A choice of recent thrillers
Charles Mitchell
English readers may not be particularly interested in the fact that Ed McBain and Evan Hunter are one and the same person, as McBain's 87th Precinct books are far better known here than Hunter's more 'serious' efforts. It isn't too hard to see why, when we read the two personae packaged together in Candyland (Orion, £16.99). They have the same ear for dialogue, the same knack of narrative dynamic, and the same tendency to write their female characters as bland male fantasy figures or damaged goods. (Teddy, Steve Carella's beautiful deaf-mute wife in the 87th Precinct series, is the locus classicus, and the tarts in Hunter's half of this book are cut from the same cardboard, although Emma Boyle, the policewoman protaganist in McBain's half, has rather more to her.) There is one big difference between Hunter and McBain, though: Hunter wants to give us deep insights into America's dark psyche, while McBain just cuts to the chase. Hunter's half of this book is taken up with the self-pitying reflections and misadventures of a middle-aged satyromaniac. His treatment of this theme is meant to be 'bold and shocking', and in the hands of a better writer it might have been: read Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theatre. But it's hard to write about tiresome people in an interesting way, and Hunter hasn't managed it. His half of the book isn't badly written, but it's dull and his central character is a bore. Don't bother struggling through it if you want to read the McBain police procedural stuff in the second half: skip straight to it, or better yet, take an old McBain down from your bookshelf and read that instead.
Brad Meltzer's First Counsel (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99) has the premise that famous people yearn to date nobodies like you, 0 Reader, because only you can give them a sense of the commonplace that is missing from their otherwise magical lives. If you've seen the film Notting Hill, then you'll know the idea. Here, the lonely princess is the American President's daughter; the narrator is a bright young White House lawyer, and we can tell that he's a real person because he has a mentally disabled father (if you've seen Rain Man or 100 other movies of recent years, you'll know this one, too). The first two thirds of this book are quite fun in a sappy sort of way, if you can stomach the idea that being an American lawyer dating Chelsea Clinton is something that we should all aspire to; then the plot collapses into wild melodrama and implausibility.
Good sci-fi writers don't need to write out a list of spurious facts to make us believe in their fantasy worlds: they bring them to life by giving them an internal coherence, and by populating them with believable people. Pat Cadigan brings this trick off wonderfully well in Dervish is Digital (Macmillan, £9.99), but Caleb Carr's Killing Time (Little, Brown, £9.99) is a sad disappointment by comparison. We know that Carr can create other worlds after reading his historical thrillers, especially The Alienist, but his switch in genre has not been a success: the characters and plot in Killing Time are lame and formulaic, and the pernickety, rather plonking authorial voice which lent a quaint charm to his earlier books does not work as the voice of the future. Pat Cadigan's book is an infinitely better read. The bulk of the action is set in a weird and fantastic vision of Artificial Reality, where Constantin, TechnoCrime cop, must track down a mysterious villain with all the processing power he needs to bend the rules — and the walls. Cadigan is an imaginative and amusing writer, and even if you're not into sci-fi, she's definitely worth discovering.
Finally, Jenny Siler has followed her debut novel Easy Money with Iced (Orion, £9.99), a dark and pacy thriller set in the winter cold of Missoula, Montana. It has a tough female protagonist and a tough female villain, too, which makes a refreshing change. The story pulls together nicely after a slowish start, and finishes at a gallop. She could write another with the same cast of characters and I wouldn't mind at all.
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