Customer Reviews

The Fly on the Wall (General Series)

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

 

 

This story is set in an unnamed Midwestern city. John Cotton is a reporter at the state's capitol. One of his colleagues tells him he is working on a really big story. Shortly after this the colleague falls several stories and dies. This starts Cotton investigating the same leads. Then another one of his friends is killed while driving Cotton's car.

I found this to be a very slow book. The characters were not well developed. Cotton's attraction to Jane seems to come out of the blue. Also, I had difficulties following the leads in the beginning. They were very technical.

The political intrigue did not get interesting until about 1/2 to 2/3 way through the book. One issue covered in the book is how much political corruption, stealing of public funds, etc. is allowable if it serves the purpose of getting or keeping the "better" politician in office.

Tony Hillerman's books set on the Navajo reservation are better. The characters are much more well developed in those books.

One of Hillerman's few stories that doesn't take place on the Navajo Reservation. Here, newspaper reporter John Cotton stumbles onto a story of government corruption that has already led to the death of a friend and fellow reporter. It was kind of difficult to figure out where his investigation was going in the first half of the book. Things did start to make sense in the second half. Also, drama started to go up a bit. More should have been done to flesh out Cotton and other characters. You mainly see him as a reporter, not a human being. It also would have been nice if the city and state where the story took place was named. Still, all in all, it was an okay book.

Tony Hillerman's The Fly on the Wall has not aged particularly well. Written in 1971, early in his career, the book has been bypassed by technological advances as well as Hillerman's success with the Leaphorn/Chee series. Knowing that no future tales of John Cotton, newspaperman, have been written made getting into the book a little more difficult than I expected.

The characters and setting don't fit well with what one has come to think of as a "Tony Hillerman" book - that combination of Native Americans, their folklore, and the Southwest. To a man (and a woman), the characters are all extremely liberal in their political viewpoint. If you're convinced there's a liberal bias in the mainstream press, this novel will do nothing to disabuse you of that notion. Even if you do subscribe to the dominant point of view, you may be disappointed by some of the things liberalism's used to excuse in the final chapter. Perhaps the book's greatest weakness is the lack of alternate viewpoints explored: there are no real Republican characters either as foils or villains and this makes for some uninspired conflict and ultimately an unsatisfying resolution.

Part way through the book I found myself wishing Cotton would get himself out of a jam by making a cellphone call, or fax or e-mail his stories in to his editor, then I remembered - 1971! None of those things existed. Teletype machines and direct-dial long distance were the high tech of the day; even though photocopiers existed, Cotton still uses carbon paper throughout the story to make duplicates of his stories written on a manual typewriter. If you're nostalgic for these things, then you'll probably get more out of the story than I did.

The Southwest makes a brief appearance in the middle of the book when Cotton tries to find sanctuary there. While not quite as picturesque as in the Leaphorn/Chee books, this brief respite in New Mexico marks the point where the novel really picks up steam. Here and in Cotton's escape from the vacant Capitol building near the end of the novel are the two parts where Hillerman's pacing and plotting really shine. Compared to these fast-paced action scenes, the talky final chapter and the lengthy set-up in the first half of the book are big disappointments.

The Fly on the Wall isn't a terrible book, but it's clearly not Hillerman's best. If you're caught up on the latest Navajo novels, go ahead and tackle this one, but there's really no reason to go out of your way for it.

I enjoy the Hillerman Navajo mysteries because the characters are well developed. Not so in this book. I found the first half really boring and hard to get through. The characters were not people you could care about, an important issue for me.

Even though I am a Hillerman fan, my expectations were loweredfor this book. I'm mainly interested in his Navajo mysteries. However,I found this book to be well-written and compelling. Definitely worththe read, even though it isn't Hillerman's best.

I did finish the book staying up until 1 pm. If you are a fan of Hillerman, then you do want to read this book. The two "chased by the bad guy" scenes in the book, one in Santa Fe and the other in the Capitol, are worth the price of admission. They are pulse quickening and vivid.

This is the second time in about 20 years that I have read The Fly on the Wall, published in hardcover 1st edition in 1971 by Harper and Row, copyright by Tony Hillerman. I enjoyed the book much better the second time around; I learned from the first reading not to sweat the numerous, often-times boring details of the scam.

