While my peers flexed their muscles on the diamond and gridiron and charmed their way into the good graces of the opposite sex, I buried myself in a warm cocoon of make-believe, and sowed the seeds of my current fixation.
I pass it now every day on my way to work, the once-classically-grand Jones Memorial Library -- a mere shell of its glorious, if scarred, segregated legacy, its yellow-brick facade, white stone staircase and terrace, and imperious cupola still dominating lower Rivermont Avenue with a now-spectral gaze -- the bowels of which I scoured once or twice a week, the lower-level children's section, unearthing well-worn copies of, yes, the Bobbsey Twins (by Laura Lee Hope) and Thornton W. Burgess's one-hundred-plus animal biographies of friendly creatures like Peter Cottontail, Reddy the Fox, Johnny Chuck, and Sammy Jay. While these could hardly be deemed "thrillers," they were replete with enough primitive humor, engaging characters, crazy shenanigans, and precarious situations to keep this young reader enthralled. And they introduced me to the seductiveness of recurring protagonists, familiar personalities whose continuing adventures I was only too eager to sample.
After exhausting most of the titles in these mild-mannered series or simply outgrowing them, I entered into a phase of serious comic-book obsession. While I occasionally scanned a Disney's Mickey Mouse or a Looney Tunes' Bugs Bunny -- and some of their daffy cohorts -- for variety and Classics Illustrated only as a last resort, Superman, Batman, and their well-endowed stablemates -- Aquaman, Green Lantern, and the Flash -- were my heroes of choice; possessing extraordinary powers, consistently able to outwit and out slug their nefarious foes, delineated in living color, they were the video game stars of yesteryear and the real precursors of my adult crusaders.
I remember stacks of comic books, waist-high on an eight-year-old, neatly catalogued by publisher and subject, crowned by the solemn visage of a coonskin-capped Davy Crockett. I remember languidly rocking away a summer afternoon stretched out in a hammock on the back porch of 1226 Greenway Court, tracking the latest flights of Superman. I remember loitering at the magazine counter in Pearson's Drug Store on Boonsboro Road, stealing glances at the newest DC comics monthly editions before being swatted away, loath to expend my allowance on purchasing any, since there were too many for my pocketbook and since the publisher had had the audacity to raise the cover prices from ten cents to twelve cents and then to an exorbitant fifteen cents. I remember at summer camp anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Sunday New York Daily News sent by my father; wrapped in the comic section, it enabled me to follow the exploits of the chisel-faced Dick Tracy as he chased down Joe Period, Flattop Jr., and the Kitten Sisters.
I admired Dick Tracy, but, like other preteens, I could more closely identify with sleuths closer to my age, like the resourceful Hardy Boys, Frank and Joe. In a series of stirring if formulaic episodes, usually after taking a hand-off case from their baffled detective father, Fenton, they found missing chums, uncovered secrets in caves and old mills, deciphered marks on doors and sinister signposts, and solved airport, Shore Road, and hidden harbor mysteries, always narrowly escaping one imminent disaster after another.
By the time I discovered the Hardy Boys in the mid-fifties, at the age of eight, they were already thirty years old, the first three volumes in the series -- The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff, and The Secret of the Old Mill -- having been published in 1927, followed by thirty-two more by 1955. How long it took me to circle back and read every one -- as much as possible in order of publication, an eccentricity fostered by the creator's strategy of incorporating into each volume a summary of its predecessor's plot and a teasing introduction to its sequel -- I do not recall. I only know that I did it, up until the age of thirteen, when I finally outgrew these juvenile scribbles and closed my last book on the Hardy Boys, The Mystery of the Desert Giant. I checked them out of the library, or wheedled seventy-five cents or a dollar out of my parents to purchase the ones not available, six or seven of which I noticed a few days ago peeking from the basement bookshelves in the home where I now reside. Only one was still dressed in its artful comic-book cover, the rest nakedly clothbound in tan with brown lettering.
