, who used it semi-pejoratively to describe his peers, himself a Scottish mystery writer who maintains a much lighter tone in his works.  The most well-known of these authors is probably Ian Rankin, whose book Hide and Seek we read here back in February.  These writers tend to set their stories in the city they live in and are most familiar with; Rankin in Edinburgh, for instance.  Another, Denise Mina, is from Glasgow, and yet another, Stuart McBride is from Aberdeen.  This adds an element to the stories that I find particularly appealing, like Rick Riordan setting his adult-oriented books in San Antonio and Austin, my own stomping grounds.

So far, Killing the Shadows has taken us to London; Toledo, Spain (with tantalizing description of that wonderful city!); and a “wee bit” in Edinburgh.  This book would be a terrific introduction to the Tartan Noir world, as it centers on a serial killer who is actually stalking and killing writers of that genre.  One might suppose that the “Shadows” in the title is referring to those writers.  Our heroine of the story is Fiona Cameron who is not herself a novelist but is married to one of the intended victims.  Interestingly, the author actually gives us a list of who the intended victims are, as the killer has written a sort of diary of his little hobby, and lists them there for the reader.  We get an occasional glimpse into what he’s thinking and a sense of what motivates him.
By the time we get to chapter 15, one of the victims is already history, and Fiona’s husband, Kit Martin, is already being stalked.  Fiona has thoroughly rattled Kit by disclosing her opinion that the murder of the other writer shows indications that it was aimed at writers of Kit’s kind and that there may very well be a serial killer behind it.  The killer sees Kit’s discomfort, observing him at a party and wonders about it.  Why does Kit take Fiona’s theories to heart?  Tracking down serial murderers is what she does.  The action in Toledo centers on her helping the local police and experts from Madrid with a set of two murders which have been committed there, apparently connected to the tourist trade so important to that city.  Her use of a computer program she developed for that purpose and her previous successes with it have given her a reputation among law enforcement and experience which the Spanish agencies are putting to good use.
The writing here is good, solid work, with mild Scottish and/or English idiomatic phrasing sprinkled throughout, marred only occasionally by clichés.  For instance, “’Your average man in the pub thinks it’s cheating to set people up when you haven’t got your evidence the straight way.’  ‘Don’t mince your words, Kit, tell us what you really think…’”  Even if Kit really had been holding back his true feelings or speaking heatedly, this cliché has long been recognized as a groaner.  Also, “’Yeah, right, I can see myself writing the definitive Spanish serial killer thriller.’  ‘Why not?  It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.’”  Yikes.  I have to wonder if an American editor would have nixed these.
But overall, I the story is very satisfying so far; a “real page-turner” as the newspaper critics love to say, themselves often guilty of worse clichés than they criticize the authors for.  And at 600 pages, it had better continue to be, to hold my interest until the end!





Next Week:  Chapters 15-29
Week 3:  Chapters 30-43
Week 4:  Chapters 44-Epilogue