John Cotton writes a political column for the Tribune. A rival reporter, just before he takes a violent tumble to his death from the balcony of the capitol rotunda, tells John that he is on to something big/exciting. Shortly before the rival reporter's death, a man in a blue suit hurriedly comes looking for the reporter's notebook which contains all the reporter's notes on current/future stories he is/will be working on. John Cotton finds the missing notebook,launches his own investigation that leads to the disclosure of policical corruption high up in state government, and comes very close, several times, to having his life violently snubbed out before the situation resolves itself in a most satisfying way.

Although the book is jam-packed with minute details on how a state goverment is scammed by an unscrupulous road construction firm, just remember that understanding every detail about the scam is not that important. There is a section in the book about a poker game in progress. I'm not a poker player; I've never bothered to learn the rules of the game, but I knew enough to know that I didn't have to understand every detail about every hand to get the gist of what was going on (but it might have added to my reading pleasure if I had!). What is important about The Fly on the Wall is that the state is being scammed, and the challenge is to try to determine who is behind the scam and why. This is hinted at throughout the book, but the details are never fully revealed until the very end. (And what a Masterful ending it is!)

Just remember: the book is all about politics and scheming to get ahead, and not in understanding every tedious detail of the scam!

This is NOT one of Hillerman's Chee and Leaphorn books. That series is great and the characters shine through, and most of the books are wonderful and fun reads. This book is not any of those. I guess there are two main problems with this book. First, it was written early on in Hillerman's career and his writing style was still developing; and, second, it is clearly an antiquated story and one dimensional.

The book's hero is John Cotton - a reporte who covers politics for one of the local newspapers in an unnamed state capital some where in the northern midwest of the United States. The time is the early 70's. One of Cotton's colleagues - albeit someone who works for a competing newspaper - has a big story developed but he is either pushed to his death or commits suicide before it is published. Cotton decides to follow up on the lead and starts developing the story himself. This gets one of his friends killed, so Cotton knows he is on the right track.

Trying to get away from it, Cotton takes a fishing vacation in the Southwest and there we see the Hillerman spark! The place descriptions, the pace of the story, they all start shining and show us Hillerman fans why we like his writing so much! Unfortunately, after this brief interlude, the story goes back to its base location, and the pacing slows way down again.

Eventually, Cotton figures out what is going on and a thriller like climax takes us to a logical conclusion to the book. However, did I like it? Well, no. it wasn't so much that the book was unoriginal or boring, it was that the book was a drudge to get through for some reason. The whole scandal that the reporters are tryign to figure out has to do with the question of what should reporters do? Are they really disinterested and objective observers? Or, should they participate in their stories and adjust their writing to accommodate their personal viewpoints? Cotton is of the opinion that he needs to publish the story regardless of the cost to his favorite cause or politician. Many others in the book disagree with that premise.

A kind of morbid fascination for me was reading about the technological tools of the time and realizing how much has changed in the intervening years. Cotton writes his stories on a typerwriter using carbon paper to have copies and then a teletype to get it to his offices; when he goes to search data for background, he leafs through paper files that are stored in big rooms with many file cabinets; etc. No cell phones, no computers, no internet!

The plotting and pace of this book is rather poor. Most of the book concerns itself with technical details of reporting that just do not make sense to some one outside of the trade. Also, the whole way in which the plot is uncovered seems to not come together until Cotton explains it even though I read through all his searching and information gathering. I do not like books where the explanation for what is going on is dependent on specific information that only the subject has. And in this book that seems to be the case. Also, there is a key romantic relationship which appears out of nowhere at the middle of the book - and another at the tail end - and neither of them appear to be connected to anything.

My summary is that I am glad to have read it as part of the overall Hillerman collection that I have. I am unhappy to have to say that if this was the very first Hillerman that I ever read, that it would likely have been the last.

The Fly on the Wall reads as wonderfully as any of his Indian series do. I was quite thrilled to read a political thriller--in this day and age of excitement on the political edge. I wish he had considered that when he wrote this book--it certainly fit in. Thanks for a really great read, Mr. Hillerman.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I'm a fan of Hillerman's Jim Chee mysteries, but found this to be as good, if not better, than those. I almost gave up on the book at first -it was so technical it was almost funny- but it was worth sticking with it, because the plot turned out to be one of his most interesting. Unlike some of the Jim Chee stories, whose endings can be somewhat anti-climactic, Fly on the Wall was riveting through the final pages. I imagine this book might not appeal to all of Hillerman's fans, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.