William Denton (buff@pobox.com)
Fri, 29 Oct 1999 12:03:54 -0400 (EDT)
Has anyone else here read John D. MacDonald's big
Arthur-Hailey-style book, _Condominium_? I've seen it around
for years but always avoided it because I thought it would be
awful. A few weeks ago I found a copy for a dollar, and
figured what the hell, if it's by JDM it must be fairly good,
so I bought it.
It's the story of the people who build, own or live in a new
condo on the Florida shoreline. Lots of characters are
introduced, many are weak or criminal or stupid, some are the
standard JDM grizzled, muscular 40ish engineer types. It
turns out the condo was built very poorly and a hurricane
could knock it down--then a hurricane comes.
It's not hardboiled, but something about the legal and
business shenanigans at the start reminded me of the
corruption we often see in hardboiled books. Here, though, we
get it from the other side: we see the businessmen passing
bribes, shaving costs and socking away money for when it all
comes down. MacDonald goes into lots of detail about what
they do. Instead of the hero bursting into the room full of
old men and talking fast as he outlines what they did and why
the murders followed, we get step-by-step instructions on how
to pull real estate and development scams (after which no
murders come, because the hurricane kills off most
people).
I finished the book yesterday morning, and last night I read
Stark/Westlake's _The Man with the Getaway Face_. Big
difference!
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Fri 29 Oct 1999 - 12:04:29 EDT