Pretty Little Policemen In A Row

Goodwill has been stingy lately -- lots of decidedly uninteresting books. Sitting there now are two by Dan Quayle, for crying out loud. I assume they have ghostwriters or, if not, translators. Dozens of Mary Higgins Clark titles too. She's my nemesis at the moment. Every unpublished writer has a nemesis, a "If so-and-so can get published, why can't I?" person.

Yet we read the undeserving published (and fabulously wealthy) authors because they tell stories. MHC conceives interesting stories. They start at Point A and end at Point Z, and all a reader has to do is grope his/her way around the horrendous writing and pathetic characterizations to get to a satisfying end. Subject through predicate to object. Man bites dog. Very satisfying. The only problem is it's "Man, purplish in complexion though Adonis-like in reputation -- notwithstanding that the reputation itself was his own creation - bites, with teeth that needed brushing due to the garlic butter he had put on his pasta at lunch that day, lunch with Trudy who drove him crazy and wasn't buying into the reputation, which he had assumed she would and was shocked when she left him with the tab and a slap on the chops at what he had suggested they do for dessert, dog."

So I just finished Ed McBain's Romance , a "novel of the 87th precinct" I've read others in the series. They take place in Isola, which is New York City, except New York City also exists in the McBain novels, evidently not too far away from Isola. So Isola, I guess, sits on top of NYC but a little askew, with maybe a Northeast River and, who knows, a Painting of Liberty.

McBain (who has many names, BTW) is a much better writer than MH Clark (my nemesis), but he does manage to make reading his stories into a chore. He writes "hey look at me" dialogue, with characters talking over each other and repeating each others words - unreadable, but that's how people really talk -- except that in writing it this way, McBain is saying "I'm writing unreadable dialogue because, gosh, ain't I clever at getting how people really talk?" he also has some sort of clothes fetish, describing how every character is dressed, down to their socks. May I say that, with a few exceptions, "NO ONE CARES!!!"

Romance is a book about the murder of an actress in a play called Romance, which is a play about a production of a play called Romance (I'm not making this up), in which the actress who plays the actress who gets stabbed, gets stabbed (still not making this up). The actress is named Ed McBain (I made that up). The detectives of the 87th solve the case. All in all, a good story. But, as I. Say? Yeah, say.

On the other side of the crime coin, and the dialogue coin for that matter, about a year ago I spent a few weeks on the bus with Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty. Frankly, I was not all that fond of the story -- low level hood makes himself a film producer while outfoxing other low level hoods -- but the dialogue is great. I heard that Travolta flipped when he heard they were re-writing the dialogue for the movie, that he only agreed to the movie because of Elmore Leonard's great dialogue. Good call, Vinnie.