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[chrisno1]

Following on from terminus' 2 additions,,,,,

Hell’s Kitchen isn’t a new novel, being first published in 2001, and it doesn’t feature his most famous character Lincoln Rhyme, the paraplegic detective, but it does have a stark, rather barren prose that, while not displaying much depth, does keep the reader fairly interested.

The story involves a documentary film maker, John Pellam, who, while on assignment in New York, escapes from a burning tenement block and subsequently learns the subject of his film, an elderly lady called Ettie, is being framed for the arson. Pellam has other theories and his suspicious eye falls on big business and a series of local crime syndicates. The story meanders all over the place and isn’t particularly interesting. There are several red herrings to resolve before we reach the eventual conclusion.

While Pellam isn’t a detective, the story unfolds exactly how a traditional detective thriller would. Each character or suspect is introduced and given a perfunctory description, which often, but not always, matches the surroundings they live in. So Ettie is worn out, aging, but full of living history like her hundred year old apartment; Ramirez is shifty, dishonest, cagy like his dark cellar clubhouse; the wretched, realist lawyer Bailey lives in a dilapidated apartment and drinks not to forget, but to survive; and so on. Similarly Pellam’s investigations reveal everyone has some motivation for torching the building. As usual in these stories, the twist is that the one person you wouldn’t suspect is the perpetrator.

Deaver’s a clever enough writer to allow his lead character’s to grow through the pages, dropping elements of their personas and past experience gradually into the narrative. He’s also very good at enriching his protagonists through dialogue, which is notoriously difficult. Again however, as the novel progresses, this tactic wears a little thin. He’s still revealing the background of John Pellam on the final pages and by then it’s less of a twist and more of a tired, knowing acknowledgement, as if Deaver is trying to show us how clever he really is. The novel would stand up better if he cut most of this drip feed technique out and concentrated on the time and place of events.

Deaver’s not bad with some of the rough stuff. A couple of fights and gun battles enliven the piece and the writing’s okay here, yet I don’t think violence is Deaver’s forte. The arc of the tale means he has to describe over half a dozen fires and this become dull and repetitive. There is a gun fight, which is well dictated, and Pellam is given a couple of thuggish beatings. I notice Deaver’s characters recover from adversity remarkably quickly. Both Ramirez and Pellam seem to suffer few ill effects from their fights. Admittedly one of these is meant to be faked, but Pellam is should still receive some damage. After this punching, Pellam spits out a tooth in cartoon style and in the next chapter no one even remarks on his toothless smile and his (supposedly) bruised face.

The main baddie of the piece is an almost wordless arsonist, Sonny, a strange hybrid villain, a sort of asexual, quasi religious pyromaniac, solely given over to burning things. He’s definitely weird, but Deaver struggles to make him involving, chiefly because he has very little to say. He thinks a lot, but everything he thinks about revolves around fire. It’s a very one dimensional portrait and I struggled to understand what his motive really was for all the carnage he was committing.

This is one of the chief failures of the novel for me. While the characters and some of the situations are etched well, there is too much going on, too many leads to follow, too many possible solutions, too many bad guys. I lost track of who was who and who owned what and where. In that respect I was most reminded of John Gardner’s novels [in 007 terms] where, if all else failed, he seemed to simply introduce a new character to solve one problem only to create another. Loose ends materialise and are tied up ineffectually. Hence I still don’t understand why Sonny has to incinerate so many buildings to achieve his aims. That he’s only doing it for money and fun seems hopelessly naive on Deaver’s part. So he writes a few passages about devils, gigolos and judgement day and hopes this round’s out the psyche of his arsonist. It doesn’t.

One of the most striking things about the novel was how bare it was in terms of description. Deaver doesn’t mince his words. If one sentence will do to describe a building, that’s all we get. There is precious little detail here. The effect is to give an overall impression of Hell’s Kitchen (a New York City neighbourhood), rather than describe it. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but it isn’t a style I wholeheartedly adhere to. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to read about the sights and sounds and scents of a place. Fleming’s journalistic instincts did this marvellously and while Deaver does show glimpses of artistic representation, he really doesn’t do enough of that: rather he gives us the feel of Hell’s Kitchen, a painting without the colours.

So do I think Deaver is a good choice for a Bond novelist? Well, from this reading I certainly don’t think he’ll do a worse job that Sebastian Faulks. I do hope he thinks a little about the tautness of his plots and the motives of his characters. Background isn’t so important in a Bond novel, you establish the good guys and the bad guys early and you resolve the story. Gardner’s problem, and Benson’s to a lesser extent, was that by trying to create an air of mystery around the story, they developed an unnecessary conundrum which fails to ignite the reader’s interest. Judging from Hell’s Kitchen, this could be Deaver’s Achilles heel also. I do hope not as some of what I read was very good. I’m happy to give him a go, but to be honest, at the moment, for me, the jury is still out.