This gave me a chuckle. Military historian Andrew J. Bacevich, at The Baffler, on a certain military romance writer:
… Tom Clancy qualifies as a great writer in the same sense that Texas senator Ted Cruz qualifies as a great orator. Both satisfy a quantitative definition of eminence. Although political historians are unlikely to rank Cruz alongside Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, his recent twenty-one-hour-long denunciation of Obamacare, delivered before a near-empty Senate chamber, demonstrated a capacity for narcissistic logorrhea rare even by Washington standards.
So too with Clancy. Up in the literary Great Beyond, Faulkner and Hemingway won’t be inviting him for drinks. Yet, as with Ted Cruz, once Clancy got going there was no shutting him up. Following a slow start, the works of fiction and nonfiction that he wrote, cowrote, or attached his moniker to numbered in the dozens…
Clancy’s own career took off when President Reagan plugged Red October as “my kind of yarn.” As well he might: Clancy shared Reagan’s worldview. His stories translated that worldview into something that seemed “real” and might actually become real if you believed hard enough. Reagan was famous for transforming the imagined into the actual; despite never having left Hollywood during World War II, he knew, for example, that he had personally witnessed the liberation of Nazi death camps. Similarly, Clancy, who never served in the military, imagined a world of selfless patriots performing feats of derring-do to overcome evil—a world that large numbers of Americans were certain had once existed. More to the point, it was a world they desperately wanted to restore. Clancy, like Reagan, made that restoration seem eminently possible….
Click over and read the whole thing, and enjoy the Victor Juhasz illo.
**********
Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
raven
Hoop.
gogol's wife
A Nowruz party.
Mustang Bobby
Speaking of the theatre, I’m going to see a production of “A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.” Coincidental that it’s Stephen Sondheim’s (and my brother’s) birthday.
OzarkHillbilly
Making fun of Clancy is swinging at low hanging fruit. Still, politics aside, he could tell a story, however improbable, and make one want to read it to the end. That, of and by itself, is not a bad thing.
Roger Moore
I’m about to head out for some steak and mushroom pie and a couple of fine beers.
Cassidy
Eh, Clancy was a fun distraction. You knew what you were getting when you bought the soft cover.
Chris
Clancy’s thing was writing an alternate reality in which his worldview could be vindicated. Cardinal of the Kremlin: alternate reality version of SDI, in which laser weapons were not only totally achievable but the Soviets already had them, so we’d better get a move on or we’re going to have a mineshaft gap… Clear and Present Danger: alternate reality version of Iran-contra, one that didn’t involve selling arms to Iran or financing war criminals, and in which the Reagan/Bush figure patriotically agrees to “throw the election” as penance. Etc.
Curious to know what prompts the column, however, since he’s been dead since last September.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cassidy: Forsyth does it better.
J.D. Rhoades
@Cassidy:
Reading The Hunt For Red October taught me so much about how to add suspense to my writing that I will always be in Clancy’s debt. Sadly, like too many bestselling authors, he got to the point where he was Too Big To Edit, and that’s where he started going into his Bloat Period.
NotMax
Downsizing: the dwindling of Japan.
Chris
@OzarkHillbilly:
Oh, yes. It was good alternate reality, at least for a while. I’m just… not at all sure he ever understood that it was, in fact, just an alternate reality, and himself just a novelist and not a military expert.
J.D. Rhoades
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, yeah. So did Alistair McLean.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
QFT. I think he’s my favorite in the genre.
Baud
I wish Clancy were still living so CNN could have him on as an expert on the missing plane.
RobertDSC-Power Mac G5 Dual
I used to be a gigantic fan of the Jack Ryan universe. When the book Rainbow Six hit stores, though, the bottom fell out for me. It was awful, even though my favorite character, John Clark, had a central role. Subsequent books just got worse over time.
I still haven’t picked up his last book, Command Authority, but there’s no rush.
Without Remorse still remains my favorite Clancy book.
Cassidy
@Omnes Omnibus: Honestly, military fiction tends to run together with me. I was never pulled to one particular author.
@J.D. Rhoades: I can see that.
schrodinger's cat
Is Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele for guys?
Hungry Joe
I once read a Dale Brown novel (excuse: I was reviewing) and it made Clancy’s prose read like James Branch Cabell’s* and his politics sound like Eleanor Roosevelt’s. One line has stuck with me for more than 20 years: The female Secretary of Defense has just left a meeting room in the White House and is conversing with some muckety-muck or other. She instructs him not to be so formal. In the meeting room she may be Madame Secretary, she tells him, “but in the halls it’s Debbie.”
* A great and mostly forgotten American writer of wickedly brilliant, satiric fantasy that soared on remarkably clear, clean, sparkling prose.
Pogonip
Not much to report this evening. I am putting away some winter clothes. However, regardless of the calendar, it’s supposed to snow Tuesday and if it does, I’m wearing my pink sweater with the white snowflake print. And if it snows again I’ll wear the sweatshirt with the cardinals perched on the snowy branch.
That is all.
Gravenstone
@RobertDSC-Power Mac G5 Dual: I thought Clancy lost control of his creation when Ryan essentially failed upward into the Presidency. Still, they were generally fun, harmless reads. Paper villains, flawed heroes and the hardware was always the star of the show.
