Mon 5 Oct 2015
A Review by Barry Gardner: JACK O’CONNELL – Box Nine.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Reviews[5] Comments
JACK O’CONNELL – Box Nine. Lenore Thomas #1. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1992; paperback, 1993.
I started this with more anticipation than usual, and less certainty. It’s had a great deal of publicity, much more than a first novel usually gets, and though the reviews have been mostly favorable, still I really didn’t have a good sense of what to expect, other than something extremely hardboiled. And that, at least, I got.
Lenore Thomas is a policewoman, an undercover narcotics agent. Her twin brother, Ike, is a postman. They live together in a duplex in a mythical city [Quinsigamond] somewhere (I assume) in Massachusetts. The book turns around the introduction of a new designer-drug with strange and ultimately lethal properties.
Reviewers and would-be critics are lost without comparisons, and are prone to grab at unlikely ones when obvious and apt ones are not readily at hand. I’m going to avoid that trap, but possibly at the cost of leaving you as unsure of what Box Nine is all about as I was. There are, though, a few things I can tell you.
The book presents a bleak, grim view of urban life, and of those urban denizens that it depicts. The story is told in the present tense and from shifting view-points; Lenore’s, Ike’s, a drug lord’s, another police woman’s, Ike’s supervisor at the Post Office, and they are all strange people. Lenore is arguably the strangest: a speed freak, heavy metal devotee, in love with her guns if she is in love with anything and overall one of the more different protagonists in recent memory. The prose serves the story well. The plot? Secondary, at best; what you have are people dancing in and out of a semi-apocalyptic vision.
Do I recommend it? Lord, no. If you don’t like hardboiled fiction, you shouldn’t touch it with a pair of tongs. Even if you do, I have no idea whether you’d be glad you read it or not — and notice my avoidance of the terms “like” and “enjoy,” which seem inappropriate. Am I glad I did? No, I don’t believe I am. But it was different; I’ll give it that much.
The Quinsigamond series —
1. Box Nine (1992)
2. Wireless (1993)
3. The Skin Palace (1996)
4. Word Made Flesh (1998)
October 5th, 2015 at 2:42 pm
Barry called this “Lenore Thomas #1,” but the series that followed is referred to by the name of the town where the novels take place, described elsewhere as a “decaying New England factory town.” Whether Lenore Thomas appears in any of the later ones, I do not know, but if so, I’m sure it was only in a minor role.
I remember looking at this book in Borders when it came out in paperback, and putting it back. Not for me, I thought, and from Barry’s review, I think I saved myself five bucks.
October 5th, 2015 at 4:14 pm
I recall thinking O’Connell might go far, if he got control of an obvious talent but he opted to stay with the gonzo route and just went nowhere with it which is too often what happens with writers like this.
The talent? and arguably genius, were not accompanied by an equal discipline and the result never showed the control of the material I want evidenced in this type of book, pass.
October 5th, 2015 at 6:08 pm
Thanks for the alert that it’s written in present tense (which means it’s not for me). I wish all reviewers would mention present tense when it occurs.
October 5th, 2015 at 7:27 pm
Stories written in the present tense sometimes work for me, more often not. Unless done right and for the right reason, I almost always find it annoying.
October 9th, 2015 at 3:07 pm
Learned something here: never paid much attention to tense before. At least present has never bothered me, that I recall. Then again altho I’m sure I have, I don’t remember the last time I read any present tense fiction. Now I’ll be conscious of it.