Fiction

Fiction

This time it was the seventh page.  It seldom takes more than ten with Michael Connelly, especially if it's Harry Bosch.  Robert Parker is even sooner, though I haven't picked a new one up in a year or so, and I'd say it worked best with Spenser.  I think Raymond Chandler could do it in a paragraph or two.  Philip Marlowe had a way of talking....  I caught a sense of that when Parker completed a story that Chandler had started, but never finished, Poodle Springs.  There are others, like John Lescroart with his Abe Glitzky/Dismas Hardy books.  It takes more than the cover with its flyleaf.  That might be enough to draw me in, but not hook me completely.

I cannot put my finger on it exactly.  Why does it happen in some books and not others?  Is it the genre?  Maybe.  I read crime drama most of the time, but I have known this feeling more than once in novels about other things.  The French Lieutenant's Woman did it, but I think it was John Fowles' prose--it just does something in a few words.

Lee Child's Jack Reacher stories do this to me quickly.  The story begins with something or someone on the move, and soon you're riding along.  Sue Grafton doesn't always do it as quickly for me, but I'm only there because Kinsey Millhone is back, and I have to keep following the alphabet.  There's only X, Y and Z remaining, but I hold out hope that Sue Grafton read Dr. Seuss's On Beyond Zebra and can use it to continue after "Z."  Laurie R. King can do it also, something about Kate Martinelli draws me.  While I always enjoy David Baldacci's work, it takes a while before I'm hooked.  Not so with Harlen Coben, he can do it in a page or two.  I'll have to spend some time just looking to see what all these have in common.  My hunch is the character is on the road somewhere or otherwise on the move, but that's not true of Robert Parker's Spenser books.  He has us sit in Spenser's office when he meets his client, then we are in.

I don't think it's suspense as to the ending either.  Today's book is early in the Harry Bosch series, and I already know whodunit because of references made in later books that take up where this one left off.

I'd like to stay and chat some more, but Michael Connelly has me in his grasp, so I'll catch up with you later.