Mike in NC
Yeah, anybody who ever served in uniform could tell the military characters that Clancy imagined were laughable. No matter what the rank and specialty, they all acted like one big happy family.
Gin & Tonic
@efgoldman: That was fast.
RobertDSC-Power Mac G5 Dual
@Hungry Joe:
His stuff is just plain bad. I’ve read almost all of the Patrick McClanahan universe (since I like the genre) and each book is just cringe-worthy. I collected his stuff for completion’s sake.
@Gravenstone:
I thought he did OK as far as reaching National Security Advisor. Becoming President in the manner he did, I can take it or leave it. Clancy did one good (to me) book with Ryan as President, and that was Executive Orders. Rainbow Six came after that and then the bottom fell out.
scav
Rumpole of the Bailey audiofest. Perfectly suited for current level of grumpily cosy misanthropy. Started with the latest BBC4 version, Rumpole and the Old Boy Net, (Benedict C. alert for those that follow) and have rolled onto the earlier ones. Wishing I could afford the necessary volume and quality of plonk.
schrodinger's cat
@efgoldman: Word. Predictable and boring, also implausible.
raven
@efgoldman: Since there has only been 1 1/2 games so far I can see why you are so bummed.
shelly
And don’t forget all that gee-whiz techno-porn love. I swear he could describe a Black Hawk helicopter down to the last bolt.
jeffreyw
Trying to assemble some Chicago style hotdogs. More later…
NotMax
@efgoldman
There once was a man from Nantucket…
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: Have the hostilities between Homer and Toby ceased?
MikeJ
Clancy accomplished the single most difficult thing a writer can do: he got paid. Hell, he actually wrote three or four pretty decent books too.
Litlebritdiftrnt
The Clancy movies are passible, Hunt for Red October was only watchable because of Sean Connery. The IRA one was only watchable because of the Irish actor (can’t remember his name), Harrison Ford was well Harrison Ford, he tends to play himself in every movie he plays in. Clancy has a huge boner for the military, I am not sure that he can be trusted.
jeffreyw
@schrodinger’s cat: Not calling it a truce. More of a breathing hard and taking stock type lull.
schrodinger's cat
@efgoldman: Young Clint Eastwood wuz hawt!
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: Do you have any recipes for multigrain crackers?
Litlebritdiftrnt
@MikeJ:
Ditto. All of us aspiring writers would kill to get the book deals he did. He found a formula and stuck with it, it made him millions.
NotMax
@scav
Someone at a gathering was across the room and I caught a reference to this movie amongst the conversations, but misheard the first word as instead being ol’ Horace’s surname.
We all had a good laugh coming up with the plot and still agree it could have been a cult classic genre cross-over.
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: Nantucket and New Bedford being linked, of course, by whaling, and not dirty limericks (is there a clean limerick that uses the word Nantucket?) In its heyday, they were among the wealthiest cities in the country.
scav
@NotMax: Indeed!
Chris
@RobertDSC-Power Mac G5 Dual:
… wow. Are you me? All of this describes me to a tee. Just got done rereading WR and still think it’s a great read. But Rainbow Six… yep, using bad guys with an Evil Plan lifted from Roger Moore era James Bond and slapping a “liberal” tag onto them was indeed when he jumped the shark.
I’ve skimmed his last few books briefly, and you’re not missing anything there either.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Just saw Alonzo Mourning’s Obamacare commercial. Nice. Takes the “invincibility thing” on head-on.
hartly
@Litlebritdiftrnt: I believe the “Irish actor” you’re thinking of was Sean Bean. I think he’s actually English.
hartly
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Magic’s was good too.
JoyfulA
@OzarkHillbilly: Maybe it’s a guy thing. I picked up Red October because “everyone” was saying it was so great, and I couldn’t finish it. The plot was so implausible.
Xantar
How much writing did Tom Clancy actually do in the last few years? I recall an awful lot of “Tom Clancy’s (Two Nouns)” but very little that was credited to him directly in the 21st century.
gogol's wife
@scav:
Benedict Cumberbatch as Rumpole? That’s ridiculous!
I’ll have to swig some Chateau Thames Embankment to get over that.
Gravenstone
@hartly: Yes, it was Bean. The character he played was Irish (IRA, specifically). Likely the source of any confusion.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: From the Whaling Museum in New Bedford.
gogol's wife
@Litlebritdiftrnt:
But Alec Baldwin did a much better job of speaking Russian than Sean Connery did, which made for some cognitive dissonance since Connery was supposed to be the Soviet (Latvian, though, I guess, or maybe Lithuanian, but even so his Russian should have been much better).
ETA: His name was Marko Ramius, which doesn’t sound like any ethnicity I’m familiar with.
hartly
@gogol’s wife: John Rhys-Davies would be perfect for Rumpole, in my opinion.
jeffreyw
@schrodinger’s cat: No, not really. I made some crackers years ago as a proof of concept but they were way more trouble than they were worth.
J.D. Rhoades
@Litlebritdiftrnt:
It got to the point where he could make 31 million bucks just by selling his name to Ubisoft. Now THAT’s branding.
raven
And the the Azorean capote-e-capelo
gogol's wife
@hartly:
Only Leo McKern would be perfect as Rumpole.
scav
@gogol’s wife: My mother had a bit of the identical shock, disbelief and recourse to Old Thames. Young Rumpole, to be sure and, as it’s radio, it’s all about the voice. Not as much a chasm as it could have been.
