Neglected Favorites

 

I was going into the hospital in November, and I thought I’d better pack a good, big book – think Shogun or Lord of the Rings – and Jack Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy popped into my field of view.  As it turned out, I didn’t read it in the hospital, after all, but it was nice to make his acquaintance again just the same, and I’m now about to sink my teeth into an earlier series, The Dying Earth.

Jack Vance is one of those guys I read quite a lot of, in the late 1970’s, and then stopped reading, I don’t remember why.  This probably isn’t unusual, our enthusiasms aren’t consistent.  I went through almost all of Steinbeck, for instance, in my late teens (the only one I left out was A Cup of Gold), but I haven’t picked up any of the books since.  I can go back and read Irwin Shaw’s short stories, or O’Hara’s, and enjoy them – as well as learn something from them – so it isn’t the period or the fashion, just a lack of curiosity.  I admire Steinbeck’s muscularity, and I think he’s an influence on me, so I can’t explain it, not at least to my own satisfaction.  Jack Vance, though, falls into a different category.  It’s not that he isn’t a stylist, he’s a very graceful writer, if not quite as limpid as Ursula Le Guin, say, or Sylvia Townsend Warner, but no mean shakes.  The thing about Vance is that he’s an extraordinarily convincing world-builder; geography, and cosmology, yes, and politics, but language, and food, and music - ritual, in other words.  This is nothing to be sneezed at.  He’s right up there with Philip José Farmer and Philip K. Dick.  My favorite book of Vance’s has always been The Last Castle, an odd, dystopian novella I gave or lent to many other people, some of whom got it, and some of whom didn’t.

(Speaking of Sylvia Townsend Warner, I think Kingdoms of Elfin is one of the most startling and original books I’ve ever read, but I’ve never been able to get more than half a dozen pages into anything else of hers.  It’s a mystery.)

 

Rediscovering, or revisiting, Jack Vance got me thinking about this question of enthusiasms, and maybe it’s exactly that, that we can blow so hot for a writer, that we can’t help but blow cold, at some point.  J.D. Salinger comes to mind.  There’s that famous quote from Isaac Asimov, which I’ve used before.  He was asked, When was the Golden Age of science fiction?  And he said, Fourteen.

It’s true that we can go back to somebody we adored, in our early reading, and be disappointed; it’s also true that we can go back, and be astonished, not only that they can still cast the spell, but that we see things now that we of course missed, then.  Robert Louis Stevenson is one of these.  The opening chapter of Treasure Island is a masterful piece of compression and suspense; but Treasure Island actually begins before the opening lines, it begins with the frontispiece map.  Another example is Dorothy Sayers.  Most of us would have come to her later on, she’s not for kids, but at the same time, most of us would have raced through the books.  If you go back and read The Nine Tailors, or Murder Must Advertise, which has the reputation of a slighter book, but giving them breathing room, taking your time, they present as novels of manners, as much a highly-colored portrait of the years between the wars as Trollope is of the mid-Victorians.  And Sayers casts an unsettling eye forward; her world may seem serene and comfortably hierarchal, but Wimsey is in some ways strikingly modern.  He clearly suffers from shell-shock, PTSD, and Bunter, who was with him in the trenches, is more than a gentleman’s gentleman, he’s a refuge.

I think we sometimes outgrow writers we once liked.  I don’t think it’s disrespectful.  We still harbor a residual affection for them, which is in some ways a melancholy reflection on who we used to be.  I don’t think any the less of Robert Heinlein, for example, I just don’t think he’s readable, any more – at least for me.  (I could give The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress another shot, I guess, but I’m not that tempted to test my own bandwidth.)