This naive lad reveled in the ingenuity and craftsmanship of one Franklin W. Dixon -- how smoothly his name rolls off the tongue -- Hardy Boys' historian, only to wake up one morning years later, sadly disillusioned, cheated by the shocking revelation that, like Santa Claus, there was no such person. For the Hardy Boys -- and all their youthful partners in crime-solving, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, the Dana Girls -- were the products of one imagination, Edward Stratemeyer (and later his two daughters, Edna and Harriet), and the syndicate he established to churn out these callow potboilers like tabloids off a printing press.
The Stratemeyers' method was to compose detailed ten-to-twelve-page plot outlines and farm them out to ghostwriters, who would submit completed manuscripts for a $100 to $125 stipend, waiving any royalty rights. The real talent behind the Hardy Boys was a struggling young Canadian journalist named Leslie McFarlane, who penned sixteen of the first twenty-four volumes. Often bored by the routine nature of the work and the necessity to conform precisely to the outlines and length dictated by the syndicate, McFarlane still managed to inject ample doses of humor, sophisticated composition, plot complexity, and nuanced characterization into the books, thus accounting in large part for their enduring popularity. Although surpassed in later years by Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys were racking up sales of one to two million books a year by the time the syndicate was sold in the the early 1980's.
Launched in adolescence, my reading career soared into the stratosphere. Like a homeless man unleashed in Golden Corral, I was eager to sample every salad, entree, side dish, and dessert. High school introduced me to Dickens and Shakespeare (whom I enjoyed but can't say ever read for pleasure); four years as an English major at Washington and Lee served up such delicacies as Sophocles, Wordsworth, Camus, Proust, Faulkner, and Thomas Mann. A trio of history courses even whetted my appetite for narrative history and biography.
As I observed my English professors in their element, not only was their love of literature palpable and contagious, even more intriguing was the realization that they were actually being paid to read books. With this in mind, I accepted a fellowship to Columbia University intending to pursue the scholarly life, until fate (or the Vietnam War) rudely intervened in the form of a notice to report for a draft physical. Abandoning the fellowship, I taught English for one year at Appomattox County High School in order to secure a deferment, and subsequently took a temporary job in the family business -- one that has lasted forty years. (Oddly enough, one of my favorite books is The Best and the Brightest, a title that surely has stood the test of time, David Halberstam's riveting account of how the Kennedy and Johnson Brain Trusts squandered 50,000 lives, billions of dollars, and their own credibility in the quagmire that was Vietnam.)
But my reading fever hardly abated; if anything, it intensified. Freed from the constraints of mandated study, settled into a nine-to-five routine, never enamored of television sitcoms or melodramas, shunning the community volunteer work that was to occupy me in later years, I found a bountiful world of books beckoning me.
My menu was diverse and comprehensive. Harboring illusions of recapturing my fellowship, I tackled classic works missing from my resume: Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain); Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky); War and Peace and Anna Karenina (Tolstoy); Jude the Obscure and The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy); Nicholas Nickleby and Our Mutual Friend (Dickens); Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw (Henry James); and Les Miserables (Victor Hugo).
As academia faded farther into the distance and the search for literary meaning began to grow tiresome, I dove into weighty tomes of non-fiction: Shelby Foote on The Civil War (3 volumes); Bruce Catton on Ulysses S. Grant (2 volumes) and The Army of the Potomac (3 volumes); Dumas Malone on Thomas Jefferson (6 volumes); Winston Churchill on World War II (6 volumes); Allan Nevins on The Ordeal of the Union (8 volumes); Page Smith on the Early American Republic (4 volumes); Geoffrey Ward (2 volumes), Arthur Schlesinger (3 volumes), and Kenneth Davis (5 volumes) on Franklin Roosevelt; Robert Remini on Andrew Jackson (3 volumes); Stephen Oates, David Hugh Donald, and Benjamin Thomas on Abraham Lincoln; Peter Massie on Nicholas and Alexandra and Peter the Great; Barbara Tuchman on The Guns Of August, Admiral Stilwell, and The Calamitous Fourteenth Century; William Shirer on the Third Reich and the Third Republic; Theodore White on The Making of Several Presidents; Ron Chernow on Alexander Hamilton, Washington, and Grant; Walter Isaacson on Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci; Robert Caro on The Years of Lyndon Johnson (5 volumes); and The Oxford History of the United States (8 volumes published to date).