Hungry Joe
@Gin & Tonic: “Clean limerick” is an oxymoron. Or should be, anyway.
J.D. Rhoades
@gogol’s wife:
I once wrote that Hunt For Red October (the movie) was about Sean Connery as a Russian submarine captain who defects because the other Russian submarine captains are making fun of his accent.
hartly
@gogol’s wife: Well, we have to make due with what we can get. Rhys-Davies has McKern’s voice and rotundity. If the stories were ever to come back to television, he’d get my vote.
Mike E
@Baud: Heh, maybe that retired general on Hannity was holding a séance.
J.D. Rhoades
@hartly:
Rhys-Davies doesn’t have that sour, put-upon quality that McKern brought to Rumpole. Still, he’s an excellent actor, so it might work.
hartly
@gogol’s wife: If memory serves, he mentions going fishing in Vilnius with his father when he was a boy. I think that’s in Lithuania, though I don’t really feel like looking it up right now.
jeffreyw
Ok, my attempt at a Chicago hot dog.
raven
@jeffreyw: You got da piccalilli right.
Villago Delenda Est
@Litlebritdiftrnt: Sean Bean, who specializes, it seems sometimes, in on-screen deaths.
opiejeanne
Thanks for reminding me of some writers I’ve liked in the past and just forgotten, like Martin Cruz and Forsyth. I’ve been reading a series of mysteries written by a Canadian writer named Barbara Fradkin, an ok write but only a pale shadow of Louise Penny’s writing, but I’ve read all of Penny’s books and am killing time until her next Inspector Gamache comes out.
Of course, there’s the new Pratchett book just sitting there in my husband’s lap. I let him read it first, just to be nice.
Cervantes
@gogol’s wife:
Yes — we have that, plus we have the books.
Why do we need anything else?
Poopyman
At least Clancy was good for the economy here in Calvert County. Especially during and after the divorce.
Never could read him, though.
I’m sitting in the back yard listening to the birds and watching the Sun set over the river. Then dinner with Mrs p.
Jay C
@NotMax: @efgoldman:
No ,not a winner: this is an opening for the Rhode Island Poet Laureate’s position: you’ve got to be a little more, umm, “site-specific” for the job…
There once was a man from Pawtucket….
Poopyman
@Jay C: There once was a man from Pawtucket….
Yatsuno
@gogol’s wife: Iranian or Baha’i? Both are fun!
dmsilev
@Chris: My “favorite” bit from Rainbow Six was the Cunning Plan that the villains came up with. Spoiler alert, I suppose.
Anyway, the Evil Environmentalists (who just happened to be genius-level genetic engineers) came up with a kill-everyone-except-us virus and were going to release it at the Sydney Olympics. These games, according to the book, would take place during a viciously hot summer, and the organizers had built in water-mist systems to cool the crowd. Infect the misting units, and away we go.
Except for one wee little problem. The Sydney Games took place in mid September. For those people unacquainted with the strange seasons of Down Under, that’s actually early spring, not a time of year noted for broiling heat. Maybe Clancy would have gotten it right if the seasons were known as the ADE-134Q ‘Spring’ and so forth.
Suffern ACE
I was always more into Ludlum and LeCarre. Spies are just more interesting.
schrodinger's cat
@Yatsuno: Could be Parsi too, Parsis know how to throw a parteh.
*Parsi = Zorastrian
schrodinger's cat
@Suffern ACE: Me too. Loved Tinker, tailor, the book, the TV show and movie.
ETA: Not a huge fan of Ludlum, too convoluted.
schrodinger's cat
@gogol’s wife: Who is Rumpole?
Howard Beale IV
@Litlebritdiftrnt: Actually, I though Alec Baldwin did a damn good job as Jack Ryan-much more believable than Harrison Ford.
dmsilev
@Suffern ACE: Ludlum got pretty repetitive towards the end of his career. Unusually, however, he recognized this and wrote a couple of books spoofing his own standard tropes (‘The Road to Gandolfo’ and ‘The Road to Omaha’). Basically, take every overused Ludlum plot device, dump them all into each book, and turn the absurdity up to 11. Great fun.
Howard Beale IV
@hartly: In the movie he was referred to as the Vilnius Schoolmaster.
NotMax
@J.D. Rhoades
A bit long in the tooth to play Rumpole on TV, but for audio, Brain Blessed would bring an interesting portrayal.
And Patricia Routledge as She Who Must Be Obeyed.
dmsilev
Re: Ludlum, Wikipedia says this: “Ludlum died on March 12, 2001, at his home in Naples, Florida, whilst recovering from severe burns caused by a mysterious fire which occurred on February 10.”
Mysterious fire, huh? Fitting, I suppose.
Cervantes
@Chris:
The article is a response to some of the more ridiculous obituaries.
NotMax
@schrodinger’s cat
Rumpole of the Bailey – series of droll novels by John Mortimer.
If you’ve never seen the various TV versions starring Leo McKern, run, don’t walk, to seek them out.
