Fri 18 Oct 2013
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: JONATHAN VALIN – Natural Causes.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[10] Comments
by Robert J. Randisi
JONATHAN VALIN – Natural Causes. Congdon & Weed, hardcover, 1983. Avon, paperback, 1984. Dell, paperback, 1994.
Since the appearance of his Harry Stoner novel, The Lime Pit (1980), Jonathan Valin has been hailed as among the best of the present-day private-eye writers. Of the first Stoner adventure, Publishers Weekly said, “Wow! One of the roughest, toughest and most completely convincing private eye novels in a long time.”
Other critics have praised Valin as the second coming of Chandler. That may not be fair, since Valin is a good writer and storyteller in his own right, and Stoner, a PI who works out of Cincinnati is a fully individuated character.
In this, the fifth Stoner novel, the PI is hired by American Productions to go to California and find out who killed the head writer of their biggest soap opera, on Quentin Dover. In describing Stoner’s investigation. Valin also vividly depicts the world of a big-time soap opera — of which he knows much. He spent a year as a story consultant on a popular daytime soap.
Stoner runs the gamut of Hollywood personae: directors, actors, agents, not to mention the victim’s beautiful alcoholic wife. Add drugs and murder and a jaunt south of the border, and you’ve got the story of how and why a man with a half-a-million-dollar-a-year job would get himself involved with something that could — and did — get him killed.
Valin may indeed be one of the best of the present PI writers, but to compare him to Chandler is to do a disservice — one that critics all too frequently perform.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Editorial Comment: My review of The Lime Pit, Valin’s first Stoner novel, can be found here. I also reviewed Final Notice, the second book in the series here, a post that also includes some comments about the author and a complete bibliography.
October 19th, 2013 at 12:17 am
Thanks, Steve. This is the kind of 80s mystery I suspect all this blog readers enjoy being reminded about.
October 19th, 2013 at 2:26 am
I really enjoyed Valin and Stoner, then one day, like Parker and Spenser, I just couldn’t go another. I’m fairly sure it was me, but I know I’m not alone in this.
October 19th, 2013 at 5:10 am
I know what David is talking about. I’m not sure that it applies to Valin and Stoner but in my case after about a half dozen novels by Parker starring Spenser, I just couldn’t take Susan and Hawk anymore. They annoyed me so much and ruined the novels so that I had to stop reading Parker.
I’ve run into this also with some TV series. I start out loving the show and by the end after a few years, I hate the show and can’t stand the characters.
Examples for me were Thirty Something and True Blood. I now hate all vampire films, novels, and TV shows. With Thirty Something I started off liking the characters and by the end, after 4 seasons, I wanted to tar and feather them and ride them out of town on a rail.
Just two examples and like David says, it must of just been me.
October 19th, 2013 at 10:44 am
#1. I should have used the word “hope” instead of “suspect.”
I want to see the book reviews move into the modern era. I enjoy reading about old traditional books (even if the books don’t appeal to me), and I enjoy reading about the fifties hardboiled books (even if I find them dated and unappealing), but I would like to see the blog open up to exploring the lesser known beyond 1960s.
I don’t want every post to be about something I like, I want to expand my knowledge and experience all mystery fiction.
#2 and 3. Your complaints about Robert Parker’s Spenser are similar to my feelings about Tarzan, Ellery Queen and nearly every Gold Key type of 50s mystery. Forgive me Max Collins, I hate Mike Hammer. And of course that is just me. Comments are opinions not the written in stone universal truth. That is what makes the comment section fun and interesting.
My problem with most series fiction is it can fall into a formula. Parker wrote so fast the books began to blend into one. I liked Hawk and Susan, but Spenser became predictable. Parker’s books stopped being different but trapped in a formula that allowed him to write faster and sell more.
The romantic comedy mystery can be very entertaining but it quickly wears out its welcome with its formula predictability.
I want this blog to expand its look into the mystery genre. In my TV reviews here I try to cover every decade and wish I had the time and energy to do the same with books.
I have written here about some writers such as Vince Kohler and Gregory Mcdonald but there are so many more. Not only dead and forgotten authors but living and out of print such as Tim Maleeny’s Cape Weathers and Liz Williams’ Detective Inspector Chen.
