RARA-AVIS: Re: Stone's _A Long Reach_

Kevin Smith (kvnsmith@colba.net)
Wed, 3 Jun 1998 09:16:36 -0500 >> Well, it's the time of the month for the new book, and this month it's
>> Michael Stone's _A Long Reach_.
>> but not one of my nerves has been wracked.

>> I can't remember who suggested this - evidently there are varying
>> tastes on here :) - but someone must have liked it. Any comments?
>
>
>I think it might have been me or maybe Gary Warren (to suggest it)--we
>both like PI's and the premise is a fine one; however, and this is a big
>however, it didn't grab me as I thought it would. I like Mike Stone so
>much as a person that I thought maybe the disappointment was that I
>didn't go ga-ga over it; maybe I hyped it to much in my own mind and
>then didn't find it as good as I expected.

It might have been me, too...I really liked the first one...I'm just
starting it, and I'm sorry it this one turns out to be lame...
>
>I must admit I preferred Stone's first, The Low End of Nowhere, but both
>are enjoyable trifles. Streeter's unrepentant high-school macho is
>mitigated somewhat by his self-deprecating sense of humor and the fact
>that Stone chooses to make his hero a man's man who needs a woman,
>Linda, to help him see what's really going on. Not to give anything
>away to those who have yet to finish the book, but by the time the big
>plot twist comes it is not much of a surprise, having been the McGuffin
>for far too many made-for-USA Network and/or Showtime type,
>straight-to-video movies. There are tons of books I would recommend
>before this, but for all that, I kind of enjoyed it, mostly for the
>character Streeter. He reminds me a bit of Kanter's Ben Perkins, a
>fifties high school-cool kind of guy trying to make it in a nineties
>world.

Hmmm...like I said, I really enjoyed Stone's first book. Then again, I
also really liked the Ben Perkins series, one of the few P.I. series I can
think of where the detective's vast circle of friends and family play such
a large part without making one want to go run screaming from the room (I'm
just waiting for fans of the traditional loner P.I. to tell me that's
exactly what they did). In fact, I think Perkins is one of the great lost
series of the eighties and nineties, made all the more amazing by the fact
that the series started as a long string of short stories in AHMM, EQMM and
Mike Shayne, before breaking into paperback. The closest comparison I can
think of is The Rockford Files. Picture Jim Rockford as a younger, more
violent guy, and sometime family man, slap him with a past as an ex-union
goon, and move him from the California beach to suburban Detroit.
>
>Stone's short bio in front of the book raised a question with me,
>though. It said he was a working PI. It got me wondering how many PIs
>have worked in the genre. Hammett and Joe Gores, of course, Jerry
>Kennealy (author of the Polo books more of which should have come out in
>paperback) and, now, Stone. I am pretty sure there are others, but I
>can't think of any off the top of my head. Can anyone else?

Well, there's also Nancy Baker Jacobs, who writes the Devon McDonald
mysteries, and Parnell Hall, who calls himself the "world's laziest
writer", because his character, Stanley Hastings, does exactly what Hall
himself did for years, namely working as a P.I. in name only, while getting
accident victims to sign contracts with an ambulance-chasing lawyer. If
Hall actually ran into as many loonies and murders as Hastings does, I
can't blame him for switching professions...

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Kevin Smith
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