fajrdrako | Home Body... (Reply)

This is not a recommendation.

See, I was browsing the library bookshelves yesterday, looking for something new. I found a novel by Gerry Boyle called Home Body, which looked interesting enough: a murder mystery with a first-person narrative protagonist, a reporter named Jack McMorrow, set in Maine. It seemed worth a try, but what really made me pick it up were the review quotes recommending it on the flyleaf and back cover, one comparing Jack McMorrow to Spenser, and then a recommendation by Robert B. Parker himself.

I'm such a sucker.

I see superficial resemblances between Spenser and McMorrow - who isn't axtually a reporter, but a copy editor. His girlfried is stylish, genteel, and works in social services. He is interested in helping the wayward young. He is at times foolishly bullheaded; but while Spenser is smart when he is foolishly bullheaded, McMorrow was pretty much an idiot. There's a scene where he has stolen a key from a corpse (without reporting the murder), and used it to get into her box at the post office. He reads her mail in his car, and needs to get it back into her mailbox within seven minutes, when the guard will come back. Suspenseful, right? Then McMorrow loses the key in the street somehow and can't find it again, and I think I was supposed to be caught up in the action but all I could think was, "What a loser!" As often as not, McMorrow was making his own troubles.

What I like about the Spenser novels is the style of his snappy wit, the fast-paced writing that is deliberately underwritten and terse but still expressive and Chandleresque. Even when Parker sounds as if he's parodying himself, his writing has a certain spark to it. The style here was simply ordinary... Soggy. The plot never rose above itself; most of it was predictable, and the one good twist on the last few pages was too little, too late.

There was one character I liked, McMorrow's neighbour, an elderly guy named Clair who was ex-green-beret. Call him the equivalent of Hawk. When McMorrow needed heavy artillery, Clair came and helped out - I loved the scenes with tough-guy silver-haired Clair. He gets a total of a few paragraphs in a book of 393 paragraphs. I found myself wishing the story was about Clair, not McMorrow.

So why did Kirkus Review say "the dialogue hums and crackles"? Why did Publisher's Weekly say it was "snappy prose" when I found it totally mundane? Just to sell books? Note to self: never trust the cover copy.