I like this blog and want it to continue to cover traditional and fifties mysteries. Without this place I would never had discovered writers such as Norbert Davis and Henry Kane. But I am curious about what happened after 1960.
October 19th, 2013 at 11:08 am
Michael
Your idea of what this blog should cover agrees nearly 100% with mine, and perhaps what it maybe even was back when I was able to post 2 or 3 articles or reviews a day.
At the moment I’m struggling to maintain a schedule of one post a day, which is why choosing what I take the time to get posted is lot more important to me.
On the other hand, sometimes I have to choose what’s convenient — what’s readily available and will take only 15 or 20 minutes to post, for example.
The main criterion, though, is this. Anything posted here is of interest to me, in one way or another, and (hopefully) there’s something in it that I didn’t know or hadn’t said before.
PS. In your fourth paragraph, I assume that you may have meant Gold Medal, not Gold Key?
October 19th, 2013 at 2:37 pm
#5. Steve, thanks for correcting me. You can tell I’ve read more Gold Key comic books than Gold Medal paperbacks.
October 19th, 2013 at 4:35 pm
Michael
If I tend to write more about the the earlier era it is because I’m something of a genre historian, and frankly have an affection for the older books. That said, I’ve reviewed my share of post 1960’s books and contemporary works — and when they are good quite favorably.
My only argument would be if you don’t know the genre’s history you won’t know when you are being sold inferior imitations of older writers work. If someone does a clever impossible crime story you enjoy, I think it is even better if you know that Carr, Rawson, or Brean hadn’t already thought of it before.
Of course everyone doesn’t have to, or want to, read all these books, but thanks to blogs like this you can at least know of their existence.
As for the Mickster you either love him or hate him — there’s no middle ground, but much as I loathe his politics and some of his less than enlightened social and racial ideas, he remains one of the most visceral, powerful, and savage writers who ever put pen to paper. I feel the same about Andrew Vachess, I think he exploits the very thing he is railing against, and frankly many of his fans needed medication in their rabid and delusional attacks on anyone who dared critique their guru, but the man could write in a way few others have.
Walker
I think what happened to me in regard to Vallin was the glut of new eyes in that period. At some point I couldn’t tell half of them apart, and ended up with some odd choices; liking Spenser imitation Fiddler better than the original, and trending toward more off beat variations like Healy’s John Francis Cuddy, Alo Nudger, or Stephen Greenleaf’s more literary books about John Marshall Tanner. About the only eye of that era I stuck with was Max Allan Collins Nathan Heller.
October 19th, 2013 at 4:49 pm
By the by, Henry Kane wrote well into the modern era, and after a flirt with soft porn in the sixties came back with some of his best work.
I agree on the romantic mystery to some extent, but I still love the screwball school and am now and always will be an advocate of the Norths — and Pam’s legs.
Re Gold Key/Gold Medal, GM was owned by Fawcett who once upon a time was DC’s greatest rival, so you aren’t all that far off.
Re Tarzan, I know what you mean, but if you haven’t read it try Tarzan and the Foreign Legion, in which ERB does something different with the ape man, and also has one of the best lines in the series when a Brooklyn born character recognizes Col. John Clayton of the RAF is Tarzan:
“Dat’s Johnny Weismuller?”
December 9th, 2013 at 2:31 am
I just read this one, or I tried to. I got less than halfway through before I had to quit, and the fifty or so pages before then were a struggle. I had no interest whatsoever in the characters, not one of them pleasant (with many of them less so than others) nor the setting (behind the scenes on a La-La Land soap opera set). Any resemblance to Raymond Chandlerland in this one is purely fragmentary, and imaginary at that.
December 9th, 2013 at 2:34 am
I went searching and found this review on Goodreads
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1059451.Natural_Causes
from which I quote in part:
“…Unfortunately, the plot is almost as shallow as the people Harry investigates. We do learn what motivates some of the characters to do the things they do, but the more I read the less I liked almost everyone in the story. Shallow lives and shallow people who are neither smart or complicated just isn’t interesting. The story unfolds with Stoner interviewing one person after another, and the red herrings aren’t strong enough to supply good twists. The killer’s identity left me thinking “so what?” ”
Pretty much what I said but said better, from someone who read farther.