Material Witness

REVIEW: Promise Me by Harlan Coben

May 25, 13.38pm

A long wait always heightens expectations, and its been seven years since the last time Myron Bolitar graced a novel. That was Darkest Fear, at the end of which Myron retired from the heroism and rescuing industry.

In the acknowledgements at the end of Promise Me, the eighth Myron outing, Harlan Coben  admits that one of the most frequently asked questions to him by fans had been when Myron might return.

As one of those who had asked him - at a book signing in London four years ago - I was thrilled to see Myron back and particularly delighted that this book strongly hints that the sports agent/private eye/hero might be back in the rescuing business.

In the seven years since he has been away a lot ahs changed for Myron: his parents have moved to Florida; he has a full-time girlfriend; and his business - MB Reps - has added clients from the entertainment industry to its roster of ball players.

A lot of this is incidental to the plot, however, as it is a friend of Myron's rather than a client who needs help in this instance.

After promising the daughter of a close friend that he would be on hand to offer her help should she ever need it, Myron is called out in the middle of the night to pick Aimee Biel up in midtown Manhattan. Against his better judgment Myron drops her at an address he doesn't know in suburban New Jersey. Within 24 hours she is reported missing - possibly the victim of a serial kidnapper.

Racked by guilt, Myron comes out of retirement and engages in a manhunt that brings him into contact with the usual cast of destructive characters: cross-dressing muscle, a psychotic hitman, a 300-lb giant dressed in white spandex. And those are Myron friends.

Promise Me is fascinating because it is partly rooted in everyday middle class anxieties - are my children having sex/doing drugs/going to get into college? Is my husband having an affair? Do I need more botox? - and partly based in a New Jersey made famous by Tony Soprano.

Myron straddles both places delicately, trying to come to terms with a future that might involve commitment and step-children at the same time as visiting S&M clubs with Big Cyndi and fruit loop best friend Windsor Lockwood III.

For about 330 pages this is a great thriller, with a fascinating cast of characters, a convincing plot and great speed. It is also illuminated throughout by Coben's witty and conversational style and all-round great writing. 

But right at the very end, the book seems to slip away as the ending accelerates towards a somewhat muted and strange conclusion that jars a little against what went before.

Nonetheless, that will do little to change the opinions of those who regard Coben as one of the great thriller writers of this era, and it should also bring Myron to the new audience that Coben picked up with Tell No One, Gone for Good and others.

Reading

Flesh and Blood by Jack Harvey (p36)

Pelagia and the White Bulldog (p184)

History almost repeats itself - Harlan Coben keeps me up

May 24, 12.47pm

Only a 6am alarm call and the anticipation of a pretty heavy and important day at work kept me from adding Promise Me to the relatively short list of novels I have read in one sitting. (A list that, off the top of my head, includes just Tell No One and The Night Gardener, George Pelecanos' next book). Jeez this guy knows how to get you to turn pages.

I went to bed about 10.15pm and got through about 220 pages before slightly panicking about lack of sleep and turned the light off. I managed a few more on the train this morning and am now tantalisingly stuck about 30 pages from the end of the book and with no opportunity to read it until tonight. AAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHH.

It's great - not Tell No One great perhaps - but it has a lot of the same elements (hidden secrets, lightning fast narrative, expert plotting) but it does have Myron Bolitar in reluctant hero mode Windsor Lockwood, the ultimate in psychotic sidekicks, at the very top of his game.

Review tomorrow.

Reading

Promise Me (p330)

The long wait for Myron is over

May 23, 10.11am

The Tesco in our town is very small and pretty crap, so I very rarely visit it. But this morning I needed to get some coriander (for a pesto to go with some haddock I bought in the fishmonger across the road). It is one of the secrets of the success of Tesco that customers end up buying stuff they hadn't gone into because it is skilfully merchandised in key areas of the store. And it worked this morning as I ended up spending £8.97 on a Promise Me by Harlan Coben, the long-awaited (by me anyway) return of Myron Bolitar, wise-cracking, mystery-solving agent of sporting superstars.

This is the first time (I can recall) that I have bought a book from a supermarket. Although you read a lot about how independent bookstores are struggling to compete with discounting supermarkets, I have always wondered if it was really true. I buy more books than just about anyone I know and I don't buy from them (although I do buy from Amazon - although rarely on price, just convenience) so I started speculating about whether this might just be a myth that's become accepted as a truth. The supermarket I do frequent more regularly doesn't sell books at all, except during Harry Potter season.( There was a fabulous article in yesterday's Guardian on the future of independent book retailers which started me thinking on this.)

But having bought Promise Me without even really thinking about it, I think I can see the point. Although I didn't look at the price until I'd finished buying, at £8.97 it is cheaper than Amazon, if only by 2p (plus the postage, I suppose) and is probably only a couple of quid more than back catalogue paperbacks would be in the town's independent store, and probably five less than this book. Bizarrely, the book came packaged with a free torch. I'm not sure  if this is to facilitate reading after my wife has ordered lights out or because it will help me solve some clue later in the book, and I don't suppose I'll ever find out.