Kirbster
“The Hunt for Red October” was the first book-on-tape I ever listened to. The fact that the audiobook version was abridged improved the story greatly.
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
“Jack Higgins,” too, I suppose.
But I prefer Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Greene; Mailer, Vonnegut, and Heller; not to mention Homer.
opiejeanne
@jeffreyw: Hot dogs sounds amazingly good, for some reason. Better than the leftover homemade pizza in the fridge.
muddy
@schrodinger’s cat: Fire! Fire! Fire!
Villago Delenda Est
One of the things that bothered me about The Hunt For Red October, the movie, was that it managed to take out one of Ramius’ primary motivations for wanting to defect with a spanking new ballistic missile submarine: the circumstances surrounding the premature death of his wife.
Otherwise, I liked it very much.
I had a first edition of the book, but lent it to a Marine major when I was on TDY in Honduras in ’85. He packed it up before he shipped back, forgetting that he borrowed it from me. He was a good guy except for that one thing. Meh.
jeffreyw
@opiejeanne: I always thought the Chicago style dogs would be just so so, but these were really very good. The tomatoes worked really well with the pickle spears.
geg6
Crab cakes with an orzo salad and a crisp Reisling. Eating light tonight because we pigged out on pizza last night. Roasted chicken with onions, carrots and fennel with a side of garlic roasted potatoes for tomorrow’s dinner.
I’m obsessed with food this weekend.
muddy
@efgoldman: I was downsizing my library some years ago, and set to re-reading a lot of books to see if I was going to keep them. In some cases reading everything an author wrote, keep 1 or 2 as good examples. Sometimes they’d all end up going because they annoyed me as a group, which I had not noticed reading them with years between.
It was really unfortunate how many authors got in ruts of plot, or description, or just an odd one-liner used over and over and over until my head explodes. In the end I got rid of over 60% of them. Now there’s a one-in-one-out rule.
IowaOldLady
Someone I know online just published a submarine book and one of the big review sites said he was the best since Tom Clancy, or something like that. I assume they meant it as praise. The guy I know (Rick Campbell) was in the submarine service for long enough that he was one of two people on board who could fire a missile. No one ever had such an exciting option where I worked.
catclub
@efgoldman: HMS Ulysses had the Kapok Kid, right?
I read that a long time ago.
I remember learning that as he got older Abe Lincoln limited his reading to the Bible and Shakespeare.
When in doubt, limiting oneself to known greats is not a bad way to bend.
Poopyman
@catclub:
Yes. I remember going to the library in HS during study hall to read it. I don’t remember how long I dragged it out, but at the time I thought that was a tremendous book. I wonder how it would hold up after 40 years?
catclub
@Cervantes: Some people thought no Sherlocke was needed after Jeremy Brett.
Then along comes Cumberbatch.
Elizabelle
@Hungry Joe:
James Branch Cabell, hmmm?
Virginia Commonwealth U’s library is named after him.
Never met anyone who ever read anything by him.
Richmond has a lot of famous writers, beyond Edgar Allen Poe.
Are you by chance from the former capital of the Confederacy?
Cabell’s buried in Hollywood Cemetery, a must see in Richmond.
FlyingToaster
@gogol’s wife: Lithuanian.
Vilnius is the capitol. Kaunas was the capitol when the Poles held Vlinius.
Their last names run to -as, -is, -ius (not exclusively, mind you).
/pedant
SiubhanDuinne
@Chris:
The Baffler is a biannual publication. The last issue before this one would presumably have come out about the time of, or even a few weeks before, Clancy’s death.
Cervantes
@catclub:
And law books.
And he read them all aloud.
Cervantes
@catclub: What if I were to say you’re proving my point?
muddy
@efgoldman: I had a lot of science fiction and historical mysteries fall by the wayside. I do re-read things I like though. And having a brain like a sieve I can even read some mysteries again and not remember whodunnit.
nancydarling
@OzarkHillbilly: I’ve only read one Clancy novel, “Clear and Present Danger”. I persevered to the end, but I found his characters so poorly drawn, his plots so convoluted that I constantly had to refer back to earlier pages to remember who was the head of the FBI, CIA, DEA and a whole alphabet soup of agencies.
I can see how his works would appeal to dick-waving chicken hawks like little Billy Kristol, Cheney, etal.
Steeplejack
@efgoldman:
I have seen the rot starting to creep in with Michael Connelly and (to a lesser extent, although I could be in denial) Lee Child. Both of Connelly’s last two books (Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller) were bing-bang-boom, check, please!
srv
I’m thinking a good war would be preferable to a meteor. So let’s send John Clark into Crimea and see what he can do.
scav
@Cervantes: Well, some people look at Basil Rathbone and see no reason whatsoever for Jeremy Brett. There was a definitive Lear at one point so all other interpretations are invalid and shouldn’t be permitted. As there is Champagne, Burgundy and Chateau Thames Embankment are verboten. Piffle.
Elizabelle
I think the biggest cautionary tale against receiving a major book advance is Patricia Cornwell.
Has she written anything worth reading in years?
Very much liked her earliest books, but she’s an abuser of readers now.
The book ends when the Fedex courier arrives for the manuscript. And her characters have become unlikeable and beyond preposterous.
Cervantes
@nancydarling: You might appreciate this:
That was Maureen Dowd in the NYT, October 8, 2000.
