Customer Reviews

Grave Descend (Hard Case Crime)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In a relatively short time, Hard Case Crime has become well known for periodically exhuming classic works of crime fiction and giving them the distribution and packaging they deserve. This month's exhibit is GRAVE DESCEND by John Lange. The cover, I would submit, speaks for itself, standing out on the shelf like a rose among a garden of weeds. The contents within are up to the billing.

GRAVE DESCEND was nominated for an Edgar Award, which no doubt surprised and delighted John Lange, who was busy at the time doing other things besides writing. "John Lange" is in fact a pseudonym for a gentleman who later became a phenomenally successful author with crossover success in film and television. I'm not stating his name simply because I don't want it to detract from this book, which is a work of such quality that it deserves to be judged on its own merits.

It begins with a mystery of sorts. James McGregor is a deep sea diver who ekes out an existence in Jamaica running an undersea salvage company. McGregor's best days are behind him; even so, he somewhat reluctantly agrees to the proposition of Arthur Wayne, a mysterious stranger who is a mass of contradictions. Wayne holds himself out as an insurance company representative who wants McGregor to undertake a recovery operation on Grave Descend, a luxury yacht that, McGregor is told, has just sunk off the coast of Jamaica.

McGregor reluctantly agrees, even as he learns that practically nothing Wayne has told him is true. As McGregor becomes more deeply involved in the project, he finds that he is not only being misled but is also being set up.

Lange devises quite an interesting scenario here. McGregor is neither rich nor a rocket scientist; the people who are using him are wealthy and intelligent, with an apparent infinite supply of resources. McGregor has friends, a journeyman's working knowledge of his field and the ability to think on his feet. It makes for an interesting battle of wits, and more.

Ultimately, Lange's narrative strength makes GRAVE DESCEND the readable, accessible work that it is. The author mixes background subject matter --- Jamaica, deep sea diving, World War II --- with interesting characters and an exotic plot to create an ultimately timeless novel.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

"Every story was different, and they were all, to his ears, improbable. But not like the Grave Descend. That was not merely improbable; it was weird. Even the name of the ship was weird." -- from Grave Descend

Author John Lange is actually the pseudonym of a massively bestselling author whose name you would instantly recognize if I chose to reveal it. Hard Case Crime, seeing the first reprints of Lange's books since their original publications, would like us to respect his privacy, but as we all know, there are no secrets on the Internet, and his identity is only as far away as a single click.

Coincidentally, John Lange was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Grave Descend. The author actually won the Edgar for another novel he wrote around the same time under a different pseudonym. (He has also won one under his own name, but not for a novel.)

Jim McGregor, a diver by occupation, is hired to investigate the sinking of the Grave Descend, a luxury yacht with an unlikely moniker (it's actually a quote from Samuel Johnson, the source of all the epigraphs in the book), off the coast of Jamaica. The main trouble is that McGregor can't seem to get a straight series of events surrounding the sinking -- everyone has a different take on what happened, even where the boat went through customs.

To make things more difficult, the sinking is being kept from the press for 24 hours due to the presence of the boat's single passenger, Monica Grant, who is not only striking beautiful (especially in a bikini) but is also the "good friend" of the boat's married owner, Robert Wayne. McGregor discovers a few other details while involved with this mysterious crew, and begins to piece together a puzzle that's got his name written all over it.

John Lange offers up a straightforward, taut thriller with no frills but more than a little John D. MacDonald in its pedigree. The short chapters and reliance on dialogue make the relatively complicated plot flow easily and quickly toward its conclusion. A slight but entertaining piece of escapism, Grave Descend is likely to pass through your mind without touching much along the way. It's by no means a crime classic, but it's completely engrossing during the reading -- I finished it in just a couple of hours and I don't imagine it took Lange much longer -- there's just not a whole lot of substance. I'm even having trouble coming up with things to say about it, but fans of MacDonald and Richard Stark could do worse than to take a short cruise aboard the Grave Descend. Just watch out for those hammerheads.

The cover of this book has a statement that says this book was nominated for the Edgar award. If so, that year was hurting for good books. Grave Descend feeds off of Sean Connery's James Bond and the slick caper productions of the late 1960's. John Lang's book feels to me like more of an excuse to get some action licks in rather than an attempt to create a seriously engaging thriller.

The character we follow is Jim McGregor, a diver by trade who is pulled into a scheme. Just what is happening is pretty much the jist of the rest of the book. McGregor investigates why he is being set up or not told the whole truth and the stakes keep getting higher. Really in the end, this story is almost laughable in its silly twists and turns.

The hardest thing for me here, was in following just what was happening. Characters disapear from scenes with no explanation and Lange seems to have written whole chapters or series' of events in his head that he has failed to let the reader in on. Just what the heck was happening romantically here is beyond piecing together.

It feels like the author only spent a couple of days writing this. And the lack of quality shows. In my opinion, this is not worthy of the Hard Case Crime re-prints.

