Customer Reviews

Detective

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This seems to have been an attempt at a "literary" private eye novel. Unfortunately, the work comes up short both as literature and as a tale of detection. There is indeed very little detecting and precious little mystery. The focus instead is on the personal relationships of investigator Joe Leland. Leland, a former cop famous for having solved the brutal murder of a homosexual some years previously, is hired by Norma MacIver to look into the death of her husband, Colin. Colin had fallen to his death from the roof of a racetrack. Was it an accident, or suicide, or was he pushed? Much of the book is an exploration of the dead man's character. In one excruciatingly long chapter of more than 50 pages, Leland interviews MacIver's former wife. The author has the unfortunate compulsion to examine the psyches of uninteresting people in exhaustive detail. The whole thing just keeps going on and on and on.

There are some sensationalistic elements: murder, including child murder, nymphomania, homosexuality, political corruption, a real estate scam - but very little action. Another major flaw is the setting. The story takes place in the 1950's, in the cities of "Port Smith" and "Manitou"; I don't know if these are supposed to be real or fictional places (I lean to the latter opinion), but whatever they are supposed to be, they are totally lacking in color. The movie version of The Detective, made in 1968, wisely changed the setting to New York City, and presented the story in a much more linear fashion. The film, also called The Detective, featured Frank Sinatra as Joe Leland, Lee Remick as his nymphomaniac wife, William Windom as Colin MacIver, and Jacqueline Bissett as Norma. Though by no means outstanding, the movie version is a vast improvement over the novel.

I mentioned that this book was long: 598 pages in my trade paper edition. That's long!