Material Witness

REVIEW: Hit Parade by Lawrence Block

August 30, 16.20pm

The fact that the central character in Lawrence Block's latest is a remorseless hired gun who kills with ruthless efficiency and a (mostly) clear conscience means that a lot of readers aren't going to like Hit Parade too much.

Keller, making his third appearance following his debut in 1998 in Hit Man, is not somebody you'd want to meet down a dark alley - well, not if you were his latest job anyway - and the business of trying to empathise with this man who criss-crosses the US with murder in mind is a little difficult to get into at first.

Keller doesn't agonise over the morality of his work - as I first expected he would - merely over whether it offers good long-term prospects for such a career are promising. (In Hit Parade he is most often pre-occupied by the fact that in a post 9/11 world, flying cross country to his jobs has become difficult, thus necessitating lengthy car journeys).

And once you get used to these ideas, the Hit series is strangely entertaining, laugh out loud funny in parts, and Keller, if not an appealing character becomes a fascinating study in normalcy. (Much like many of my acquaintances, he worries about his finances and his commute - rather than the fact that he has just strangled an aging golf enthusiast or "helped" a baseball player choke on his own vomit).

The Keller series started out as a series of short stories - Hit Man was presented very much in that fashion - and that spirit lives through into Hit Parade, which has no particular narrative running through it from start to finish but merely follows Keller from job to job. What little continuity there is, comes from occasional diversions - usually in the form of conversations between Keller and his sarcastic agent Dot - about whether Keller should pack in the killing/get another dog/buy more precious stamps.

Hit Parade is an easy and extremely entertaining read - with the wit and air of jollity of the Burglar series rather than the pathos of the Matthew Scudder books that one might expect - and the reason for that is simple: Block is an outstanding writer who has a great facility with words. On his own site Block mentions a friends, Donald Westlake, a long friend and writer of whom he says:  "the man has never written a bad sentence."

I haven't read all Block's stuff, but I've read a lot and in my experience the same compliment could be applied to his own work.

Hit Parade is easygoing, enjoyable and disarmingly funny. As long as you can leave your ethical hang-ups at the front page, you ought to like it.

John Hannah - A good actor but no Rebus

August 29, 12.13pm

Finding something half decent to find on television these days - in the Uk at least - can be a real trial.

Last night I had almost resigned myself to watching a programme on Channel Five about women who breastfeed their children until they are six (or even older) and follow them around with potties trying to anticipate their ablutory needs because nappies are unnatural.

Which could have been entertaining as there's nowt so weird as folk, but at the last minute I found the pilot episode of Rebus on ITV3 (a channel whose existence I was dimly aware of).

It was enjoyable: a terrific plot, largely well-acted and told with both pathos and pace.

The only slight downer was John Hannah who made a noble and brave effort at presenting himself as a seedy, rule-bending, heavy-drinking hardass, but couldn't pull it off.

Joy of joys then that a plug at the end raised the prospect of a new series of Rebus starting on ITV one soon with Hannah's successor Ken Stott reprising the role he took on so brilliantly last year.

REVIEW: Echo Park by Michael Connelly

August 24, 13.28pm

Writers who cross over their characters from one book or series to another do so at their own peril: the results can often look clumsy or contrived and do little to enhance the status of either character.

Michael Connelly has previous in this respect. Jack McEvoy, the reporter at the heart of The Poet, pops up here and there in other works, while Terry McCaleb - forever fixed in my mind as Clint Eastwood after the movie adaptation - featured in A Darkness More than Night, which I found one of the less successful installments in the generally excellent Bosch chronicles, of which Echo Park is the 12th.

There is no great character collaboration in this book, but roughly a third of the way in, Bosch reads the record of an ex-con who was at one time or another represented by attorned "Mickey Haller", the protagonist in The Lincoln Lawyer, a book that in the UK at least has catapulted Connelly to a whole new stratospheric level of readership.

It was a tiny mention - not returned to - and entirely harmless. But it was also utterly irrelevant and  it really, really pissed me off, and for about 30 pages quite put me off the book. I sat there wondering if this was Connelly nodding reassuringly to his army of new Richard-and-Judy-Bookclub readers: "Hey, here's Mickey. The Lincoln Lawyer. You're in the right place."

That's probably grossly unfair to Connelly, but there you have it. It annoyed me.

But it is minor gripe. Echo Park is a terrific addition to a series that is aging gracefully and showing few signs of trailing off into the sort of mediocrity that can be a real danger to a 12-book-old series.

Bosch is put on the trail of a serial killer who confesses to nine unsolved murders by an ambitious DA politico, Rick O'Shea - nicknamed Ricochet - and in the process is catapulted back into an unsolved case from his past. Working with Open-Unsolved partner Kiz Rider, Bosch is quickly forced to contemplate an unbearable truth: that a mistake made by himself and a former partner, the always hapless Jerry Edgar, may have prevented this serial killer from being nailed after his first murder.

Fans of conspiracy theory and tales of official corruption - and I am one - will find plenty here as the further Bosch delves into the case the murkier the waters of authority become, and soon enough the detective believes he senior officials are covering up a crime.

Cross-breeding aside this is a great novel. As befits a long-time crime beat reporter in LA, Connelly has a well-developed sense of how things play when the "Department goes bad", and he plots a thoroughly convincing novel and a typically deft mystery. After 11 previous encounters, there's little further to be developed in Bosch who, like Matthew Scudder, Dave Robicheaux and other serial detectives, is now set in his difficult ways.

But that doesn't matter a jot as long as Connelly continues to come up with the stories and handles the plot so well, Bosch is good for a few more sequels yet, although I won't be surprised if it's the Lincoln Lawyer rather than the True Detective who is next off the Connelly typewriter.http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/HB-31942/Echo-Park.htm

More kids, fewer books

August 24, 12.45pm

So it turns out the main difference between going on holiday with kids is approximately 5 books a week. In days gone past - I almost called them the "good old days", but my kids might read this one day - I could run through about a book a day.

On this occasion, two weeks in France, I managed about four and a half. Two volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time (numbers six and seven), Harry Bosch's latest outing and Laura Lippman's recent addition to the Tess Monaghan series of novels. I also started, and have now nearly finished, Hit Parade by Lawrence Block.(Which meant I carried about six unopened books). In due course, I'll review all three here.

(In addition to these I also read a Richard Scarry book, Busiest People Ever, at least four times, and Stanley, Flat Again at least twice. I'll not review those, except to say that I enjoyed reacquainting myslef with Lowly Worm and I get a massive kick out of watching my four-year-old son's face when he is listening to stories. He's a total addict, and that's great.)

But my failure in getting through my reading list was as nothing to that of one of my companions, although he set the intellectual bar somewhat higher than I did. He completed neitherDumas'  Vingt Ans Apres (in the original French) or The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchil's extraordinary account of the events leading to the Second World War.