If this sounds a lot like work (a misconception, really, since these are superb historians whose writing sparkles with expository clarity, vivid characterizations, dramatic intensity, and balanced interpretation), I cannot deny an occasional dalliance in more mundane popular fiction and gorging myself on tasty treats gleaned from best-seller lists and word-of-mouth recommendations.
When I heard he was a favorite of John Kennedy, I chewed through all of Ian Fleming's James Bond tales before the film Dr. No made him a household word. Having enjoyed Michael Crichton since the publication of his first book, The Andromeda Strain, I predicted to my two media-savvy sons after reading Jurassic Park that it would make a blockbuster movie. Throughout the 1970's and 1980's, I managed to consume my fair share of the output of best-seller stalwarts like Arthur Hailey, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, Tom Clancy, James Michener, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk, John LeCarre, Lawrence Sanders, and John Irving.
With all those skeletons in my closet, I feel eminently qualified to expound upon the idiosyncrasies of a compulsive reader.
A compulsive reader always finishes a book he starts, no matter how absurd, dull, obscure, or irrelevant it may be.
A compulsive reader always has a book on stand by; when he finishes the one in hand, he immediately snatches it up, if only to read one page, since he must always be in a book -- never in between. He has six or seven others stacked in his bedroom, future selections, some of which have lain dormant for months, even years, as more delectable titles have intervened.
A compulsive reader keeps a mental list of at least twenty books he intends to read in the near future.
A compulsive reader treasures every spare moment as an opportunity to deposit more pages in his completion bank. He produces his book in the blink of an eye -- at physician offices, in Jiffy Lube and car wash waiting rooms, in airport and train station lobbies, on the elliptical machine at the YMCA, and on any occasion while waiting for his spouse to emerge from her dressing room.
Like a cow grazing virgin pasture, a compulsive reader spends hours browsing bookstores, always in search of that elusive, provocative, coveted title -- rarely buying -- to add to his ready-to-read supply. At dinner parties, his eyes and attention have been known to wander in the direction of his host's bookshelf to evaluate his tastes and see if he possesses anything worth borrowing.
The compulsive reader finally runs out of bookshelf space, and, perish the thought, finds himself compelled to resort to the library or to de-accessing his collection -- through trades, discards, or donations.
A compulsive reader not only reads books; he reads about books -- in newspapers, in magazines, and now, for hours, like a hog wallowing in the mud, in a stupendous waste of time, on line. In fact, these days, any pretender, with a little research, can converse intelligently about any number of books whose covers he has never cracked.
And finally, the compulsive reader suffers from the rare phobia: fear of the unread book, which he compensates for by an hysterical desire to read every book in sight and often fulfills -- like I did upon moving into my parents' home nineteen years ago. Finding their expansive shelf space stocked with not only their own collection but also with the remnants of twenty-four (three times eight) years of high school and college, I vowed to leave no volume unthumbed.
It took me about a year to read those fifty or sixty which were new to me -- my average annual output. In the past 40 years, since graduating college, I estimate I have read 2500 books -- a dubious accomplishment I don't encourage others to emulate.
Like any other habit carried to excess, compulsive reading can have negative repercussions. It's an inactive, solitary pastime which can isolate the bookworm from his partner and from other family members and in certain social settings from friends and acquaintances -- for no greater good.
For reading is merely a relaxing, pleasurable avocation -- and has no more intrinsic value than surfing the television or internet airwaves, listening to music, playing golf or tennis, or attending sporting events. If one's purpose is to acquire knowledge or to be a better informed person, he can probably learn more in a shorter period of time by watching any number of history, discovery, or news channels. Having read so many books, I can hardly remember even the most recent titles, much less their plots or contents.
Such obtuseness would tend to debunk the claim of scientific researchers that reading does indeed have a correlative benefit; by exercising the brain, it may delay the onset of dementia. In my case, however, I am fearful of the opposite effect -- acceleration into senility -- when I consider the depths to which my reading regimen has deteriorated. Other than the spasmodic intrusion of a work of history, biography, or purported literary merit (I've become an aficionado of Anthony Trollope -- fifteen books in five years), it consists of one mind-numbing thriller after another.
