(I originally posted these sentiments over at DetecToday, so
for those of you reading this here as well, please forgive
the cross-post, although I did re-write portions of the post
for Rara Avis)
I'd like to add my voice to those busy lavishing praise on
BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD (awful title, foisted on him by his
publisher), Sean Chercover's debut novel. Like Al Guthrie,
Sean's a friend of mine, but I refuse to admit any bias
whatsoever in praising his work. I've read plenty of stuff by
people I like a lot that I wouldn't praise, because it
doesn't merit it.
I hear a lot of windy disquisitions being bounced around
lately about how this or that author is "changing the way we
think about the PI novel", and I would like to point out that
Ray Dudgeon reminds me of no one so much as Hammett's
Continental Op. Not because he's short and pudgy, or because
he's particularly smart, but because I read about Dudgeon and
I think, "gritty, hardboiled, and achingly realistic." No
psycho side-kicks. No arsenal of weapons (unless you count
the wine bottle he uses in the book's first fight scene to
brain an assailant who jumps him on his way to see his girl).
No ninja skills. No extended, orchestrated, lovingly
choregraphed ballets of violence, and when Dudgeon gets the
crap kicked out of him, it *hurts* for longer than the length
of the current chapter. This, folks, is a modern (or if you
prefer, a truly "post-modern") turn on hard-boiled writing,
right down to the core of its black, black heart.
So is Dudgeon 'revolutionary'? I think so, in that you can't
spell 'counter-revolutionary' without 'revolutionary.' In his
hang-dog fatalism, his individualism, his easy mixing
(without truly "mixing") with mob guys, the cynical,
sardonic, wise-cracking first person narrative, and his
adherence to a personal code, Ray Dudgeon is as old school as
Chuck Taylors and short shorts on a basketball court. In his
ability to honor these conventions of the genre while
presenting them to us as something believable, something
credible, and not just so much by-the-numbers cliche, Sean
Chercover combines the ability of a craftsman with the world
weary lyricism of a Yeats.
You might not have heard it here first, but you did hear it:
Sean Chercover is a comer.
All the Best-
Brian Thornton
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