Steeplejack
@muddy:
This drove me nuts in Michael Connelly’s The Gods of Guilt:
The hero nods his way through the whole book. And once you notice something like that, you can’t un-notice it. You’re counting them and waiting for the next one. Ugh.
Steeplejack
@efgoldman:
That’s the main reason I got my Nook. Can get new releases at close to trade-paperback prices (tremendous feeling of luxury), and then I don’t have non-deathless prose cluttering my shelves afterwards.
Also, for binge-reading series, it’s great to finish one book while lying in bed late at night and immediately purchase the next one via wi-fi and keep on going.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@gogol’s wife:
Or Number Two…
Cervantes
@scav:
“Invalid”? “Shouldn’t be permitted”? Who said that?
Everything should be permitted. I simply don’t see the point of re-casting Rumpole.
Re Holmes: I have not seen Cumberbatch. Rathbone and Brett were fine, but I prefer Holmes on the page. Chacun à son goût.
MazeDancer
Temporary stay has been issued in Michigan stopping equality in marriage. 300 couples managed to be wed while the “window” was open. Clicking through the pictures of some of them at the top of this LA Times article – while ignoring headline wording – http://goo.gl/4syifx will make you smile for the Power of Love.
Hate is gonna lose. Love is gonna win. It’s just going to take a little more time.
Long Tooth
The only Clancy book I’ve ever read is Hunt For Red October, and that before the movie was released. I thought it a ripping yarn, and felt the film did it justice.
OzarkHillbilly
@Chris: It was enuf for me that I knew.
Helen
@Elizabelle:
No. No she hasn’t.
And I fear for Elizabeth George. Her last Lynley novel was bad to the point of almost unreadable. And the wrap up of Barbara’s story was fake and the very definition of jumping the shark.
I haz a sad. Cuz I am in love with Thomas Lynley.
scav
@Cervantes: oddly that didn’t seem to be the balanced goût response behind the “why do we need anything else?” comment earlier. The point is people other than you happen to enjoy them.
Cervantes
@scav:
Which Rumpole do you “happen to enjoy”?
When I said “Why do we need anything else?” I was agreeing with the following:
Better?
Mike in NC
@Steeplejack: Reminds me of the historical novels of Jeff Shaara, another lousy writer to be avoided at all costs.
SiubhanDuinne
@muddy:
What does that even mean?
WereBear
@Steeplejack: I would hate to lose Lee Child; he’s one of the few who can still surprise me.
IowaOldLady
I think at some point writers have said everything they had to say about a certain character and should write something else. But it’s hard to walk away from a sure sale.
I throw books in the trash if they tick me off enough. If they’re that bad, I don’t want anyone else wasting time on them either.
Speaking of which, Rush’s children’s books are on the NYT best seller list.
schrodinger's cat
@catclub: Have you seen Parade’s End? Both Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall who plays his wife were wonderful.
schrodinger's cat
I lubs me some Agatha Christies and I hate the updated PBS versions.
Southern Beale
I work on Saturdays now. Taught a class then had a writer’s group. Finally finished up at 4:30. Had only eaten one piece of toast all day. So hubs and I went to a local Mexican place, downed three margaritas and some enchiladas, and are now home with a nice tequila buzz and it’s barely 7:30.
And this is how you do it when you’re over 50.
Bex
I like the Rule of Ten mysteries. Reading the Third Rule (third in the series) now. Love Tenzing Norbu, the Dharma detective.
WereBear
I’m still fond of John D. MacDonald and his Travis McGee series, though his Gold Medal paperbacks are even more diverse. But he had his series age pretty well; the girls varied in body type and personality and goals, the schemes and motivations changed up, and sometimes Travis would screw up pretty badly.
scav
@Cervantes: If anything, I tend to get pleasure from comparing interpretations personally. Don’t much believe in singular perfection, and even if it existed, would find things of note in the variety. Also like bouncing between the interpretations required by film, radio and text.
Xjmueller
@jeffreyw: Try cucumber half-moons instead of pickle spear sometime. Its a nice alternative. Some south side dog houses serve them that way. Hard to beat a good Chicago dog.@jeffreyw:
Cervantes
@efgoldman: Exactly.
Before the election, Dowd already had him usurping the throne.
I appreciated her saying so.
(Much as I dislike almost everything else she has ever written that I’ve read.)
Comrade Scrutinizer
@schrodinger’s cat: So tired of Bandersnatch Cummerbund…
Steeplejack
@Mike in NC:
The tragedy is that Connelly started out so well. The Harry Bosch series is generally pretty good, but now that it’s up to 16 entries it’s getting a little wheezy. And Connelly launched the related Mickey Haller series in 2005 and so added another set of plates to keep spinning. It has gone through the life cycle much more rapidly (five books so far).
In thinking about these and other series, I’m wondering if about 10–12 books is the structural maximum for maintenance of quality. But it could also depend on when the serious money starts rolling in. There must be enormous pressure, external and internal, to keep doubling down when you hit on something that is phenomenally successful.
Thinking about series that maintain quality all the way, John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee novels come to mind, although I haven’t read them in years and suddenly feel slightly nervous about what a rereading might reveal. I do remember that the last few weren’t quite as good as the earlier ones, but they were worthy and there was no precipitous dropoff in quality.
