Books

A friend of mine sent me this description of a kiss from ON CHESIL BEACH by Ian McEwan, one of the New York Times’ "Best 100 Novels of 2007."  If there’s an award for bad writing about sex, I would nominate this bit:

With his lips
clamped firmly onto hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved
around inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years
ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anesthesia.
This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in
thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private
imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her
that another tongue should be able to go there too. … He wanted to engage her
tongue in some activity of its own, coax it into a hideous mute duet. … She
understood perfectly that this business with tongues, this penetration, was a
small-scale enactment, a ritual tableau vivant, of what was still to come, like
a prologue before an old play that tells you everything that must happen.

 

That’s exactly what this book feels like…Robert B. Parker’s spare change, the nearly worthless stuff in his pocket that gets tossed in a jar and forgotten.

Sunny Randall is usually Parker on aut0-pilot…and SPARE CHANGE is no exception, except that it may set a new low for him (something I thought the last Sunny book did). In this book, Sunny goes after a run-of-the-mill serial killer. Parker doesn’t have a fresh take on the subject, the investigation is dull and Sunny, and all the cops around her, behave like imbeciles. The climax is predictable, perfunctory, and makes Sunny unbelievably stupid. As if that wasn’t disappointing enough, Parker tacks on a totally unnecessary and laughably ridiculous "Irving-the-Explainer" at the end. Did he mean it to be funny? I don’t think so.

It’s a truly terrible book. It has none of Parker’s snappy dialogue…it reads more like someone trying to imitate Parker rather than something by Parker himself. If Parker’s name wasn’t on it, I doubt it would be the bestseller that it’s bound to be.

Actually, this feels like a half-assed Spenser, only without Spenser and Hawk. All of Spenser’s other regulars are on stage — Belson, Quirk, Healy, even the irritating Susan Silverman. Spenser isn’t around to moon over Susan, so Sunny does it for him. She even rambles on and on and on about her dog, the way Spenser does.

I’ve completely run out of patience with Parker’s fascination with his heroes and their relationship with their dogs. Spenser, Stone, and Sunny all have dogs that they treat like their children and spend endless amounts of time (and pages) thinking about and talking about.

Any time Parker starts talking about the dogs, I skip pages…something I rarely do when reading a book. But if you skip all the yammering about dogs, that only leaves about 20,000 words of story, so the book goes by pretty fast.

This makes the third or fourth Parker stinker in a row…so I’m asking myself why I keep bothering to buy, and read, Parker’s books. Is it my affection for his early work? For the impact he’s had on my writing and my career (my first two script sales were to SPENSER FOR HIRE). Usually when I get to this point, he surprises me by coming out with a great novel — an APPALOOSA or a DOUBLE PLAY or an early Stone — and wins me over anew.  Because when Parker is in top form, he’s terrific. I guess that’s what keeps me buying.

I hope the next Parker book is that great one… it’s long overdue.

UPDATE: It turns out I’m not the only disappointed Parker fan who decided to blog about SPARE CHANGE today…so did my buddy Bill Crider.

I can’t resist sharing a SPOILER after the jump:

Read more

Yesterday, I had a booksigning for MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS and DIAGNOSIS MURDER: THE LAST WORD at Mysteries to Die For in Thousand Oaks. It was the first formal signing I have done in eight months and I had a great time. The crowd was big and enthusiastic and there was a lot of laughter. I’m looking forward to my signing next Saturday at the Mystery Book Store in Westwood. But those are the only signings I have set up and I am not rushing to schedule any more.

In a way, it was probably a good thing that I took an unintentional signing hiatus, thanks to my travel committements overseas for FAST TRACK. Since about 2003, I’ve had about four new books out a year and I was doing a LOT of booksignings. I was signing too much…the events were becoming less special for me and for readers.

I also took an unplanned year off from conventions, missing Bouchercon, Thrillerfest, Left Coast Crime and Men of Mystery (I’m also missing Bouchercon next month), even though I had new books out to promote. I think that turned out to be a good thing for me, since you can become such a familiar face and frequent participant on panels that it diminishes the impact you have…it actually becomes counter-productive. There are some authors who are at every convention and do the same panels over and over and over…to the point that most readers probably know their advice and anecdotes by heart. I don’t want to become one of those  authors ("Oh God, not Lee again. Do we have to hear that Ian Ludlow story for the 112th time?"), though I fear that I already have.

For another thing, a big signing schedule and a lot of convention travel just isn’t cost-effective for me. It might be on a stand-alone original novel, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense with the lower royalty percentages I get on my tie-in work. And with all the international travel I have been doing lately for my TV work, I’m not eager to jump on a plane again to attend a convention as soon as I get home.

The next convention that I will definitely be attending, and am eagerly looking forward to, is Left Coast Crime 2009 in Hawaii…but I don’t know if I will be attending any before that. We’ll see.

My friend Ian Ogilvy — best known for playing Simon Templar in THE RETURN OF THE SAINT — has several new websites devoted to his wonderful and hugely successful MEASLE series of children’s books. You can learn more about them here:

http://www.measle.eu/

http://www.measlebooks.co.uk/

http://www.measlebooks.com/

I was standing in line at my local Barnes & Noble when I witnessed an amazing thing: A woman was buying several mysteries, and as the salesguy was ringing her up, he asked: "Have you read J.A. Konrath?"

She said no, she’d never heard of him, and that’s when the salesguy pointed to a stack of Konrath books right there on the counter.

"This writer is amazing," The salesguy said. "I sent him an email and told him so…and look what he did." The sales guy picked up a book and pointed proudly to a blurb on the back.

"That’s me!" the guy said.

"Wow," the woman said. And bought the book.

The saleguy did it with the next customer, too. And sold another one of Joe’s books.

I was stunned. It was hand-selling in action…and positive proof that Joe’s unique approach to promoting himself and his books works. I told the guy that I knew Joe and that I’d let him know about the salesguy’s hard work.

"Great," the saleguy said. "Would you like to buy a copy?"

Now I’m wondering if Joe is also paying a commission…