February 14
Not every sidekick is ideally suited to the starring role. It's difficult to imagine, for example, Cletus Purcell, having the emotional depth and range of reactions necessary to step out of Dave Robicheaux's deck shoes.
Then again, it might not always have been easy to see exactly how Robert Crais could bring Joe Pike to life beyond his existence as Elvis Cole's silent-but-deadly back up. Pike is the night to Elvis's day.
"You're the one who doesn't say anything and he's the one who makes a joke out of everything," Larkin Conner Barkley says (and I'm paraphrasing) to Pike, during his first outing as a protagonist in The Watchman.
Since LA Requiem, the story that elevated the Cole/Pike series from the simplicity of the entertaining-but-empty early novels into a serial with gravity and emotion, Crais has explored Pike's character to a limited degree. But what he has exposed is a self-contained man, with a hardened, impenetrable exterior protecting a soul that he reveals little of to anybody, even Elvis Cole. Pike is quiet. Pike doesn't smile. Pike doesn't do much of anything except run his gun shop, keep Elvis alive and kill Elvis's enemies. It's hardly promising material for a novel in which he occupies centre stage.
But Crais is a clever writer. You have to be to keep a series alive into its tenth installment, as this is. And so he has written the perfect novel for Joe Pike.
The action moves at break-neck speed throughout, so that nobody stands still for more than a few minutes and so that no reader is left in the company of Pike during downtime for any longer than necessary. Yes, Pike's character and motives and inner emotional life are explored here to a greater degree than ever before, but very little more is revealed of Pike. He is quiet and he doesn't smile, and although he manages a range of emotions that anyone familiar with him might have thought impossible, Joe Pike will never be Hamlet, standing in the spotlight, exposing his hopes and fears to the world.
Nonetheless it is a welcome change of pace and direction for the series, and has helped to bring a new spring into its step after two books, The Last Detective and The Forgotten Man, stripped Elvis Cole to the bone (and damned near killed him off into the bargain). Elvis needed a break.
Pike is called in to look after the afore-mentioned Larkin Barkley after three attempts are made on her life in just a few hours. He is told that she is on the run from a point man for the Colombian drugs trade who runs away from the scene of an accident after she slams her Aston Martin into the side of Mercedes in the wee small hours. They go into hiding together as Pike decides the only way to keep his charge safe is to turn the tables on her pursuer and chase him down.
Barkley is a thinly-disguised parody of Paris Hilton. A vapid, blonde heiress with more money than brain cells and a constant need to be at the centre of attention. And not, therefore, Joe Pike's cup of tea. Or so you might think.
While Crais keeps a good thriller moving along extremely well, the major point of interest is how Pike deals with the girl and vice versa. This develops slowly, as one might expect of Pike, but is genuinely interesting and offers a good counter-balance to the pace of the plot, as do the occasional appearances of Elvis Cole, who is rarely short of a quip intended to lighten the mood.
This is not the best Cole/Pike novel, but it is a welcome addition to one of the outstanding series in contemporary crime fiction that will have appeal that should extend beyond the legion of fans Crais has already collected with his books
The Watchman is published on February 27 in the US and by Orion in the UK on March 21.