In a different genre, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels are almost uniformly excellent for the whole 20-book run.
chrome agnomen
@Hungry Joe:
one of my long ago acquisitions was the storisend edition of his works. i find him to be one of the very wittiest writers of my experience.
normal liberal
@Helen:
I thought George reached shark-jumping territory with Deborah’s part in Believing the Lie. I haven’t even gotten around to the more recent one.
Pity. Lynley does have his moments.
Elizabelle
I think Sue Grafton’s done well with her alphabet series.
She’s up to W is for Wasted, and none of her books made me regret the time spent. Some of the recent ones are very good — I really liked her approach in S is for Silence.
Running out of letters before talent. Oh noes!
Steeplejack
@efgoldman:
Re Lee Child: I sometimes wonder how much of a difference it makes to read a series in order vs. picking up the latest and diving in. (I tend to be a bit OCD about reading series in order.) Reacher is such a weird character that I could see a reader having a negative reaction if they jumped into one of the later books. The first novel, Killing Floor, lays down a good base, and it’s only gradually over the series that Reacher evolves into what is now dangerously close to becoming a caricature.
And the first couple of Mickey Haller books are pretty good (The Lincoln Lawyer and The Brass Verdict). After that YMMV.
Cervantes
@scav:
The “get pleasure” part is the key, of course.
More power to you.
Helen
@normal liberal:
Not only Deborah’s part but the fact that Lynley wasn’t absolutely LIVID at her for it. He was, “Meh, not your fault”
And speaking of Deborah – I absolutely hate her. Have since the beginning. We would be hard pressed to find a more self-involved and self-pitying character than she.
Elizabelle
@efgoldman:
James Lee Burke is a talented writer, and apparently a very nice man in real life, but I got burned out early on Robicheaux’s constant physical injuries, his getting into scrapes and fights solely to move the plot along, and some of the violence depicted.
That said, Burke loves the natural world of coastal Louisiana, and the loss of habitat and Cajun culture, and writes so well about it.
Should give him another chance. He’s prolific.
Helen
@Elizabelle:
Agreed. She is actually getting better.
Elizabelle
@Helen:
Yes. I can’t stand Deborah either.
Elizabeth George jumped the shark for me with all the class worship of the upper crust. (And I realize Deborah was not to the manor born. But …)
A shame, because she can be really, really good, with compelling characters.
Steeplejack
@efgoldman:
I was going to ask you about that. I avidly read the Spenser books from the beginning, but they did go downhill—I associated the decline with the point when Parker got discovered by Hollywood (Spenser: For Hire, etc.)—and, although I tried, I couldn’t pick up the thread after that. Might be worth it to go back and take a look. Do you remember when he got back on track?
Elizabelle
Speaking of John MacDonald:
Cape Fear, the 1962 movie (with a good Martin Scorsese remake) is based on a MacDonald novel.
And the Gregory Peck-Robert Mitchum movie was not shot near Wilmington or even in NC. Filmed in Savannah and a marina in Northern California.
Anne Laurie
@Helen: Try Deborah Crombie (if you haven’t already). The plotting (a new ‘information topic’ for each book) is similar, and the interaction between Duncan Kincaide & Gemma James is IMO a lot more believable. (Always liked Barbara Havers, but Lord Lynley & his Oxbridge associates not so much.)
The BBC productions of the Lynley/Havers books are good, too — the actor playing Lynley made him much more sympathetic, I thought. And while Havers is played by an actress who’s much more ‘half-starved stray cat’ than ‘fat cow’, the character’s psychology is perfect.
normal liberal
@Helen:
Absolutely amen on Deborah – a nonstop whinefest of narcissism, neediness and entitlement. Why poor Helen put up with her, and Simon doesn’t simply give up are the real mysteries.
I think I haven’t read the most recent book is that the synopsis reminds me of all the things I’ve never liked about Lynley’s treatment of Barbara – either toss her from the force or trust her work, but at least be consistent.
Steeplejack
@efgoldman:
I had to laugh about this, because, although I have liked most of those books, at one point I had to stop for a while because I thought, “Goddamn, this is the most crime-ridden small town in the universe!”
Agreed. This is one of the most amazing things about the Aubrey/Maturin novels. That whole dynamic is handled very well: not just the characters’ ages but the way relationships evolve as well.
Anne Laurie
@muddy:
I doubt my OCD will ever let me do that (and it would only help so much, since the Spousal Unit is an even bigger paper-packrat than I am). But it’s a lot easier for me to get rid of ‘marginal’ books now than it was pre-internet… I’m no longer afraid that if I get rid of an ancient brittle paperback that I’ll never see another copy for sale.
But I’m one of the luddites who can’t switch to electronic reading. Goddess knows I do enough web-surfing, but even for long magazine articles, I still find paper infinitely more readable!
WereBear
@Elizabelle: There’s one of John D. MacDonald’s Gold Medal paperbacks in my possession, can’t remember the title. It’s about a man with a failing marriage and nowhere job who finds some ill-gotten gains.
It’s one of the most hackneyed plots in noir, but there are scenes and writing in that book that stick in my memory to this day. He caught the gripping emotion of such pressures in a way few authors can do, whatever their genre.
