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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Long ride to nowhere, March 3, 2003
The Charles Starkweather crime spree that left 14 people dead in 1958 spawned, among other things, an excellent feature film, Terrence Malick's "Badlands"; a so-so TV film, and this book. Lawrence Block, who originally published this book under the pseudonym Paul Kavanaugh, brings us Jimmie John Hall, 22 years old, a drifter and loser who appears in the story's opening pages by hitching a ride with a friendly stranger and killing him for his Oldsmobile Toronado. Cut to Grand Island, Nebraska, where we meet Betty Dienhardt, a 15 year old nonentity, so mediocre she's practically invisible, living with her cold, unloving father, her submissive and equally unloving mother, and her flatulent grandmother whose malodorous gas explosions make the house almost uninhabitable. Betty hates her home and wants to run away to her older sister Judy, who ran away from home years ago after a tempestuous fight with their father and has made a life for herself that her younger sister can only dream about; she fantasizes that Judy is a glamorous Hollywood actress who will drive up in a gleaming car and rescue her from this sink of despair she lives in. Jimmie John's route takes him through Grand Island and when he runs into Betty, they each sense something in each other that they vibrate to. Betty runs off with Jimmie John after he shoots her parents dead (and puts Grandma out of her misery as well), and from there it's a flight across the Southwest, leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake. We learn about Jimmie John and Betty mainly from flashbacks told by people who knew them; a former lover of Jimmie John's mother, one of Betty's teachers who says that aside from excelling in Spanish she was so ordinary that she faded into the woodwork, and the sister Betty idolized, who says that she hardly remembers her, and they were never close anyway. Block shows us who Betty and Jimmie John are, but we don't really get a sense of how they feel and where they are coming from, or why Betty chose not to escape from Jimmie John when she had a chance to, an act that ultimately dooms her. It's an interesting book in its own right, though, and shows us two rebels without a cause in a mindless quest for something they themselves are unaware of and could never reach anyway. Block wrote this book from the viewpoint of a news reporter giving a voiceover narrative, and we finally see Jimmie John meeting his end as Starkweather himself did, as the scene fades slowly to black.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Get a good grip on your chair...., March 6, 2006
This is another book that is excellently done but one that I could do without. Few Americans even remember the real-life misadventures of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. In the late 1950s the duet, one a James Dean dittohead and the other, a misguided 14-year old girl, went on a killing spree across the midwest. Lawrence Block's book is somewhat loosely patterned after the real killers and their pointless crimes.
The novel's plot is gripping enough, certainly: one brutal murder after another. The characters are well limned, idiotic as they are. The atmosphere is real if somewhat detached in time. The dialogue is excellent, even without Block's usual comic asides. Nonetheless, this is no pleasant work of art. The sane reader just wants to kick the characters behinds at the outset and tell them not to use their unhappiness with life in killing innocent people, e.g., a man who stops to help the duo on the highway.
I am not saying that such people do not exist in real life. There are too many examples, Bonnie and Clyde, Starkweather and Fugate, etc. And there are others yet unborn. It is just that I am reluctant to wallow with them in their woe is me excuses.
Lawrence Block is, to my thinking, the very best American writer of crime fiction. This is one of his earlier works, penned before he discovered the Burglar, Tanner, and Keller. The talent here is obvious, but I am glad that he let more sunshine into his plots as he continued to publish.
As a footnote, the best book on the real Starkweather is a book of the same name by William Allen.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Psycho Novel........................., January 8, 2012
This is another psycho novel. I do not care for this type of story.
It is well written but not my cup of tea.
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