The best feature of Grave Descend is its "readability". The fast paced action and plentiful dialogue make for effortless page turning. The entire novel can be polished off in a few very short hours.
It would be a mistake, however, to include Grave Descend in the upper tiers of the Hard Case Crime series... for two major reasons. Poor character development and haphazard plotting.
Neither protagonist Jim McGregor nor the supporting cast are adequately fleshed out. For that reason, the reader has no basis on which to understand, identify with or be surprised by their various actions. Furthermore, the story contains a number of plot elements, each potentially quite interesting when considered individually. However, when incorporated into the overall scheme of things, they fail to gel together to provide the narrative unity readers have come to expect from the mystery genre.
Bottom line: An effortless read with plenty of interesting action packed scenarios, but lacking in three dimensional characters and coherency of plot. A three star effort, subpar for the usually excellent Hard Case Crime series.

Grave Descend is a breezy and generally entertaining tale of a salvage diver in Jamaica who gets into a bit of trouble involving a yacht of the same name.

The prose is efficient; the dialog effective. The plot has plenty of twists and turns.

The biggest flaw relates to the sketchy characters, who seem to be little more than placeholders within the story for reciting dialog and performing action. None seems to have any "inner life". Not even the main character.

Also, the story seems quite rushed. There is plenty of opportunity for building tension and suspense, but the author races through the story, even the climax. [I suspect the original publisher might have imposed a maximum word count. The novel appears to be no more than 50,000 words. So maybe that's why the story is rushed.]

Nevertheless, Grave Descend is probably worth reading. Fans of "John Lange" might enjoy reading an early one of his novels. Others might just enjoy the breezy story.

P.S. Since no one else is disclosing who actually wrote this novel, neither will I ... though it'll take you 10 seconds to find out on the Internet. [Kudos to "Hard Case Crime" for insisting the novel stand on its own.]

I tend to like Crichton that is a bit more complicated, but this isn't bad. It has a comfortability which derives from his very real scuba diving passion and experience, and includes the last-minute twist typical of his Hard Case Crime contributions.

This very old pulp paperback arrived promptly, and in the condition I would expect a well-kept but well-read 30-year-old paperback to be in. Very satisfied.

John Lange's Grave Descend (2006 / 1970) is an ephemeral affair, grounded in the overly masculine international intrigue of its era. Set in gorgeous Jamaica, Mr. Lange (Michael Crichton) sets up a marginally-complex action thriller that shows all the hallmarks of the chart-topping author that he would day become.

James McGregor is a close-mouthed manly man with a military background and a talent for diving. He's hired by a mysterious businessman with obviously dodgy motives to do some salvage work on the Grave Descend, the book's titular yacht. The problem is, as McGregor quickly discovers, the yacht's not yet sunk.

Smelling a rat, McGregor recruits a few local friends to cover his back. The money's good, even if the job stinks, and there are a host of attractive women involved (one is French, one is a femme fatale and one is a lunatic with a pet ocelot). McGregor figures that as long as he goes in with his eyes open everything will be ok.

The book dissolves into double- and triple-crosses with everyone seemingly on everyone else's side. There's a horde of Nazi gold (the McGuffin du jour of the late 60s and early 70s), a bit of murder and lot of manly-manliness going about. Given the thick fug of testosterone that permeates the novel, it is a surprise that McGregor doesn't require his oxygen tank at all times.

Mr. Crichton, bless his memory and Jurassic Park, has always been a bit of a hack. As his later career showed, he became deft at picking a contemporary "hot topic" issue, packing it with chase scenes and spinning it into a yarn bestseller. In Zero Cool (despite the self-sabotaging framing device and thin lead character), he at least punctuates the set-piece action sequences with with some refreshingly cheeky dialogue and a sense of good ol' fashioned fun. Grave Descend veers to the other extreme - a super-serious, self-consciously meaningful work that's too clumsily ambitious to be an airport-sold action thriller. The closest comparison would be a Travis McGee mystery, except John D. MacDonald created a character to work with, and not a stuffed-scarecrow of hyper-masculinity. As McGregor bounces from one fatal peril to another, his ultimate insignificance becomes all too apparent - the reader just doesn't care what happens to him.

I started and finished this book on a 4 hour plane flight, story moves fairly quick and is a very interesting read. I would recommend to any fan of Michael Crichton or avid mystery reader.

Lately I've been reading some of the books in the "Hard Case Crime" series. To be frank, most aren't anything to write home about, but I greatly enjoyed "Grave Descend," perhaps because, in part, it's such a quick read.

Well constructed and briskly paced, there's also the action...LOTS of action, and an antagonist who talks like any one of a zillion James Bond film villains (Gert Fröbe as Fleming's Auric Goldfinger comes instantly to mind).

Anyway...it's a fast, fun read, and I highly recommend it!

Way back before he wrote blockbuster bestsellers like Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton wrote pulps under the pen name John Lange. These books were out of print, hard to find, and very expensive until recently when publisher Hard Case Crime began to reissue attractive paperback editions.

In Grave Descend, diver James McGregor is hired to explore the wreck of a luxury yacht, but the whole thing smells fishy from the start. Nobody who was on the boat seems to be telling the same story and the supposed insurance adjuster has far more information on the wreck than he should. When the Jamaican police get involved, McGregor knows he should probably just walk away, but his curiosity won't allow it. Soon, he finds himself neck deep in danger and double crosses.

This is a short, spare novel filled with tough guys and bad girls in the classic pulp tradition. At just 202 pages, it's a quick read, skillfully building the intrigue before the dangerous climax. One other John Lange novel (Zero Cool) is currently available from Hard Case Crime and, based on my reading experience this time out, I'll be on the lookout for his others in the coming months.