I learned a lot from him.
JoyfulA
@efgoldman: I was an early Connelly fan, and then Poet I and Poet II put me off. I really liked the first Haller, and you’ve reminded me to read the rest.
Things have to add up for me, and the first Lee Child I read had his protagonist living on some small amount of money, maybe $20 a day, yet eating meal after meal of 16-oz steaks. Lots of little stuff like that. I might not have made it to page 50.
Anne Laurie
@Steeplejack: Don’t know if you saw this, but Amazon put out a pilot for a tv series of BOSCH, and it got enough ‘likes’ that they’re going to make more episodes. Haven’t read the novels (yet), but I liked the pilot and am glad not to be left with an unfinished cliffhanger.
Steeplejack
@Anne Laurie:
Agree about this, especially the casting. Sharon Small gets Havers’s emotional temperature just right.
normal liberal
@Anne Laurie:
Crombie gets points for being less obviously an attempt to imitate P.D. James, and keeping the wandering through the edge of society but without the class worship.
Someday there will be a nice dissertation analyzing American women writing Brit police procedurals.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodinger’s cat:
To me, Joan Hickson was the definitive Miss Marple.
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman:
I’m afraid that doesn’t happen in my house. Unless incoming.
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
He and Bob McNamara were in the same class at Harvard Business School.
SiubhanDuinne
@Elizabelle:
Maybe she could move to the Greek alphabet, like hurricanes.
Steeplejack
@Anne Laurie:
I’ve got to say that one of the black-and-white E Ink readers like my Nook Simple Touch or the Kindle equivalent is quite good enough for this finicky reader, especially given the benefits of instant book availability, portability and no clutter. But it’s not an either/or thing. I still like to fondle my physical books. My Nook is great for “serious” reading as well as “entertainment,” although for the former I’m more likely to also have (or want) the physical book. Currently rereading Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes, one of my favorite novels.
WereBear
There’s also a substantial number of fans who want the books in any series to be much the same. Just as many television series would spend years running in place, fans of detective stories can want more of the same.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
Amen, sister. Both of the later two Marples were too soft and treacly.
Steeplejack
As long as we’re discussing crime fiction, I must put in a word for one of my favorites, Nicolas Freeling’s Inspector van der Valk series. Published in the ’60s, very much of their time, but uniformly excellent for a 10-book run. I keep waiting for those to come out as e-books. (Actually, it’s about time to check again.)
Steeplejack
@efgoldman:
Oh, jeez, you’re giving me PTSD! I vaguely remember that one. And the nadir did come around the time that Parker started making the books all about Spenser’s relationship with Susan and their cutesy wisecracking with each other like some latter-day Nick and Nora Charles. Ugh.
Anne Laurie
@efgoldman: Have you tried Donald Westlake? His books could also be uneven, but the Dortmunder series (also for instance Dancing Aztecs or God Save the Mark) should appeal to your pessimistic feeling that, unfortunately, this is the best of all possible worlds, and we are so screwed…
Linnaeus
Clancy was entertaining in his early years (Red Storm Rising, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Patriot Games). When he became an industry, I lost interest.
Steeplejack
@Anne Laurie:
I was going to mention Westlake’s novels about the criminal Parker (published under the pseudonym Richad Stark) as a series that maintains a pretty high level of quality. He should have stopped after Butcher’s Moon in 1972, though. Parker and his colleagues are very much a midcentury group of “heisters” with a Peter Gunn vibe, and when the series started up again in 1997 it was just weird.
I have never gotten around to reading the Dortmunder series. Yet another entry in the endless backlog.
Steeplejack
@efgoldman:
Oh, yeah.
tybee
Ross Thomas wrote some amusing stuff back in the day.
as to Clancy, Red Storm Rising was his best effort but The Hunt for Red October wasn’t too shabby. after those, the rest were strictly downhill.
Red Storm reminded me of of a book that i think was “World War III, August 1985”
Steeplejack
@efgoldman:
Yeah, saw that on HBO. Awful.
@tybee:
I liked Ross Thomas’s books. For some reason I lump him in my mind with Lional Davidson and Andrew Garve, probably because I read them around the same time and they all did one-offs, not series.
muddy
@Steeplejack: I love the Dortmunder books. My dad turned me on to it. So funny. Push it up to the front of the queue.
Steeplejack
@muddy:
Will do! Pulling the trigger on The Hot Rock later tonight. Although it will have to wait until after the couple of books I’m in the middle of right now.
Hungry Joe
@Elizabelle: No, I’m from nowhere near the Confederacy. In college I discovered Cabell quite by accident, and loved his stuff. There’s also a Cabell hall at U. of Virginia, I think, but I’m not sure about that. He was revered by Mencken and a whole slew of ’20s writers.
muddy
@SiubhanDuinne: One side of the house was listing pretty badly! They were all together in one place. I made a bunch of bookcases of various size and then trimmed the book total to fit in those. It was going to break the house the way things were going.
Anne Laurie
@Hungry Joe: Been almost forty years since I read Cabell, but at the time I had the impression he was the writer the King-in-Yellow scribblers (Chamberlin, Lovecraft, the more recent sf writers like Blish who tried pastiches) were trying to be.