That's not to say there's no method to this madness. Why would a well-educated, reasonably intelligent, naturally inquisitive, frustrated scholar stoop to such triviality?
Well, for one thing, the suspense keeps my attention. Even after digesting five hundred murder mysteries, I still can never predict the outcome or identify the guilty party.
Secondly, if there is any morally instructive message to be gleaned from this genre, it is that the competent fictional treatment of criminal activity can illuminate the fine line between illusion and reality and reveal universal truths about human behavior. Are not some of the motives that drive people to success (and failure) in their personal and professional lives -- greed, sexual passion, unrestrained ambition, pride -- the same ones that drive others to dissemble, deceive, steal, and, in extreme cases, murder? Are not the qualities exhibited by the detective in his relentless quest to unmask the culprit -- persistence, judgment, analysis, courage, patience -- prerequisites for mastering all of life's challenges?
Accordingly, the crime writing I read must meet certain self-selected criteria.
While the plots may border on the improbable, hinge on dubious coincidences, culminate in the incrimination of a minor, unsuspected character, obscure relevant information, and countenance too many gratuitous killings, they must retain a semblance of credibility and evince some intellectual complexity -- which is why I reject international, political, conspiratorial inventions.
Characters -- primary and secondary -- must reflect genuine psychological insight, thinking and acting in ways consistent with their relationships and predicaments. Virtuous protagonists should be flawed and conflicted, and the motives of villains cleverly suppressed, so that the lines between good and evil are often blurred. Recurring characters should both evolve and retain a comfortable familiarity, so that coming back to them after an interlude is like reconnecting with old friends.
The best crime writers are no less polished and professional than those in other genres in their ability to depict individuals and settings visually; to employ imagery judiciously and creatively; to convey realistic dialogue; and to capture the essence of a character or situation, whether by means of an effusive, digressive, or economical style.
Here are thirty authors who seem to meet those criteria:
(I've read every crime novel by the first twenty and am well on the way to completing the body of work of the remaining ten.)
Elizabeth George, an American who writes multifaceted, psychologically intense British murder mysteries starring the chilly, analytical Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Thomas Lynley, of noble birth, and his softer, more sensitive, working-class assistant, Sergeant Barbara Havers (They are exceptional in Playing for the Ashes and Deception on His Mind);
Dick Francis (recently in partnership with his son, Felix, taking his franchise down a notch), whose forty-plus tales of British horse-racing (with double entendre titles like Reflex, For Kicks, and Longshot) repeatedly plunge attractive, innocent, interchangeable thirty-something males into desperate situations from which, drawing on latent reserves of ingenuity and courage, they fortuitously manage to extricate themselves;
Steve Martini, whose alter ego attorney, Paul Madriani, is as cool and efficient as his creator in unraveling the twisted cords of evidence binding the wrongly accused, although his latest adventure, Guardian of Lies, is a little more fanciful, propelling him from his staid Southern California courtroom south of the border into the clutches of international terrorists seeking to resurrect a decades-old nuclear weapon;
Richard North Patterson, who has ambitiously tested the limits of the genre, using it in a diverse array of intellectually stimulating -- and occasionally overtly didactic -- novels to explore serious timely issues -- like presidential politics, abortion (Protect and Defend), gun control (Balance of Power), capital punishment (Conviction), the Israeli-Palestinian controversy (Exile), and the tragedies of African kleptocracy and exploitation (Eclipse);
Daniel Silva, whose art-restorer-turned-Israeli-agent, Gabriel Allon, introduced in The Kill Artist, constantly -- and reluctantly -- lured out of retirement by his crusty master and mentor, Ari Shamron -- glides effortlessly across Europe, from palatial villas to dangerous back alleys to secluded safe houses -- saving popes, rescuing kidnapped diplomats, facilitating defections, extracting crucial information, eliminating enemies, and dodging countless assassination attempts with a calmness and determination that render him wholly credible;
