Crime Season: Portrait Of A Serial Reader
I hate it when summer ends and I can no longer, in clear conscience, read garbage novels.
For three months now, every book I have read has contained the words “laughing eyes” or “exit wound,” often in the same sentence.
Now I’ll be forced to switch to philosophy, biography, history and literature - books that expand my mind - until next June. I believe in keeping my mind supple and active, except during the summer, when I believe that my mind should be allowed to atrophy and degenerate. Actually, I would read good books during the summer, too, except I simply can’t take the risk of sand or flies or Snapple stains mussing my copy of Tom Clancy’s complete works.
I have a simple test for determining whether a book is a garbage novel or not. It’s a garbage novel if its title contains any legal terms whatsoever.
I’ve read about 40 of these this summer, things like: “Innocent as Charged,” “Evidently Witnessed,” “Guilty As All Get Out,” “Prejudicial Parts,” “Moving to Strike,” “Legal Briefs,” “Overly Ruled,” “Presumed Indicted,” “Habeas My Corpus,” “Well Acquitted,” “Belly Up to the State Bar, Boys,” “Raw Immaterial,” “Peremptorily Challenged,” “Here Comes the Judge,” “Gross! Negligence!” “Under Black Robes,” “Indictment to Riot,” “Approach My Bench,” “So, Help Me, God,” “Perjure, She Wrote,” “Beyond the Bail,” “Crossly Examined,” “Move for Continuance,” “Beneath Contempt,” “Look Ma, No Foundation!” “Your Own Recognizance,” “No Further Questions,” “Natural Jury Selection,” “Pled Dead,” “Strawberry Torts,” “Hearsay Can You See,” “Carry On, Bailiff,” “Ms. Demeanor,” “Pleas, Mr. Postman,” “Thyme and Punishment,” “Whoa, Big Felony!” “Second Degree Dead,” “Standardized Testimony,” “Howdy, Counselor!” and “Bang the Gavel Slowly.” Next summer, I fully expect to read the heart-pounding “Recess For Lunch” and “Yellow Legal Pad.”
These novels tend to be oldfashioned mystery-thrillers, heavy on what you might call “plot re-cap,” in which the author gently reminds you what you read yesterday while lying on the beach. Every 20 or 30 pages, you get a passage like this:
“So that left Scanlan and Delgado as the only two men with both motive and means. However, Ryan recalled with a frown, each man had an alibi. Scanlan’s sister was willing to testify that Scanlan had spent the day in question installing her state-of-the-art indoor putt-putt course, the kind with holes shaped like celebrities. And Delgado, of course, had produced two strangers who will swear that, on the day in question, they saw him carrying a basket of underpants into the laundromat.
” ‘It’s a puzzle,’ said Ryan to himself. ‘Unless … unless those weren’t Delgado’s underpants at all.”’
Character description is the other thing that sets garbage novels apart. Besides having “laughing eyes,” the characters often have cruel, hard mouths, often on the same face.
The eyes in these novels are remarkable. They’ll tell you everything you want to know about a person. If they are “cold gray slits,” then the person is evil, and probably either a serial murderer or a prosecutor. If they are “warm, limpid pools of aqua-blue,” then the person is either the grieving but beautiful widow, or the brilliant but beautiful attorney who has been assigned to assist with the case.
In either case, the protagonist will have some sort of love affair involving these limpid pools, and the two participants will invariably show their affection by addressing each other by their complete names.
“I’m afraid I’m falling in love with you, Richard Winkie,” or, if she is really far gone, “Richard Winkie, attorney at law.”
But September is here, and I am putting aside all of my John Grishams and Steve Martinis and Patricia Cornwells and I am getting started on Ursula Hegi’s “Stones in the River,” a work of true literature which I have been putting off all summer.
I know it’s a work of true literature because it’s about a dwarf in Nazi Germany. The dwarf is not, to my knowledge, an attorney.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review