Where's Spenser When We Need Him?

 I have long been a fan of mysteries, especially those featuring snarky detectives.  Robert B. Parker's Spenser will always stand out.  I remember discovering Spenser when friends were reading aloud one of his books during a break during my college years, and the dialogue was so much fun.  Anyhow, ever since then, I would tend to find one or two writers and just read all of their stuff: Sue Grafton (I gave up around M or N), Sara Paretsky, Dianne Mott Davidson (one of my wife's editing clients).  I fell into John Sandford when he was writing under a pseudonym--John Camp.  Lee Child's books were less mysteries and more thrillers, but very addictive.  

More recently, I started reading the Bosch books by Michael Connelly.  Bosch started out as a weary, abrasive detective in the LAPD.  The TV show has been something that all of my siblings and mother watch--our tastes usually don't align so well.  So, I got the latest book, where Bosch and a younger female detective, Renée Ballard, work together after Bosch's retirement from the LAPD.  The book takes place more or less in the present--people are wearing masks (or not) and there is much discussion of the state of LAPD.  A theme that gets repeated several times (and I am not that far into it) is that LAPD is now facing deep budget constraints because the protests have cost so much money that programs are being defunded even if the department is not receiving less money. Oh, and the cops are wary of doing anything because they don't want to face a hostile public. 

Anyhow, mostly because of the way Connelly keeps referring to the position the cops have been put into by the protests, I am offput.  It is distracting and angering because LAPD has behaved awfully before, during, and after the protests.  I would know this even if I didn't have a relative engaged in some of the protests as LAPD and LA Sheriffs have made it abundantly clear that they are above and beyond the law.  I guess in the past I either read books that didn't feature cops or I was able to compartmentalize so that I didn't really think of how bad the cops were in reality when I read about the hero cops in the various books.

Spenser was a fallen cop--he had left because he didn't get along with authority.  Maybe some subtext I might be injecting into the series, he was far more liberal or tolerant or whatever than the cops.  Maybe not.  But now I am thinking that as I give up on Connelly, as I gave up on some other folks whose political leanings got to be too annoying (Tom Clancy is the classic case as his racism completely soured me), I need to find mystery authors whose protagonists are not cops again.  Where is the next Spenser, V.I. Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone, or Goldy Schulz?  The good news is that they are out there.  I just need a detective to help find them for me. 

Standard Science Fiction/Fantasy Hubris: We are the Bestest

I was reading something (folks who know me can guess, but I shan't spoil) that had a spot of time travel in it, and, of course, changing the past wrecks the present.  I have always been struck by how consistent it is that efforts to change the past always produce a worse time-line.  It is almost as if the time-line we are in is the best one of all, and that every other one is inferior.  This is some hubris, fellow Earth-1/Earth-prime/whatever-we-want-to-call-ourselves.  Perhaps one of the best visualizations of alternate timelines was the episode of Community.

Sure, there are some very few exceptions: Quantum Leap was is the primary exception as Sam's efforts to change the past generally worked out, improving people's lives without breaking the space time continuum in any major way.  Back to the Future is another example, but one with plenty of warnings about how much more damage can be done than fixing.  The fixing here is mostly to un-do the damage but turns out, by accident rather than by intent, to produce a better present--Marty's parents are cooler and more successful in the revised 1985. 

Mostly, however, efforts to change the past lead to utter heartbreak.  I remember reading a Marvel series "What If?" which would ponder basic questions of the Marvel Universe and always, always, always the lesson would be that if that event was changed--Gwen Stacy dying, the death of Phoenix, etc--the new reality would be much worse. 

This smug attitude about the "real" time-line seems problematic.  Sure, it is fun for writers/filmmakers to set things up this way since doing otherwise would mean that our reality is inferior.  That probably does not sell books or tickets.  But it does represent some arrogance to suggest that the current timeline is the best possible one, does it not?

Thriller Writing: Politics and Editing

There was some discussion of Tom Clancy's work last night on twitter, and whether it was his right wing politics that made his latter books bad.  I would say two factors mattered as much or more for him and for many authors in this genre, which were then exacerbated by his right-wing politics.

The challenge for thriller authors, as opposed to mystery authors, is that one often needs some political dynamics to kick off and then complicate the crisis.  And politics is, perhaps like sex, hard to write in a way that is semi-realistic and yet still interesting.  It is no accident that Hunt for Red October is Clancy's best book--it has the least amount of political machinery required to move things along.  Red Storm Rising has a modest amount of incredibly stupid politics--that Soviet response to the loss of some oil production facilities would be to invade Europe so that it could invade the Mideast--but these political dynamics are mostly out the way early. 

The problem is that as the Jack Ryan series goes on, he gets deeper and deeper into politics, and politics is required to move things along more and more.  And Clancy sucked at politics.  Not just right-wing-ness, but just stupid, simplistic, often racist takes. 

The second factor that kicked in mightily is that big name authors get edited less and less as their success gets bigger and bigger.  Knowing what we know about Clancy, there is no doubt that as he became quite popular, his editors probably stopped doing much editing.  This is something my wife, a freelance editor, has long believed about most successful authors, knowing what she knows from the inside of the business.  I will always admire her big name clients for wanting her to work on their stuff--that they wanted to write the best they could and knew that more help was better than no feedback. 

Anyhow, Clancy (and others) could not write politics, and Clancy (and others) became less edited over time.  Once Clancy made Ryan President, the politics became ... unintentional humor.  And I stopped reading Clancy.