Patricia Cornwell, whose best work, The Body Farm, is many years behind her, yet whom I can't give up on, in spite of plots that crawl at a snail's pace through filler pages of tortuous dialogue and gratuitous backstories and a self-obsessed cast of characters -- Scarpetta, Benton, Marino, and Lucy -- whose emotional antics have become tiresome;
John Sandford, pseudonym of the prize-winning journalist, John Camp, who has convinced me that the Minneapolis-St. Paul setting of his nineteen Prey novels (Start with the early ones: Rules of Prey and Eyes of Prey) is home to more serial killers than any other city in the world, all of whom, after 380 pages of grim reaping, diabolical scheming by deviant minds high and low, and convoluted cat and mouse games, are eventually brought to justice (but rarely to trial) by the tenacious, unflappable (and witty) Lucas Davenport and his investigative team;
Sue Grafton, whose plucky private eye, Kinsey Millhone -- besides tracking down a host of missing persons (and bodies), solving decades-old murders, rooting out extortionists, uncovering fraudulent insurance schemes, jogging regularly in order to assuage the guilt of an occasional cheeseburger, and surviving innumerable close calls -- has, over the course of her alphabet series, as in T for Trespass, matured from a rather dry transcriber of people and places into a keen observer of human nature;
Stephen Hunter, whose mystery thrillers chronicling the daring exploits of World War II marksman Earl Swagger and his Vietnam veteran master sniper son, Bob Lee ("the Nailer") -- particularly Time to Hunt, Black Light, and Pale Horse Coming -- conquering heroes who prevail over impossible odds, resonate with an exuberance that willfully leavens implausibility with satire and illustrate time and again that, "in certain circumstances, there's nothing more necessary than a good man with a gun and the guts to use it well" (unofficial Stephen Hunter website);
Michael Connelly, the best in the business, whose three early works, The Poet, Blood Work, and The Last Coyote are masterpieces of crime fiction, in the last of which series protagonist, renegade detective Harry Bosch uncovers some tragic family history and, in a recurring Connelly theme, recognizes the squalid underbelly of Los Angeles crime and politics as symbolic of a society mired in self-delusion and corruption;
Lee Child, whose ex-military policeman, Jack Reacher, 6'5" 250 lbs., stands as the quintessential Marlboro Man, restless and rootless, shirking cars, money, houses, and clothes (other than what's on his back), strong enough with his fists, dexterous enough with a blade, and accurate enough with a rifle to outfight, outwit, and outshoot the evildoers he encounters in his cross-country wanderings, saving lives and reputations -- and sacrificing many more in the process -- in these marvelous pieces of pure escapist fiction (I like Echo Burning and One Shot);
Robert Crais, whose witty, hip, greatest-detective-in-the-world (or at least Los Angeles), Elvis Cole -- with the laconic, imperturbable Joe Pike watching his back -- and demolitions expert Carol Starkey (star of two stand-alone Crais novels) a new love interest, after live-in girl friend Lucy Chenier (whom he met in Voodoo River) soured on Cole's violent lifestyle when her son was kidnapped (in The Last Detective) -- battles his own vulnerabilities and self-doubt while surviving one harrowing shootout after another;
T. Jefferson Parker, another talented Southern California crime reporter who, working the Pacific coast, has produced seventeen police procedurals featuring a changing cast of law enforcement officers who, as a rule, wind up deeply and personally embroiled in the cases they are investigating (Check out California Girl and Silent Joe);
Further north, in San Francisco, John Lescroart, whose intricately-plotted courtroom dramas (like Nothing But The Truth) invariably require the combined skills of bartender-turned-defense-attorney, Dismas Hardy, and his half-Jewish, half-black friend, Detective Lieutenant Abe Glitzky -- both of whom have family problems of their own to deal with -- to uncover hidden motives, overcome departmental and political interference, and vindicate the falsely accused;
Moving east, George Pelecanos, story editor for HBO's The Wire, who merges an intimate knowledge of the neighborhoods, stores, bars, music, and people of Washington, D.C., a sensitive and authentic voice, gritty prose, street-smart dialogue, and fast-paced narratives to paint a hard-boiled picture of urban life and explore the meaning of race, class, family, and work (Read his breakthrough generational tale, The Big Blowdown);
Deborah Crombie, a Texas native who has traveled to England and Scotland to research her locked-room mysteries featuring the dour Detective Superintendent, Duncan Kincaid, and his feisty female partner (now lover), Sergeant Gemma James, who must sift through numerous red herrings, plenty of suspects, and lots of secrets (as in Dreaming of the Bones) to catch their killers -- while keeping their own relationship in balance;