It’s refreshing, on the other hand, to find out you can be hooked again by a writer, just as thoroughly as you were the first time.  Here’s an embarrassing story.  I read Jefferson Parker’s Laguna Heat when it first came out, and then the next book, Little Saigon, and I liked both of them a lot.  And then I had the misfortune of watching the TV movie of Laguna Heat.  I’m sorry, but Harry Hamlin, for all that he seems to be a nice guy, is not a very expressive actor, and even with Jason Robards and Rip Torn and Jimmy Gammon – no.  Least said, soonest mended.  But here’s where I mortify myself.  I stopped reading Jeff Parker.  We all know the writer has zero control of what happens when they sell a book to the movies.  Sure, you got Dutch Leonard, or Dennis Lehane, but the rest of us are up shit creek.  You can open the oven door, and the soufflé will fall, but Jeff wasn’t even in the kitchen when it happened.  It took me fifteen years, before I picked up Silent Joe, and realized what I’d been missing.  I can say now, with all humility, I never would have forgiven myself, if I’d missed A Thousand Steps, or worse, The Rescue.  And what about the Charlie Hood books?  There’s always the satisfaction of knowing you can give yourself a second chance. 

Take this as a cautionary tale.  Fashions change.  Our own tastes.  The way a writer looks at the world, or the way we do.  But don’t pass up a good book.  They sneak up on you. 

A Thousand Steps

  

T. Jefferson Parker’s Laguna Heat came out in 1985, and I gobbled it up.  Two years later, he released Little Saigon, which I thought was even better.  I skipped the next six books, for a reason so trivial as to invite scorn, and with apologies, here it is.

Laguna Heat was adapted into a made-for-TV movie.  It’s got a good script, it’s well-directed, it has two-thirds of a solid lead cast.  Unhappily, the other third is Harry Hamlin, who conveys the hero’s moral conflict with furrowed brow and a general air of unplumbed gastric distress.

Now, of course, we both know that the last person to be held responsible for this is the writer.  I don’t have to quote Bill Goldman.  Jeff Parker is innocent of the wrongs done his novel, but he was somehow guilty by association.  I think this was partly unconscious – if I’d thought about it at all, I would have seen how ridiculous it was, but the effect lingered. 

So, cut to Silent Joe.  Fifteen years later, if you can believe it.  I pick it up in a bookstore and flip it open, thinking, I remember reading this guy.  The book sucks me in, no hesitation, and I’m like, where have I been?  And then, to my chagrin, I remember the back story.  This leads me to catch up with many of the books I’ve missed.

Then, in 2009, the Edgar nominations for best short story include me, Jeff Parker, Laura Lippman, Sean Chercover, and Dominique Mainard - and Linda Landrigan, my editor at Hitchcock, invites me to their table at the awards dinner.  Had a great time.  Didn’t win the Edgar.  Parker did.  “The fix was in,” Laura Lippman mutters to me.  But here’s the thing, which she and I would both readily admit.  It’s disappointing not to win, for sure, but it’s better to lose to somebody you like and admire, not just some chump.

Kept right on reading the guy.  All six Charlie Hood novels, which stack up with Don Winslow’s border trilogy. 

I have to say I’ve written about this neck of the woods as well, and about what Parker has called the Iron River, money and guns going south, drugs and human traffic coming north.  We three would probably agree that the War on Drugs is a failure, but nothing we’ve written is prescriptive.

Which brings us to A Thousand Steps. 

Jeff Parker is a California boy, and his books have a local specificity, particular to a place and time.  A Thousand Steps takes us back to Laguna, but the Laguna of 1968, the summer of a thousand Zig-Zags.  The book is, yes, a mystery thriller, but I’m inclined to think of it as a quest story first and foremost.  The departure here is that the hero is sixteen, and Parker inhabits the kid’s voice with absolute authority.  It doesn’t feel made-up or inauthentic in any way.  Parker was that age, in Laguna at the time, and he’s said in interviews that he didn’t have to conjure up much – that it was a matter of reimagination.  I believe it.

The thousand steps of the title are metaphorical, but they refer to a beach just off the Pacific Coast Highway, on the south end of Laguna.  I have another tangential connection here, which is that my pal David Price, himself a native Southern California boy, is the architect who designed the public restrooms for Laguna’s beaches.  (Both the restrooms and the flights of steps are being rehabilitated.)

A Thousand Steps, the book, is immersive.  It’s both a journey inward, and an embrace of the larger world, at high velocity.  I didn’t hesitate.  Neither should you.