James,
Re your comments:
> I'm also a big Spenser and Jack
> Reacher fan along with quite a lot of others.
I kinda burnt out on Spenser some time back (though I've developed a taste for Parker's Jesse Stone cop novels and his westerns about a pair of roving frontier lawmen). Virtually all private eye novels since Chandler's
The Big Sleep (Joe Gores is an obvious exception) are derivative of Chandler's Marlowe series (I wrote an article about it once called "The Marlowe Paradigm"), but few were as self-conscious about it as Parker. I also got tired if the endless discussions about the meaning of honor. What got me most, though, was his moral inconsistency in one novel. I think it was
A Catskill Eagle. Anyway, Spenser's got the drop on a bad guy who's now unarmed, and his gangster buddy, Hawk, tells Spenser to kill him. Spenser says something to the effect of how his sense of ethics won't allow him to kill an unarmed man. So Hawk, conveniently removing Spenser's moral dilemma, kills him instead. Hawk, the guy who does all the really nasty, but supposedly necessary stuff that would sully Spenser's precious honor, just seems too damned convenient for me.
But, here's the thing. If murder is wrong, isn't it wrong for everybody? If it was wrong for Spenser to kill an unarmed man, wasn't it just as wrong to stand by and let someone else do it for him? Particularly when, armed as he was, he had the means to prevent it? Isn't he, when the situation is analyzed rather than passed over quickly as part of a fast read, just as complicit?
I stopped reading them after that.
I've only read three of Lee Childs's Reacher novels, the two "prequels" in which he's still an Army cop, and the first one published,
The Killing Floor. He got a lot of the military and law enforcement details wrong, which irked me since the whole
raison d'être of a police procedural is technical accuracy (in one of them he says the only five-star general in US history was George Washington; criminy, there were ten five-stars, if you include the admirals, in WW2 alone!). I liked
The Killing Floor, particularly the well-wrought small-town setting, but I never quite bought the central coincidence, and the notion that one federal agent could,for practical purposes, wipe out counterfeiting struck me as unbelievable.
Still, he has a facility with story, plot, and style I can only envy and he writes the most convincing American of any British author I've ever read.
> Not the world's greatest T.V watcher though. I prefer
> reading.
You have to seek out
Bosch on the 'Net. It's only available at Amazon. It comes free if you're a prime members. Some divergences from the books, but Michael Connelly is the exec producer and he's written some of the scripts (one is a collaboration with George Pelecanos).
JIM