Ian Rankin, Britain's best-seller, whose moody, dogged, hard-drinking, chain-smoking John Rebus stalks the grimy underworld of Edinburgh, Scotland, often bucking his superiors, always juggling two or three cases at a time, in novels (like The Falls) that are "fast, gripping, often paralleling real events, and rich in character and social observation" (Gordon Brown, Times Online, April 17, 2008);
Peter Robinson, another Brit, whose plodding, introspective Detective Superintendent Alan Banks confronts cases of ever greater complexity (like the stunner Innocent Graves) -- plagued by an increasingly tenuous relationship with his wife -- in a picturesque rural village that belies the gore, deviance, and violence lurking beneath the surface, in finely-wrought pieces of character as well as crime;
Jo Nesbo, vocalist and songwriter, former stockbroker, reporter, and club footballer, creator of Oslo police detective Harry Hole, whose tortuous battles with his own alcoholism and insecurities mirror his relentless pursuit through Norway's frigid landscape of egregiously depraved and gratuitously violent serial killers, including The Snowman, who targets adulterous mothers, sets frozen replicas of himself outside their windows as warnings, and slays them in the most gruesome manner;
Greg Iles, architect of Southern Gothic, who recovered from a horrendous automobile accident in 2011 that resulted in a ruptured aorta and partial leg amputation to craft his magnus opus, the 2000-page Natchez Burning trilogy, in which idealistic attorney Penn Cage grapples with his physician father's apparent murder of his long-time black nurse and uncovers a bloody trail of illicit relationships, law enforcement corruption, racial killings, and age-old vendettas, all told in precise and powerful language;
Wilbur Smith, who, well into his eighties (and with the assistance of co-authors) continues to churn out action-packed episodes in his ongoing saga of the Courtneys, from their early seafaring days as privateers and treasure hunters to their entrenchment in the economic, political, and military infrastructure of their South African homeland, each one replete with exquisite renderings of the native flora and fauna, melodramatic love affairs, and constant struggles both physical and psychological over land, wealth, and power;
Henning Mankell, internationally renowned, with over forty million in sales to his credit, most of them about his "melancholy, drunken, bullish" detective, Kurt Wallander (a name he plucked from the phone book), whose personal gloom and decay (he suffers from diabetes and, in his final case, the early stages of Alzheimer's) echo his creator's disillusionment with Swedish society, where the only redemption is found in the "common decency of ordinary people" and the ultimate foiling of "reassuringly wicked" criminals (Andrew Brown, The Guardian, October 5, 2015);
C. J. Box, whose genius consists of thrusting an idealistic, impetuous, and persevering Wyoming game warden named Joe Pickett into bizarre situations in which poaching, land-grabbing, trail guiding, off-season hunting, environmental exploitation, and the stalking of endangered species invariably culminate in one or more murders and often threaten the lives of his steadfast wife, three rambunctious daughters, and avenging guardian angel, all set amidst the gorgeous but at times inhospitable Bighorn Mountains;
Laura Lippman, like her original lead, the spunky Jewish-Catholic accidental private investigator, Tess Monaghan, a former reporter who, while moving beyond the standard "who done it" formula into a series of standalone works that are more character-driven and literary, has remained faithful to her gritty Baltimore roots, often drawing from real-life tragedies, as in the generational drama After I'm Gone, in which a convicted patriarch's disappearance connects to a delayed murder and the incrimination of several family members;
Archer Mayor, who employs his experiences as volunteer medical technician, local sheriff's deputy, and assistant state death examiner to concoct intriguing cases, usually two or three simultaneously, that send his unflappable detective Joe Gunther and his prize team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation -- Willy, Sammie, and Lester -- into the lush, spare landscape of the New England countryside, the back alleys and dark corners of small towns under siege, and the hearts and minds of their quirky inhabitants, like the Tag Man, an eccentric cat burglar placed in a moral quandary when he stumbles upon a horrific scene during one of his nighttime forays;