Anne Laurie
@muddy:
Around here, we refer to Stinson’s Law:
Hungry Joe
@Anne Laurie: Ballantine re-issued a bunch of Cabell novels (e.g., “Jurgen,” “Figures of Earth,” “The Silver Stallion”) in strikingly beautiful paperbacks in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I almost got into the only fight of my (semi-)adult life when a friend of my roommate tore a strip out of the cover of “The High Place” to make a roach clip.
StringOnAStick
I’m not a big reader of novels, but I really love what I’d call “specific topic non-fiction”, like the book I read about the great worldwide influenza epidemic of 1916-1918, which had a huge amount to do with ending WWI and is barely a part of current memory. Or a book called “The Children’s Blizzard”, about a late 1800’s blizzard that froze crops all the way to the Yucatan, though most of the book is about how this event ended the immigration wave to Nebraska and other parts of the Great Plains. So much so that even today, some counties in Nebraska still have less people in them than they did before this incredible storm.
I’ve kicked around writing fiction, but I’ve realized that what I like is just too off-base, and what I’m passionate about is what I described above. I have the background and experience to write something along those lines about all sorts of aspects of the flooding we had in Colorado last September, but with no connections and no track record I despair of working hard and having nothing but a nice pile of paper to show for it. Though when I was a geologist my bosses always told me I was the best writer in the house; working almost entirely with civil engineers makes that a rather low bar however…
muddy
@Anne Laurie: No! I made a rule. One in, one out. Can’t break the house rule! I already know which ones are falling by the wayside next.
satby
@WereBear: word. I still look for Travis McGee books in used bookstores, though I’ve read every one years ago.
Steeplejack
@satby:
They’re all available as e-books now, Kindle or Nook.
Librarian
Cabell Hall at UVA was named after Joseph Cabell, one of the founders of UVA. The Cabells were one of the Virginia Elite families.
opiejeanne
@Steeplejack: I have decided that the word “of” NEEDS to be included in a lot of sentences appearing in the works of several writers. I’ve noticed this recently, didn’t happen in their first couple of books (couple books, if they wrote that) but now it’s almost every place you’d put an “of” they leave it out. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!! If it’s missing from the dialogue I have no problem because some people do talk that way and it’s believable, but these writers are leaving it out of descriptive sentences: It took a couple seconds; a couple days later, etc.
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
Yeah, it’s always the little things that stick in your mind and drive you nuts.
NotMax
@opiejeanne
Almost enough to drive one to guzzling milk magnesia.
opiejeanne
@Steeplejack:
We have a very nice Nook (the color one you can watch movies on) and the cheapest Kindle. The Kindle was a gift. We like them both because we aren’t adding a lot of books to the shelves, which were completely full until recently when we hauled a lot of them to the local book exchange. I’ve acquired quite a library on both of them but there are some books that need to have a physical presence for me, like cookbooks and Terry Pratchett novels.
J.D. Rhoades
@efgoldman:
If you expect her work to be just like her father’s, you’ll be disappointed. But it’s excellent in its own right. The prose isn’t as gorgeous, but the plotting and the characterization will knock you on your ass if you give it a chance.
(full disclosure: Alafair’s a nodding acquaintance. Still, I really like her work).
Steeplejack
@opiejeanne:
I don’t know that I’d ever buy a cookbook as an e-book. E-book formatting is pretty plain, and I have read too many Amazon reviews where people complain about the Kindle versions of cookbooks.
BruceJ
@J.D. Rhoades: He was too big to edit after Red October, unfortunately.RO is good book, All the rest were first drafts.
Glocksman
Clancy’s earlier works were decent escapist reads.
Rainbow Six and later books were merely formulaic fiction that lacked the redeeming qualities of his earlier work.
That said, I do like certain series in that genre simply because they are escapist.
One of my favorite series that has long since jumped the shark is Sapir and Murphy’s Destroyer books.
Up until the late 80’s, the Destroyer books were often thinly disguised critiques of society at the time.
Though one bit that is ironic is that Chiun had the habit of removing ‘made in Japan’ labels from TV’s and replacing them with ‘Made in Korea’ labels.
Given the prominence of LG and Samsung, I don’t think he’d have any labels to change out today.
opiejeanne
@NotMax: clever. Clever.
opiejeanne
@Steeplejack: yeah, I made the cookbook mistake when it was new. The pages are pretty, this is a color Nook, but it’s a pain to try and cook from.
Flatlander
Curious. I wonder what Bacevich was selling from his elliptical trainer. Perhaps his dictionary.
Nutella
@Flatlander:
Perhaps his editor, but the price would be very, very low.
Nutella
@StringOnAStick:
You could try the blogging route, that is, write some short pieces on different aspects of your topic and publish them to a new blog on a regular schedule. If you get readers for that, publishers will take notice. Mention it here and in places frequented by Coloradans once you’ve got a few posts up to get the ball rolling collecting readers.
I’d love to read about the floods and I expect others would too.
This way, you can do parts of it and see how they appeal to readers rather than producing a huge pile of paper and then trying to find readers.
Original Lee
@Steeplejack: Exactly. Once I started wondering why Miss Marple never married, I re-read the books with that idea in my head. Let me just say, she reminds me of Mary Poppins (and not in a good way).