No secret that I adore crime novels and am a huge fan of the Golden Age of detective fiction writers, ie: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and D L Sayers. Recently have tried Michael Innes and have also loved Edmund Crispin and am now trying Gladys Mitchell (not totally enamored so far but am going to have another go); Margery Allingham, ditto.
In the last couple of years I have become addicted to Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri; thoroughly enjoyed Camilla Lackberg; Simon Hall; Andrew Taylor (particularly the Lydford series); Martin Edwards (the Lake District series) and have been sent crime fiction from new authors all of which I have enjoyed in varying degrees.
So I tell myself that I am not a stick in the mud when it comes to non-British crime writers, but I am finding that I am coming unstuck with thrillers from the US. I recently read two enjoyable reads by Linwood Barclay, pretty formulaic but great fun; loved the John Dunning Cliff Janeway series (probably because the ex-cop turned detective in it is a bookseller and there is loads of bookish info), but on the whole I find the US genre hard to crack.
Have just finished reading Evidence by Jonathan Kellerman which was sent to me by the publisher. This author is a familiar name to me, always see him heaped up in airport bookshops etc and I have never felt the slightest interest in trying one of his books, but hey when you get a review copy, then you give an author a whirl. This book is full of what I call 'Grisham-speak' - as always cars are 'gunned' away from the sidewalk, numbers are 'punched' into a phone etc etc. I was looking for these cliches as soon as I started reading and yup there they were. The writing tries to be achingly cool:
'Milo stared at me.
I raised my eyebrows.
He cocked his head to one side "my partner's gonna ask you some questions now. They're a little personal but we really need to ask"
Waving the red shirted kid over, he ordered an extra-large Coke.
Both women had stopped eating.
Sherry Passant's thigh pressed hard against mine'
It is all trying to hard to be LA Confidential, to be laid back, with snappy short dialogue and oh my goodness me, it gets boring. Don't think I will be trying any more of this guy.
Now a few weeks ago I posted about Patricia Cornwall as I had tried her Kay Scarpetta novels, about which I had heard good things. I picked up an omnibus of three of her novels in a charity shop and got stuck in. This is my original post here and the comments I received were most interesting as they seemed to reflect my initial thoughts precisely.
I decided to persevere and borrowed a couple from the library and managed to read one and then decided no more. The detail in this book turned my stomach. Not the autopsy details, gruesome though they were, but the seeming obsession with bodily appearance and functions. In this particular title, Scarpetta was giving a physical examination of a murder suspect and we had comprehensive descriptions of his skin, spots, cuts, blood, his underwear, nails, smells .....by the end of it I was feeling really nauseous. This particular section of the book went on for pages and pages and totally slowed down the narrative. I cannot see that it helped the story progress in any way whatsoever. Two more murders in this book and the same minute detail. Two thirds through the story I began to skim - I wanted to find out who did the murder, though I had lost interest by then, and once I had shut the book up, did not read the second one and the books went back to the library.
There was an almost ghoulish distasteful feel to this Cornwall book as if the author was relishing the forensic details more than the story line and I won't be reading any more by this author. If I felt the writing, characters and plots were worth the effort then I would persist, but they don't. And there is one thing that is really puzzling me. One of the titles I read a month or two ago ended with the death of a main character, very important in Scarpetta's life. In the last book I read, published only two years ago, this character is alive and well. I checked the publication dates to make sure I was not imagining it, but no. This character should not be there as far as I am concerned. So what happened? Was it all a Dallas-type dream or was it a covert operation or ...what?
If anybody has read all by this author and can enlighten me or tell me I have got it all wrong, then I would be really pleased to hear. I am being deliberately vague as to identity etc as I don't want any spoilers to appear in this post which might upset anybody reading all of Patricia Cornwall's stories.
