BOOK REVIEW
Death's Door, by Quintin Jardine, 408 pp, 2007 Headline, paperback,.Available at Asia Books and leading book stores, 395 baht
BERNARD TRINK
This reviewer has a peculiarity (more than one, but I'll come to the others later). When I pick up a work of crime fiction, I like to read about the crime - murder, robbery, drugs, whatever. How it was investigated, solved. Twists and turns are expected.
What I don't like to read is everything there is is to know about the policeman or private eye after the culprit. It is irrelevant. I realise that writers are hard put to fill 400 pages with core material, so non-essentials are thrown in for space purposes. To be sure lawmen and women have private lives, but what has this got to do with anything?
Yet more than a few authors all but lose track of the crimes they come up with, focusing on the hunters, their affairs, spouses, children, celebrations, mournings. Arguably, this is what readers (except myself) want to read. I dispute this. Readers are led to believe that this is how crime fiction should be written, but which textbook says so? Scottish scribe Quintin Jardine for one knows the drill and has followed it for nearly 30 novels.
The literary creator of Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner of the Edinburgh Police, the reader is quickly distracted from the possible serial murders of two young women, promising artists (more deaths will follow), by marriages, divorces, pregnancies, illness among Scotland's finest.
Suspects have alibis, which take chapters to break (a double could have been on the plane, which means... ). The plot expands to include nefarious activities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, MI6 and the CIA. (Could the billionaire businessman be behind it?)
Ambitious detectives are vying for promotions, not above rattling the skeletons in their rivals' closets. One is blown up in a house thought to be the hiding place of a witness. His grieving widow may have terminal cancer (there may be a cure).
Long before page 406, the question took hold in my mind: Who cares? Not that Jardine is a boring writer, but he really should make a reappraisal of what should go into crime novels. Back to basics is an overworked and simplistic cliche. Still, its need applies.
Ian Rankin is better at it. According to the blurb, Jardine is a popular author in his homeland. I wonder whether he has caught on abroad as well. While he has no background with Scottish law and order, he displays knowledge of police procedure there.
Another of my peculiarities is that whenever a character in crime fiction is introduced as a refugee from what was formerly Yugoslavia, this reviewer knows straightaway that he did it, whatever it is. Sure enough there's one in Death's Door. Need the cops search further?
I'm not eager to read the earlier books in the Bob Skinner series, yet I'll be interested in his subsequent ones.
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