Mon 28 Jan 2019
A Mystery Review by Barry Gardner: RICK BOYER – Pirate Trade.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[7] Comments
RICK BOYER – Pirate Trade. Doc Adams #8. Ivy, paperback original, 1995.
I’ve been wondering what happened to Boyer; this is the first from him since 1991’s Yellow Bird, and he’s obviously lost his hardback contract. Yet another HWMA (Hardboiled White Male Author) takes a shoot to the crotch. Oh well, he’s still being published, which is more than Benjamin Schutz can say.
Doc buys his wife Mary a purse decorated with real ivory from a sore on Nantucket, but he soon wishes he hadn’t. The ivory turns out to be illegal — illegal ivory is Big Criminal Business — and Mary is enlisted by the Feds to help with a sting operation. Doc doesn’t like this even a little bit, but Mary wants to do Something On Her Own.
Due as much to his interference as anything else, both of them end up facing some real real danger, and Doc’s mercenary friend, Rozantis, is pressed into service.
These are basically crime/adventure books, and my taste for such seems to be waning lately. On top of that, I think this is the least of the eight Adams’s, with a plot that seemed disjointed and narration more than a bit episodic. The characterization of Adams and his supporting cast has been fairly strong over the length of the series, but there was nothing here to add to it.
All in all, it was a reasonably quick and pleasant read — but nothing that would send you running to Half-Price to find the earlier books. Boyer and Adams may have hit the wall with this.
The Doc Adams series —
Billingsgate Shoal (1982)
The Penny Ferry (1984)
The Daisy Ducks (1986)
Moscow Metal (1987)
The Whale’s Footprints (1988)
Gone to Earth (1990)
Yellow Bird (1991)
Pirate Trade (1994)
The Man Who Whispered (1998)
January 28th, 2019 at 1:21 am
I suspect that wall mentioned had more to do with Boyer and the series ending up in paperback than race or sex or even genre. Publishers don’t generally discontinue popular series that are making money, and justifying their continued existence.
Personally I tired of Boyer and the rather soft-boiled Adams after the second book.
January 28th, 2019 at 7:03 am
Never read one, but I did read and very much enjoy his Sherlockian pastiche, THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA (1976).
January 28th, 2019 at 11:12 am
Doc Adams was either a dentist or an oral surgeon, and he lived, as I recall, somewhere in the greater Boston area. Barry nailed it when he called the books crime adventure stories, which was a good part of the reason why I read only the one I did. I was expecting more detective work than there was, and unfortunately I never went back.
January 28th, 2019 at 11:37 am
This interview with Rick Boyer tells how he dislikes detective stories, and prefers thrillers instead:
http://www.wcuenglish.net/inkblot/mystery.html
I’ve never read any of his work. I mainly stick to real mysteries.
January 28th, 2019 at 12:03 pm
Thanks for the link, Mike. I found the interview to be very interesting. Here’s a portion of Boyer’s answre to the very first question:
“I don’t like the mystery genre. I’ve never been a fan of mysteries, particularly whodunits. If someone is murdered and there are eight suspects, that tells me the guy wasn’t very well liked anyway, so why should the reader care what happened to him?
“I prefer the thriller genre because it brings the danger into the present. A suspense novel can be a really great novel; a mystery, even if done well, is usually only okay.”
January 28th, 2019 at 5:31 pm
To me, the problem with amateur sleuths is how “realistic” is it for an oral surgeon or hair dresser, etc to keep getting involved in murder.
If I went to an oral surgeon that has been involved in nine different murder cases, I am probably moving to the next one on the list.
January 28th, 2019 at 8:38 pm
I’m a thriller fan, but there is no conflict with the mystery element if the writer is good enough (Philip MacDonald comes to mind). Boyer wrote rather laid back adventures that weren’t particularly thrilling and frankly not too compelling. His good humor was enough to get through the first two, but ultimately Adams was a very uncompelling antagonist.
There is a reason the term Mystery Thriller exists without a comma between them.
And I would point out there is more than a small mystery element in many of the classic thrillers by writers like John Buchan and Hammond Innes, mysteries, codes, and even treasure maps to be revealed.
I’m not sure I ever saw the point of your adventure thriller character being a Boston area oral surgeon even in a comic series, but it worked well enough for some readers for a few titles. ‘
One problem I had was the series wasn’t packaged as adventure thrillers, but as hard-boiled mysteries, which they weren’t and Adams wasn’t, even for a thriller series he was pretty soft-boiled.