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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
old but not forgotten,
By Cynthia White "frogdog" (Vancouver Island, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Detective (Paperback)
This is a great detective story. It's a little dated now in parts, but the plot is very well constructed, and the story was ground-breaking in its day. When I move and have to box up thousands of books, this is one of the few that I keep accessible. I guess it's out of print, but then buy it used. Thorp wrote a sequel which evolved into Die Hard.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Loved it, Loved it, Loved it,
By Liz "Birdmother" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Detective (Hardcover)
Read it, Read it, Read it. If you can find it. A classic gem. The story line is just as new as if it were written yesterday.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Long and Occluded Mystery.,
By Steven Daedalus "Steve" (Deming, NM USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Detective (Hardcover)
It has to be one of the "wordiest" books I've ever read. It's filled with the interior monologue of Thorp's detective and ex-cop, Joe Leland. And for Leland, every conversation -- every GLANCE -- is a metaphorical duel of wits. What is the other character thinking, and why, and how can I get around him? No, not a duel of wits but a battlefield in which everyone lies or misrepresents the truth. And it's all described in a blizzard of words.
You think I'm fooling with you, that I'm not telling you the truth? Maybe my judgment is flawed? Is that why your brow suddenly knotted? You just blinked your eyes twice in a row, rapidly. I don't know if you realized that. Or perhaps you did it on purpose to make me think you thought that I thought you were lying. I don't know you at all but it would be like you to do that. I forget what it was that it would be like you to do but, believe me, based on my years of experience as a police officer and now private investigator, it's exactly the thing you would be likely to do, whatever it was. Nothing gets by me. Here's a quote. Joe Leland is meeting someone in a restaurant for a typically murky conversational exchange. The setting itself is of no consequence. "The restaurant was nearly empty: a middle-aged couple by a window overlooking the avenue, three businessmen in the most distant corner. The room needed paint and new flooring. By modern standards the tables were too big and the aisles too wide. There were three waiters in sight, and the youngest, a hawk-faced man in his forties with shining slicked-down hair, motioned them to a table in the center section." Now, that's the description of a restaurant that has no role to play in the story. The waiter with the slicked-down hair has no role to play either, although that doesn't prevent Joe Leland from going on to have a duel of wits with HIM too. Here's a quote from Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny." It describes the beginning of an important conversation between a defendant and his lawyer. Note the concision with which the restaurant setting is sketched in. "I'm hungry," said the lawyer. "Where can we get some chow and talk about it?" "There's a cafeteria over at Pier 8." "Come along." Maryk shrugged, reaching for blue trousers at the foot of the bed. "If you're going to plead guilty," said Greenwald -- his voice was pitched high over the clatter of cutlery and tin trays, and the gabble of hundreds of Navy Yard workers feeding themselves amid steamy odors of tomato soup and cabbage, and human being -- "then the whole thing becomes a formality." The plot of Thorp's novel is terribly convoluted and, it seems to me, awfully dated too. It treats sex with such delicacy that reading about love making is like watching one of those soft-core porno films with billowing transparent drapes, lots of warm candles, and unidentified hands caressing unidentifiable grooves of an unidentified body. Along the lines of, "He moved his hand. 'It didn't take you long to go there, did it?'" And the sex is in fact important. The whole STORY is about a closeted homosexual. But don't expect anything like the movie with Frank Sinatra as Joe Leland. The only thing they have in common are a couple of names and that gay element. I managed to finish it but the result was a feeling more of relief than satisfaction, as if I'd just finished that job of insulating the attic that I'd been putting off for more than a year. It could have been an interesting story if it had been about one third as long as it is, if it hadn't been written in a style common in the days before the invention of photography when every description of persons or things needed to be gotten down in detail, if it had had some poetry or was an exercise in style, like "Lolita." As it stands, it's a long hard slog.
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