IT’S all very well for the
White House to put out the word that President Clinton dotes on Marcus Aurelius
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and that he reads books in German. It’s something
else again to catch our Chief Executive red-handed with something called “The
Concrete Blonde.”
Don’t be surprised if you’ve
not heard of “The Concrete Blonde,” one of four novels that Mr. Clinton
picked up (on blind credit, having been short of cash and bereft of plastic) on
a recent binge at Mystery Books in Washington. This new police procedural
by Michael Connelly won’t be out until June; the advance copy was the store
owners’ gift to the President, who had expressed his satisfaction with the
author’s two previous novels, “The Black Ice” and “The Black Echo,” which won an Edgar
Award as best first mystery in 1993.
We could just hold our horses
until June to share Mr. Clinton’s latest enthusiasm. But with galley in hand,
it’s more fun to jump the gun on this blunt-spoken thriller, which pits the
series hero, Harry Bosch, a maverick homicide detective for the Los Angeles
Police Department, against a cruel and cunning serial killer. Aside from making
Mr. Connelly very, very happy, the alacrity with which the President snatched
up this rough bit of goods would seem to indicate that he likes his genre
fiction hard-boiled and a bit racy. Or does he?
“It’s obvious that he genuinely
likes mysteries and is very knowledgeable about them,” says Debora Knutson, the Mystery
Books employee who helped the President fill his book bag. “But you can’t
really peg him.”
Not easily, anyway. What can
you make of someone whose tastes run to Carl Hiaasen’s anarchic fantasies
of Florida in toxic meltdown; Sara Paretsky’s sobering views of industrial
Chicago as a sociological wasteland; Walter Mosley’s moody-blues period pieces
about Los Angeles’s ethnic underworld; and the country singer Kinky Friedman’s
manic riffs on the theme of the detective as wild man?
Ms. Knutson gave the President
what he asked for: “The Curious Eat Themselves,” John Straley’s manly outdoor
adventure about freakish upheavals in the magnificent natural order of the
Alaskan wilderness, and “Bad Love,” Jonathan Kellerman’s latest pop-psych thriller
about children driven batty by their elders. Mr. Clinton also went for one of Joy Fielding’s domestic-suspense potboilers,
“The Deep End,” on the bookseller’s word
(well-meaning but misguided) that it dealt seriously with the psychology of
child abuse.
“Strawgirl” and “Child of Silence,” by Abigail Padgett, a former
investigator on such abuse cases for the San Diego courts, would probably have
been closer to the mark.
Call me pushy, but I think
mystery lovers should all help our busy President with his reading list. It’s
my idea, so I’ll go first, with a few authors and some representative titles to
start him off:
For all the apparent
eclecticism of his taste, Mr. Clinton seems partial to action-driven stories
with substantive social content. Mr. Straley’s rugged Alaskan adventures may be
stylistically removed from Mr. Hiaasen’s feverish Florida capers, but they
express the same rage over civilization’s cynical despoilment of the
environment. So let’s add to Mr. Clinton’s book list the ecologically sound
regional mysteries of Bernard Schopen (“The Desert Look”) and Judith Van Gieson (“Raptor”)
in the Southwest, and those of James W. Hall (“Bones of Coral”) in Florida.
THE President’s appreciation
for Sara Paretsky’s tough-minded insights into Chicago’s inner-city social
conditions suggests that he would also respond to the gritty underclass view of
New York in Peter
Blauner’s “Slow Motion Riot”; to “The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes” and
other compassionate novels by K. C. Constantine about a decaying Pennsylvania
mill town; to Stephen Greenleaf’s neon-lighted prowls through the San Francisco
Tenderloin in “Blood Type”; and to the nightmare visions of Detroit
captured in the bruising crime fiction of Jon A. Jackson (“Hit on the House”) and
Loren D. Estleman (“King of the Corner”).
Given Mr. Clinton’s interest in
the racial tensions that energize Walter Mosley’s raffish private-eye novels,
the First Reader should also go for any of Tony Hillerman’s fiercely
intelligent mysteries, which are set in the Indian territories of the Southwest
and feature tribal police officers. “The Shaman’s Knife,” by the Canadian author Scott Young,
might be a bit of a stretch for the President, who seems to lack a foreign
policy in regard to crime fiction. But he would surely learn a thing or two
about the conflict between modern law and ancient native customs from the
Eskimo hero, Inspector Matthew (Matteesie) Kitologitak of the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police.
Anyone else want to play this
game? Your turn.
Drawing
Marilyn Stasio writes the Crime
column for the Book Review.
No comments:
Post a Comment