Customer Reviews

Shotgun Alley (Captain Richard Bolitho Adventures)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop burst into the private investigation spotlight for the first time in the thrilling Dynamite Road . Together they form an unlikely but very effective combination, so effective that they have remained in business long enough to feature in Shotgun Alley, a sequel that picks up where Dynamite Road left off.

Andrew Klavan has put an interesting spin on his hardboiled private detective series that just tweaks it a little to give it a refreshing nuance. It's not the investigative work that is carried out although they are very adept at their jobs and the action flows in waves; it isn't Weiss and Bishop's character traits or personalities, although they are very distinctive and well-developed; it's not even the way they operate, although undercover work has featured in both Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley and is rich in suspense and intrigue. All of these qualities would have drawn me to the series anyway, but the quality that gives the series that little distinctive twist is that it is narrated by Andrew Klavan who is working as a young office clerk in Weiss's firm.

Shotgun Alley is the name of a bar frequented almost exclusively by bikers and, in particular, by a group known as The Outriders. Not an official gang, they display no colours on their jackets, they are considered too violent and unstable to be part of the more formalised biker gangs. Scary thought, huh? They've already proven what they're capable of when Jim Bishop moves into their midst in a not-so-subtle way. The raw, tough, sneering persona of the biker outlaw comes easily to Bishop making him the ideal operative for the undercover job he has been assigned. His job in this case is to infiltrate this criminal crew and lure away the leader's girlfriend, Honey. Honey happens to be a rich man's daughter and he doesn't want her shenanigans jeopardising his future political plans. Yep, he's a sentimental, loving rich man.

Bishop's operation isn't the only job keeping Weiss in business. The agency is also approached by Professor M.R. Brinks who has been receiving a long series of sexually explicit and harassing emails. She wants Weiss to find out who is sending them, claiming to be outraged and promising all sorts of repercussions. Weiss is not so sure about her real reasons for finding her cyber-stalker but takes the job.

It's this job that Weiss gives the young Klavan his big chance to do some real detective work. Klavan confesses that as a fan of Chandler and Hammett he has always dreamt of becoming a private detective like Marlowe or Sam Spade. He idolises Weiss, pointing out that he's everything a hardboiled private detective should be, even down to the bottle of Macallan Whisky in the bottom drawer, and he's eager to impress him.

So what is this Scott Weiss like anyway? According to Klavan he's a big ugly man with a paunch, basset hound features, mournful, world weary eyes and a habit of feeling sorry for everyone else. He has an uncanny knack for tracking people down and almost a second sight when it comes to problem solving (much to Jim Bishop's good fortune).

Jim Bishop, on the other hand, is a dangerous dude who plays by his own rules. He's at his best when the adrenaline is pumping and all hell is about to break loose, which seems to be a regular state of affairs where he's concerned.

Klavan's two protagonists are richly developed characters who are as vastly different to one another as it is possible to get, yet they manage to work together successfully, possibly because they rarely meet each other during the course of the story.

The tone of the story maintains a dark and dangerous edge throughout as we live with the volatile bikers. You can sense the barely contained rage in every confrontation that Bishop has with Cobra, the gang's leader. Switching the focus across to Weiss doesn't lighten things any, either. He seems to wander around with a black cloud above his head and a hangdog expression on his face, sighing at every opportunity, to the point where it starts to become an amusing attribute of the man. He is constantly haunted by the spectre of Ben Fry, known as the Shadowman and acting as an ever-present threat to Weiss. This looming presence carries over from Dynamite Road and remains just beyond Weiss's peripheral vision, lurking as a constant reminder that he lives in a dangerous world. (Weiss would sigh heavily at this point...)

Shotgun Alley is a hardboiled detective story that delivers a brooding story of gang violence highlighted by sudden scenes of frenetic action balanced with periods of introspection and self-absorption. Apart from a short section where Weiss's reflections become particularly tedious, the book maintains a solid pace that will be sure to keep all private detective fans glued to the pages.

This book has a few starts and stops that kind of leaves the reader feeling like they were on a bumper car ride. The writing is very jagged. Klavan has a style that feels like he were narrating the entire novel from the vantage point of a 1940's MGM/Bogart voice over. In my opinion, I think that Klavan heads away from his stronger areas and concentrates too intensely on too many action scenes.

The parts of the book that just click and are kind of magical are when Klavan writes beyond Weiss and Bishop and concentrates on the third character in his series... himself. I could have just kept reading and been a very happy camper if Klavan had forgone the rest of the story and focused on the relationship that is touched upon between himself and the girl in the pizza joint.

What I have put into this review here are some of the stronger negative points that I encountered. Its a pretty good book. I can think of many protagonist series' that I would rather have another sequal to instead of another Weis/Bishop book, but its not that bad either.

Over the weekend, I read Andrew Klavan's second Weiss and Bishop novel, _Shotgun Alley_, and really enjoyed it, though in retrospect, the book is chock-full of cliches: the tough guy hero who infiltrates a biker gang and proves himself to be just as virile as the rest and a femme fatale right out of film noir. But Klavan writes with such power and assuredness, that the whole thing comes to vivid life and it moves.

