Off the peg PIs - one size fits all

I’ve just finished The Irish Sports Pages by Les Roberts (review to follow shortly). This is the fourth of the Ohio/Kentucky crime novels I’ve recently read and I’m detecting a trend (the other three books being The Killing of Strangers, Satan’s Lambs and The Lime Pit). In fact skipping forward to the next novel I’m about to read, Tonight I Said Goodbye by Michael Koryta, it might in fact be a de facto rule of Mid-Eastern crime writing – that all crime novels are PI novels. I won’t pre-judge TISG, but the other four all share some similar characteristics with regards to the PI.

1. They’re all in their late 30s to mid 40s.
2. They’re all single with failed marriages and only a few close friendships.
3. They have a caring, romantic, sentimental side that they do their best to hide or deny.
4. They’re driven by a core sense of justice and fighting the wrongs of the world, and yet they know and are friends with people who routinely break the law.
5. They’re prepared to use violence, but only for a righteous cause.
6. They’re prepared to take a beating or dally with death to solve the case. In fact they seem to actively court it.
7. They’re smarter than the collective minds and resources of every state and federal agency combined and are always several steps ahead of them (even though they are often a failed cop).
8. They’re stubborn and ignore every warning to back off from a case and let the professionals deal with it.
9. They have suspect judgment, especially near the end of a case, rushing off to save the day rather than doing the sensible thing and calling the cops or bringing reinforcements (meaning they are caught and disarmed and then have to get themselves out of a sticky situation – a bit like James Bond really – why the bad guys don’t jut kill them straight off is a mystery in itself).

It obviously takes a certain kind of person to be a PI in these here parts. Of course, lots of crime fiction has it cliché characters and formulaic plots – they’re familiar and comforting and they work, producing a flawed hero people can identify with and an entertaining story. Reading four of a kind in a row though can be a bit wearing.

Review of The Killing of Strangers by Jerry Holt (Lucky Press, 2006)

Another of my Ohio/Kentucky reads.

Sam Haggard left the police to take up a job as a security guard at the local university and in turn his wife left him. He’s now been sacked by the university for yelling at her new partner. As he picks up his stuff to leave the head of security offers him details on a baby-sitting job – keeping an eye on Crystal Jones, a local counter-culture celebrity, who’d been an agitator at Kent State University during the 1970 civil guard shootings. In the aftermath her partner, Delbert ‘Lucifer’ Jones, disappeared and now it seems he might be back, twenty five years later, stalking Crystal. Haggard is hired by Corrie, Crystal’s daughter, to keep an eye on her alcoholic mother, but her grandfather soon pays him off. Not long after Crystal dies in a mysterious fire, the Feds are taking an interest in Haggard, and the local cops are trying to bury the story. Everything seems to lead back to the Kent State killings and Haggard is determined to find out why to save himself and Corrie, the young woman he feels compelled to protect.

I found The Killing of Strangers a rather frustrating book in many respects. Some of it was well written, the contextual story of the Kent State shooting was interesting, and it certainly had a lot of action, but I found it quite patchy and uneven in quality and there were parts I just couldn’t buy into. For example, Haggard getting the sack for yelling ‘Get your fat arse out of that window’ at a professor who was illegally entering a university building at two o’clock in the morning and who had set off the fire alarm. I can’t see that standing up to any kind of legal scrutiny. The ending also stretched credulity to the limit, with coincidence after coincidence, and a very careless special operatives abductor. The older, downtrodden but worthy man falling for the girl half his age is also a well worn path at this stage. Some of the scenes were very well done, but others were pedestrian or redundant or below the standard set elsewhere in the book. The characterisation is generally good, and I thought the Mac character was excellent with his bitter wisecracks, but he was underused. My sense is a book, written in the third person, that focused on Mac and his wife would have great potential. All this, of course, is my opinion, and the book gets a raft of strong reviews on Amazon. It just didn’t click with me, even though I enjoyed parts of it.