Fri 18 Mar 2016
Reviewed by Walter Albert: DONALD ZOCHERT – Another Weeping Woman.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
DONALD ZOCHERT – Another Weeping Woman. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. No paperback edition.
A young woman camper is apparently mauled and killed by a bear. The autopsy establishes that she also had a bullet in her head and that she was dead before either the bullet or the bear got her. A good start, and then it’s downhill all the way.
The main problem with this book is the style: “The thing I’ll remember most is the car horn. The sound of that car horn just after dawn — filling the little valley with its wounded cry, echoing off those cliffs and rising up the cirque in that cold September air to the face of the Grasshopper itself.” This is the opening paragraph, and the portentous, tense tone is maintained for 262 pages. “The house had been taken over by darkness. The wind cried in through the shattered windows, the wind and the darkness and the night rasping past the teeth of glass that grinned in the wooden frames.”
This is a desperate, adjective-laden, overwritten novel, and if the angst-ridden symphonies of Mahler or a hysterical guitar savagely resounding in a shadowy, empty hall crouching in a hungry night are your sound, you’ll have a grand time. I’ll have a soda with a twist of lime, thank you, Archie.
Post-scriptum. In this year of our Lord, 1982, it is still possible to find a novel that features a “Mr. Big.”
Bibliographic Notes: The detective in this case, which is set in Montana, was a Denver-based PI named Nick Caine. There was a second adventure, The Man of Glass (Holt, 1982), and that was the end of his recorded career. Zochert wrote one other mystery, Murder in the Hellfire Club (Holt, 1978), set in mid-18th century London.
March 18th, 2016 at 9:54 pm
“…if the angst-ridden symphonies of Mahler or a hysterical guitar savagely resounding in a shadowy, empty hall crouching in a hungry night are your sound, you’ll have a grand time.”
I suspect that is me, actually. I’ll have to track this book down!
Many’s the time that a negative review gives me enough information to know that I’ll like the material even if the reviewer didn’t.
March 18th, 2016 at 10:08 pm
I know what you’re saying, Patrick. That’s what a good review can do.
FWIW, though, I didn’t care for this one either.
But it won’t be tough to track this one down. Reading copies are available on Amazon for less than a dollar. Maybe you can let us know how it works out for you!
March 19th, 2016 at 7:59 am
Very perceptive Review –as usual for you.
March 19th, 2016 at 8:02 pm
Pretty much my experience of the two Caine novels, pretentiously if prettily overwritten sounding far too writerly and not half enough detectively.
HELLFIRE was okay, even fun, the 18th Century being more open to overwriting than the 20th.
Zochert wrote very prettily, and I like pretty writing, but he spent so much time at it everything else seemed to get lost in the prose. One of the tricks of the trade is for the reader not to catch the writer writing too often. Too often this sounded as if it were spoofing the genre.