Jim Bishop is charged with bringing back the daughter of a rich man who is planning a senate run. In an act of rebellion, she's joined a biker gang made up of misfits and castoffs too crazy to be accepted in the traditional gangs (there's even a "Mad Dog"; at one point, a character says "What does a biker have to do to earn the nickname Mad Dog?"). They're the Outriders and they're not above killing a few innocent bystanders who might get in the way of their smash-and- grab thefts.

Back at the office, Weiss has been hired by a feminist professor to track down the person responsible for a string of sexually-harassing emails. The only problem is she's been receiving them for over nine months--it turns out she's fallen in love with the sender and wants help tracking him down. The process of finding out who the sender is allows Weiss some time to reflect on his own unrequited love for his fantasy woman from the previous
novel. He knows that there's an unstoppable killer out there, just waiting to follow him should he try to find this woman, but he's not sure if that should stop him from trying.

There's a great scene where the unnamed "I" narrator (if we believe the book's foreword, this is Klavan himself, though it's hard to believe these books are really based on real events as the narrator assures us) meets a woman who seems to be his perfect match and they have a wonderful conversation which ends with her giving him her phone number and eliciting a promise for him to call. Very soon after, he drifts into an all-consuming sexual relationship with Weiss' female operative Sissy, and forgets all about Emma McNair, his perfect woman. Very sad, really.

We learn more about the backstory of the relationship between Bishop and Weiss and how they started working together. It all builds to a raid on a warehouse during a dark and stormy night, with police and FBI agents, tipped off by Bishop, waiting to capture the gang.

I really had a great time with this book and it was literally a page-turner that wouldn't let me go. There were several times that I was about to put the book aside and do something else, but I read just one more sentence and that was enough to draw me into the next chapter and then the next. I liked _Dynamite Road_ a lot, but _Shotgun Alley_ is even better. Hopefully, this series will continue for some time.

It figures that when Edgar-winner Klavan embarked on a series it would be eccentric, action-packed, and darkly humorous. This second Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop case bears out that assessment as the private eye firm takes on two separate cases. Romantic, lugubrious, ex-cop Weiss quickly punches holes in a feminist professor's furious search for an emailing sexual harasser. And adrenaline-junky, ex-criminal Jim Bishop meets his match in the rich-girl-turned-biker's moll he's been hired to seduce away from the aptly named Cobra.

Bishop's action-evil-and-danger-driven case is the more exciting, naturally, being charged from minute to minute with sex and violence, daredevil riding, diabolical one-upmanship and sheer viciousness for the fun of it. But Weiss is such an endearing character with his towering intellect and his genteel illusions, that the harassment case becomes more than just comic relief between the searing biker scenes.

Honey's wealthy, senate-aspiring father wants her home before she ruins his career along with her life. But it may already be too late. Honey was the driver in a robbery gone bad, and while she likes the thrill of danger, jail is not really on her agenda. Bishop, a hungry ladies' man himself, finds himself alarmingly obsessed with Honey. Cobra, however, a deliberately amoral intellect with a penchant for lectures, will reliably kill them both at any hint of defection.

Even with father-figure Weiss reigning him in and working the system, Bishop takes us on a heart-stopping ride, with Klavan, in the guise of his younger self, interpolating himself along the way. Unusual, visceral and larger-than-life, this will keep you up all night and haunt your dreams.

I thought the book was only slightly above awful, because it could have been SO good, if an editor had rapped Klavan's knuckles, handed him a thesaurus, and screamed "Show, Don't Tell." I bought this because the extremely descriptive cover promised a great plot. I'm a biker's wife, read a great deal from history to mystery, and always hope some author will go beyond the biker stereotypes. Oh well. The first clue that things weren't going as promised was the author's intro. In the grand tradition of romance writers, Klavan speaks to the readers as if they are desperate fans agonized to know what happened to characters in a previous book. Uhh, yeah, anyone losing sleep over it?
I was also embarrassed by his cutesy comments encouraging readers to buy the previous book because he has to "support" his adorable family. Ugh. He refers to several true crime events (like everyone keeps up with that, too), and is coy about his books being based on those cases. Except, of course, his books are more shocking, have more sex, more More. Then he analyzes the plot and characters of THIS book (why not let the reader decide?), and apologizes for the character's frailties. Now I know why.
Klavan has obviously never heard the old writer's adage "Show, don't tell." The character descriptions are plastic, statistical (5'7", green eyes, etcetera) and romance-reader variety (heavy emphasis on what they are wearing).
The writing is pathetic for someone with eight other books under their belt. I guess the ongoing repetition helps fill up space, since there really isn't much story here. Example: "He was wearing an ironical expression, too, as if something struck him as funny. Or maybe everything struck him as funny--or maybe it just struck him as too stupid not to laugh." Oooookay. This is Bishop, one of our heroes, folks. Quite the thinker. Unfortunately, all the leading men expound thusly. The old cop Weiss goes on ad infinitum about hookers, and moons over a special hooker (from the previous book of which we have heard so much! Do run out and buy it!)
And the "oddly intellectual biker" Cobra (per book jacket blurb) bores the daylights out of the lead female, and this reader, with his nonstop speeches. One speech full of wannabe biker clichés ran almost a page. To further confuse the issue, there's an office clerk doubling as an occasional narrator popping in and out of chapters, telling (why show at this point?) the inner thoughts of the main characters (including their sex life??). His point of view jumps in the story at random, psychoanalyzing Bishop and Weiss, his college days, feminists, fellow students... and he's not the sharpest pencil in the office, either. Very few of these speeches contribute to the plot, and should have been edited or deleted.
The action scenes go well past the point of tension to...well, after a four-page fight, the reader is ready for someone to get killed or go to the hospital. Anything, please, just stop already. "Some sort of choking thrill, some sort of choking urgency, rose from Bishop's chest to his throat. But he didn't know what he was thinking. He wasn't thinking anything." I was thinking I needed to put the book down and go wash the dog.