But, even without the torch, I can see that this is a bit of a bargain, and that those shoppers who are more sensible with their money than I am would see Tesco as a good destination for them.

The question now is when can I start reading it. I'm getting close to the end of Pelagia - having finally cracked the name game, and am really enjoying The March which offers a fascinating insight into one of the more controversial issue of the American Civil War: Sherman's destruction of the south.

But I have been waiting for this book since 2002, when during the same visit to Murder One in which I complained to Harlan Coben that Tell No One had kept me up all night, I also complained that he hadn't written any new Myron lately. He didn't appreciate it. One of the others may well have to wait.

Confession Time - No Da Vinci Code

May 22, 13.31pm

I skived the Da Vinci Code movie. We held our hospitality event at an excellent bar off Regent Street and then walked over to Leicester Square for the start of the show, and stood around in the rain while a massive crowd gradually forced its way through one open door.

We already had four spare tickets which I had in my pocket, one of which I reserved for my brother-in-law who hot-footed it across from the City. I gave him my ticket, and went home, reasoning being 1) that I was almost certain I'd hate the film and 2) that the finish time of the film would have been beyond my last train home. I'd rather spend the time with my wife.

A few hours later I received the following text message from brother-on-law: "Thanks for the ticket. Good decision to go home. I feel robbed of three hours of my life."

I learned something else outside the Odeon. People are very wary of charity. I gave away two pairs of tickets outside the theatre, but it was hard work. People looked at me a little as if I was trying to hand them test tubes full of ricin or something. but eventually I did manage to give them away, and I hope those who took them enjoyed the film rather more than my brother in law.

Reading

Pelagia and the white bulldog (p 171)

The March by EL Doctorow (p 46)

and still listening to:

Tell No One (disc 4 of 10)

Can Ron Howard crack the Da Vinci Code?

May 19. 16.24pm

This evening, as part of a work shindig, I am attending a charity opening night showing of the Da Vinci Code at the Odeon Leicester Square in London.  Until this week I wondered if this movie might prove to be that rare beast: a film better than the book it is based on.

But the unrelenting torrent of criticism that has rained down on Ron Howard's adaptation throughout this week suggests I am going to be sorely disappointed. I don't usually pay a massive amount of attention to film critics, but given the unanimity with which they have dismissed this one, perhaps the are on to something. Dull and witless with two-dimensional characters is the gist of their beef with Da Vinci.

Much of the criticism of the poor characterisation of Tom Hanks' Robert Langdon and Amelie Tautou's Sophie Neveu that has come out of the film is somewhat unfair as the blame for them being carboard cut-outs should be directed at Dan Brown, who never bothered to define them in the book.

I hated the book. Hated it and didn't finish it. And I couldn't have cared less if the carboard cut outs fell under a bus in the final scene they were so utterly lacking in character and interest.

But the reason I hated it was that Brown is such a poor writer of prose it made the novel almost unreadable. And that's some achievement because the story was actually pretty good. As a fully paid-up member of the Mulder and Scully fan club, I am more amenable to outlandish conspiracy theories than most. And as a fully lapsed member of the Catholic family - for a great many reasons - I am more than willing to believe the worst of it.

And so there is promising material here for Hollywood, which has the wherewithal to add what Brown could not - a well-paced narrative; convincing and sympathetic characters; a sense of time and place. Whereas it is more used to stripping great works of those things, here it has the opportunity to add them.

Well, we'll see in about three hours.

Reading: Pelagia and the White Bulldog (p157)

Russian names

May 18, 17.51pm

So it's now been a few weeks since I started Boris Akunin's Pelagia and the White Bulldog, and it's somewhat unusual for me that after such a long period I'm still less than half way through.

It's even more odd because it's a book I am actually really enjoying - it's a terrific many-textured story weaving in and out of politics, religion and the dynamics of society with a promising mystery plot brewing in the midst of all that.

It's not the paciest book I've ever read, but actually it's interesting because of that, as the diversions are fascinating. But it's not that that's holding me up and it wasn't until this morning that I realised what was taking me so long.

It's the names. First off, there's a pretty wide cast of characters, operating in a couple of locations, with some flitting back between one and the other. And each seems to have a full formal name, a shorter informal name and a nickname which are used interchangeably. And I find myself, every other page or so, flicking back to check I know who is saying/doing what.

This is a deficiency on my part, I know. I should be able to keep up. Perhaps now I'm over the first hump, I'll get there quicker.

Novel Twists

May 17, 8.22am

The imaginative way in which people use the internet never ceases to amaze me. The latest item to catch my attention was Novel Twists, which I read about in the Guardian and checked out yesterday.

It is the brainchild of one Phil McArthur a former cancer suffered is raising funds for the very worthy Macmillan Cancer Support charity by asking people to pay to contribute - page by page - to a mystery novel. The pages are auctioned, one by one on eBay and the winner of each page has to contribute their 250 to 450 words within 24 hours.

It is a very interesting idea, and certainly a very clever way of raising money for charity.

