Customer Reviews

Mathew Swain: The Odds Are Murder

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

 

 

All of the Mathew Swain books are worth reading and this was a fine end to the series, though I was sad to see it go...It is a shame Mike Mcquay never wrote any more of these Swain books because they are an awful lot of fun. All of the books have very nice artwork on the covers too!

I first read Mike McQuay's Swain series a few years after it came out, and I still think it one of the most readable and fun cyber-punk sci-fi series, even though I suspect that the term hadn't yet been invented at the time McQuay wrote the novels.

McQuay clearly modeled his writing style closely on Raymond Chandler's. He captures Chandler's mix of gritty dialog and descriptions coupled with occasional flashes of brilliant similes. The hero, Swain, is a close copy of Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, a knight errant too smart for his own good, who has a gift for pissing off violent people and occasionally getting beat up as a reward for his smart-aleck mouth.

All of the Swain books are fun, but this is the best, a violent and apocalyptic finale to the series, wherein Swain faces a problem far beyond his pay grade: a virus of unknown origin whose effect is to make people so violently paranoid that they turn against each other, then either commit murder or retreat and die, too afraid to eat food that might be poisoned. Where did such a thing come from, and how can even the Twenty-first Century's Toughest Private Eye cope with a danger of such magnitude?

I first read two of the books from Mike McQuay's entertaining Mathew Swain series about ten yrs ago and I have just recently been lucky enough to have found the entire set, which I am in the process of devouring right now. These books showcase what I like best about Mike McQuay's writing: his incredible facility for writing snappy dialog and deft touch with similies and metaphors. I can still quote, verbatim, descriptions of his from his novelization of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. The Swain series has even better use of language.Here is a sample, "Sometimes when the wind blows just right and the summer rain steams the streets like the last foul breath of a concrete dragon, the smell of death rolls down from Old Town and hangs over the living like a hammer over an anvil--waiting. There's life in death, I suppose, the knowledge of the rind makes the melon sweeter. But then, I suppose a lot of things. That's why I make my living solving other people's problems."