Growing up on a farm meant I often had summer jobs others might consider unenviable. Mucking out stalls. Weed-wacking endless feet of fencerow. Clearing the poison oak from the front field. Not everything was drudgery. Such occupations did instill in me a desire to excel in higher education so I could avoid them at all costs in the future. Also, sometimes I got to drive The Toyota, an ancient, stripped-down pickup with an odometer seeking its furthermost limits. I remember the foreman teaching me how to work the manual transmission. For long stretches, I'd growl The Toyota along in first gear, working up the nerve to shift, and when I finally stomped on the clutch and yanked back the stick -- wham! -- it would leap forward like a pitbull straining at its chain. That sense of sudden, surging speed came back to me when reading Andrew Klavan's Shotgun Alley, the sequel to his somewhat uneven Dynamite Road.

By all accounts, the new case should've made Scott Weiss smile. Of late, Weiss Investigations had been saddled with unpleasant, penny-ante stuff, including that business with the Women's Studies scholar at Berkeley. Yes, a case was a case, and Weiss felt badly that professor Brinks had a harasser who was sending her obscene emails. But low-profile conundrums didn't bring in the bucks. Then Philip Graham called, a wealthy political candidate with one eye on a Senate seat and the other on a personal problem -- his daughter Beverly. Not content to stay home and out of trouble, Beverly has dubbed herself Honey and hooked up with a nasty biker called Cobra who has a penchant for philosophizing and armed robbery. Graham wants Beverly back home, and Weiss knows that it means more business if he can pull it off. There's the rub. Weiss has his best operative, Bishop, on the case, a man as rough and tumble as they come. But Honey is hardly powerless herself, and as soon as she sees Bishop, she sets on sinking her claws into him.

The reason why Dynamite Road felt a bit off to me was Klavan's penchant for popping out of Serious Thriller Mode and into Over-The-Top Romantic Action (both of the lovelorn and simply adventuresome varieties). It felt like an odd combination, a strange mix of realism and the fantastic. Fortunately, Shotgun Alley more than solves the problem by scaling back the verisimilitude and opening up the novel's action for even more outlandish stunts. This might sound like a left-handed compliment. It isn't. Flat characters and foregone conclusions might be writerly sins in literary fiction, but not in fables, which is exactly what Shotgun Alley is, a Brothers Grimm tale for the hardboiled set. In between the motorcycle chases and fisticuffs, Klavan delves into deep themes like academic intimidation, literary theory, the composition of the human soul and radical feminism. He also deals a lot with sex. Sex and love, sex and psychological manipulation, sex and the secret longings of the heart -- all consume quite a bit of the page count, albeit in a typically not-quite-explicit form. It's encouraging when an author revs up his game during a second installment, and Shotgun Alley kicks the pluses of its predecessor into high gear.

I didn't really like it. Easy read, but all the profanity was a waste...I guess I'll stick to Parker novels....

If you like your heroes tough, your femme fatales flawed, and your bad guys really bad, then this book is for you. Klavan's 2nd Weiss/Bishop novel isn't quite as tightly written or plotted as the series debut was, but it's as good as modern noir fiction gets. This book is far superior to Stephen King's recent foray into the genre, and should be at the top of any Spillane, Hammett, or Ross MacDonad fan's list.

Andrew Klavanm's new series (Weiss & Bishop novels)is a refredshing new series. They are easy reads and while the 2 protagonists are not the type "you would take home to meet Mom", they make for very enjoyable stories.

Shotgun Alley is dark, violent and filled with profanity. It is also wonderfully written, engrossing and filled with intriguing characters. The writing style is unusual in that three are three protagonists; Weiss and Bishop, whose parts of the story are told in third person and a young narrator, whose name we don't know but whose portion of the story is told in first person. The story is introspective, suspenseful, and expertly crafted. Because of the violence, it's not for everyone, but I highly recommend it for those who like dark, PI novels.