Crap Looking Book Impressions #2: He Who Hesitates

Roll on another Crap Looking Book of Which I've Never Heard...

I let this slim volume jump into my hand because I wasn't exactly sure which of the words on the cover was the book title... Is the book called 87th Precinct, while "He who hesitates..." is a quote or allusion to the story? Maybe the author's name is "Ed 87th Precinct McBain" since as a critically acclaimed writer of "police procedurals" he felt a change in name was necessary, or his obscure middle name has driven him to write them since childhood.

I'm not even sure what "police procedurals" are. I hope I'm not going to read 151 pages on traffic violations, paperwork and donut runs.

The book is so light I can hold it and forget where it is. I doubt it leaves much time for the characters to evolve, or develop a genuine understanding of where they are and what they’re doing. So the crime fiction eye for detail is likely to be stripped back, while the central character (Ed McBain? Is it a character-as-title novella?) lets everything unfold around him and does very little to actually advance the plot.

I expect to digest this one in little more than an evening, and if there's not at least one prostitute or junkie adding to the gritty-bafta setting, I'm going to be disappointed.

Nick
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Crap Looking Book Responses #1: The Snake Tattoo

So it took a while to get started, but once I did I managed to digest The Snake Tattoo in two short evenings. Quite frankly, I'm disappointed I couldn't find more to hate about this one. Still, it breaks into Crap Looking Books Of Which I've Never Heard quite nicely.

Carlotta Carlyle is a straight-talking no-swearing ex-cop by day and cab driver by night, and her world view can be summed up in the following made-up quote: "I used to be a cop, and it gives me an eye for detail that makes near-omnipotent narration in the first person so much easier."

Occasionally her words have the craft and confidence of a Dragnet or Blade Runner voice over, but she explains her jokes too readily, and absolutely everything and everyone must be analysed in detail, at the cost of interpetation. Stab wounds don't get to add character by themselves, we have to know exactly what kind of knife they came from and when, even if it's irrelevant to the narrative itself. Sometimes my reader's eye saw her sat staring into space chalking up the minutiae of a room while other characters shuffled awkwardly around her waiting for her to notice them again.

Directly addressed as "you", whoever I am, it feels too much like me and Ms Carlyle have just met, and she's showing me around her shitty home and through her day, trying her best to impress on me that she's worth knowing and worth following. Unfortunately this approach fails to inspire any confidence in her abilities or intelligence, since her descriptions make it feel like she herself is opening her eyes and seeing everything and everyone for the first time, including her own face and a man with whom she's supposedly had an extensive love affair.

Halfway through the book something hit me. Every man she meets (including the delightfully underage Jerry) is trying to fuck her or get fucked by her, and every woman she meets is someone she wants so badly to be instead of herself. Maybe that's character building and fine craft, but it just made me hate Carlotta just as much as Carlotta does. It felt like I was sat listening to someone I don't know whine about shit I don't care about, channeling the business of everyone else through her own empty self. She's a few decades to early for the cyberpunk boom, but I can't help feeling she and her empty shell of a self would be right at home there.

Her ongoing need to fill that emptiness is no more prevalent than when a large unknown man barges into her home with a knife and the first thing she does is comment how glad she is that he's attractive. I'm never convinced that she thinks that law, honour, justice, and her work are more important than fucking anything that moves, only that they get in the way and you have to lump it.

This becomes quite apparent when, having spent the narrative preaching and practicing a holier-than-thou attitude towards corrupt cops, she suddenly decides to turn crooked when the opportunity arises to shoot dead a paedophile and frame the scene as if it as self defense. The line she apparently walks makes any message or code seem more damaging than moral. Prostitution is bad. Rape is bad. Paedophilia is bad (although one line I had to read more than a few times seems to claim pederasty is okay). Wild fucking and the desire to have it with everything that moves, well that's just fine by Carlotta Carlyle.

And the grand narrative conclusion? Her two cases unravel themselves pretty much without her help or intervention, and she makes up her mind over which of the remaining living male characters she'd rather fuck. Naturally it's the abusive arrogant one.

So maybe I enjoyed this one a little, but I'm a sucker for disappointment.

Nick
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