John Connolly, Irish bartender turned American lyricist, as obsessed with the nature of evil as his protagonist, the indomitable Charlie Parker, is forever haunted by the shadows of his wife and daughter, whose killer he brought to justice in the introductory volume, Every Dead Thing, which planted the seeds of an evolving mythology that incorporates supernatural occurrences, heterodox religious sects, immortal saints and demons in human form, and secret pseudo mafias functioning as rogue police forces;
Donna Leon, whose love for her adopted Venice, ironic perspective on all matters Italian, and keen insight into the ambiguous nature of good and evil filter into every scene of Commissario Guido Brunetti's serial quest to do right amidst a society rife with corruption and hypocrisy, as exemplified in the stellar Drawing Conclusions, in which an investigation into the death of an elderly widow by apparent heart attack -- highlighted as always by verbal sparring with his professorial wife Paola while he enjoys her sumptuous cooking -- ultimately illuminates his "simple humanity, subtlety of mind, and refusal to succumb to the tyranny of bureaucrats and moralists" (Bill Ott, Booklist);
Philip Kerr, who thirty years ago sculpted a German model of Raymond Chandler's wise-cracking private eye, named him Bernie Gunther, and with the release of his Berlin Noir trilogy immersed him in the brutality of the Nazi regime and later in the bleakness of a postwar dystopia, ultimately expanding the series to fourteen, but only after an interlude during which he explored such diverse subjects as a modernistic skyscraper haunted by its own robots, a decimated society of the future dependent on stored blood transfusions for its survival, and the anti-Communist hysteria of the mid-sixties in which an assassin for hire and a disillusioned CIA agent stalk the newly-elected president, John F. Kennedy, in preparation for The Shot;
Harlan Coben, who after a couple of false starts gained traction with the invention of former basketball star turned sports agent turned sympathetic helpmate, Myron Bolitar, whose search for truth and justice -- aided by his wise-cracking, debonair, fabulously wealthy, partially psychotic, and ruthlessly protective sidekick, Windsor Horne Lockwood III -- inevitably leads to dangerous confrontations with mobsters, con men, thieves, murderers, and kidnappers, themes echoed in the author's subsequent independent works, in which typical New Jersey suburban families find themselves victimized by dark secrets from the past, mysterious disappearances, and vengeful neighbors, as in the convoluted but perfectly resolved Stay Close;
And finally, the godfather of them all, John D. MacDonald, prolific producer of more than 400 short stories and 65 novels between 1946 and 1986, most of the latter as original paperbacks, all of them animated by energetic, biting prose, plots that seduce and satisfy, characters that talk and think like real people, a "breathtaking knowledge of the contemporary world," and harsh commentary on the harm greedy developers and businessmen continually inflict upon his beloved Florida, best known for the brutally cynical, incurably romantic salvage specialist he dredged up at the behest of his publisher in 1962, Travis McGee, who lives in a fifty-two-foot houseboat, the Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game, and who earns his retirement money by exposing dirty deeds, recovering stolen property, and rescuing endangered damsels and dandies, each adventure colorfully recorded in aptly titled pieces like The Deep Blue Good-by and The Dreadful Lemon Sky (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post, November 11, 2003).
While I make no claim that any of these writers will stand the test of time -- or even be remembered beyond the current generation -- in defense of my addiction, I summon no less an authority than George Orwell, who writes: "It is not only the great works that hold a place in readers' hearts; readable but less-accomplished works often have a longevity that their counterparts do not."
In an essay of the same name, Orwell defines "Good Bad Books" as "the kind . . . that have no literary pretensions but which remain readable when more serious productions have perished." He identifies two classic examples of the genre: Sherlock Holmes and Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, he observes, is full of "preposterous and melodramatic events" but is also "deeply moving and essentially true."
According to Orwell, escapist literature -- like contemporary crime fiction -- "forms pleasant patches in one's memory, quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd moments, but hardly pretends to have anything to do with real life." He notes that not all art need be intellectual in nature. "The existence of good bad literature -- the fact that one can be aroused or excited or even moved by a book which his intellect simply refuses to take seriously -- is a reminder that art is not the same thing as celebration."
And so, tonight, I celebrate, as I take up my newest thriller: The Turnaround, by George Pelecanos.