The results - or at least those in the first 17 pages - are, perhaps predictably, mixed. Most mystery fans like their plots to move at a quick pace, but this is breaking-the-sound-barrier fast. Almost enough to make the reader feel queasy. One or two of the 17 contributors so far have tried to calm it down and add some characterisation, depth and context or just to allow the book to pause for air. But it's going to need a lot more of that in the 233 pages to come otherwise it's going to be messy and utterly unreadable.

It's all very well carping from the sidelines, but that's not really going to help anyone. So I've decided to have a go, and at some point in the next 10 pages, buy one and add to the mix.

Thorne's London

May 16, 13.19pm

At the dinner table last night I finished Mark Billingham's Lifeless, a book started in the delivery suite of the Leicester General Hospital more than a week before.

Before I came across Billingham, I had always felt that London lacked its defining detective. Edinburgh has Rebus, Venice has Brunetti, New York has Scudder, LA has enough for half a dozen cities but for some reason London - despite its size and variety of life - just seemed to have to do without. Or I did at least, having not found someone I felt brought the city alive.

I thought I might have come across the right man in David Lawrence when I saw his well-received 2002 debut The Dead Sit Round in A Ring - what a great title! But try as I might I couldn't quite get on with it. I found the book cold, claustrophobic and somewhat depressing.

But then came Mark Billingham and Tom Thorne - although the debut Sleepy Head preceded The Dead Sit... I didn't catch up with it until afterwards - and I took to them instantly.

My memory of the earlier novels is now somewhat hazy, but what I remember grabbing me immediately was Billingham's understanding of people and their motivations. His characters with all their qualities and faults felt authentic and spoke with real voices (he has a particular gift for smart dialogue).

In the early books London is a giant amorphous mass, much of which would be unrecognisable to many visitors to the capital who might visit perhaps a few square miles in the middle around Westminster, the West End and other areas that attract tourists. And much of Thorne's London would be pretty unrecognisable to many of us who live (or have lived) here - although we would identify with the seemingly endless agglomeration of villages, small towns and communities that make up Greater London.

But in Lifeless, the city itself is a character Billingham brings the heart of London to the fore: Theatreland, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, the Strand and Hyde Park Corner. But he does so in the most original way, exposing a whole community and society - the homeless - that exists in all those places but that is largely invisible to most of us. A London we all know and recognise but as seen from an entirely alien perspective.

DI Thorne goes undercover, living in the doorway of a theatre attempting to track down a killer
who is apparently preying on London's homeless population. Billingham's talent for characterisation is given full rein as he recreates a small community of the disposessed who become Thorne's friends - junkie Spike, One-Day Caroline and the marvellous Radio Bob. What is also brilliantly done is how Thorne - struggling with the after-effects of a particularly nasty case, worried about his imperilled career and grieving for his father - slips comfortably into the homeless life.

In the middle of it all, also, is a genuinely good mystery story, with a fast pace, rising tension and some nice twists. But what fascinated me most was the tour of underground London. It felt right from start to finish and the unknown journey through familiar streets was hugely enjoyable and surprisingly revealing.

Which makes it completely different from Pelagia and The White Bulldog, set in late Imperial Russia and a province I've never heard of. A sharp contrast, more of which later.

Interruption

May 15 2006

There are few things guaranteed to put an immediate halt to your reading habits than the arrival of a 7lb 11oz screaming bundle of joy. Which is exactly what we got on May 6.

This is Agnes Martha Margaret. She's delightful.

But she has played havoc with sleep and other schedules and I have barely picked up a book or done anything much else since she arrived almost 10 days ago.

Like all our children, however, Agnes was fashionably late. So late in fact that we had been booked into hospital for Jane to be induced into labour. But when we turned up to the hospital they were crazy busy and we were basically kept hanging around for almost 12 hours before anything much happened.

And what can you do, stuck in a hospital ward for all that time with nothing much to do but wait. Well, if you have a proof of the next George Pellecanos novel, you read that. And so The Night Gardener became a (relatively rare) one sitting read. And what a great read it was. Review soon.

Reading

Lifeless by Mark Billingham (p278)

Pelagia and the White Bulldog (p97)

Dark Angel

May 3, 10.41am

I have liked John Connolly's books from the very beginning and so The Black Angel was a no brainer when I arrived at St Pancras last night without a book to read on the train home.

I enjoy the mixture of the supernatural and the conventional detective stories that he writes and as I am always pre-disposed to novels set in New England, I guess he was always going to find a way on to the list.

There's not much doubt that The Black Angel is the most supernatural of the lot. Any book that starts: "The rebel angels fell, garlanded with fire," can only be partly of this world. (And what a great opening line).

But the line that tickled my fancy last night was a little further in and rooted in more earthly matters.

"Most criminals are kind of dumb, which is why they're criminals. If they weren't criminals they'd be doing something else to screw up people's lives, like running elections in Florida."

It brought a smile to my face after a pretty long and demanding day. Judging by the tone of everything else I've read so far, it might just be the last one. I'm enjoying it hugely, but it's not one for the faint of heart or manic depressives.

Reading

The Black Angel by John Connolly (p165)

Pelagia and the White Bulldog (p62)