Wed 2 Jan 2019
Archived PI Review: BERNARD SCHOPEN – The Big Silence.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[3] Comments
BERNARD SCHOPEN – The Big Silence. Jack Ross #1. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1989; paperback, January 1990.
The first chapter of this, the first recorded adventure of private eye Jack Ross, is a good one. Described is Ross’s meeting with his client, a prostitute named Glory, in a bar at the Reno Hilton. She wants him to find her grandfather, a man who, accused of murder, vanished into the desert 40 years ago.
A fine start, as I say, but for me, the story ran out of steam no more than 80 pages in. The case simply became too complicated, with too many entanglements and too many outsiders with inside interests. Or could it be that I confuse too easily?
The desert plays a large part in the resulting drama, perhaps one greater than any of the living characters. What Schopen succeeds in doing, more than anything else, is to describe the solitary beauty of the desert in such a way that it’s brought to life more than any of the people who live in and around it.
There are not many PI’s who work in the Nevada area, which is a surprise, when you think of it, but while this first case for Jack Ross does have promise, right now I’m more inclined to call it potential not yet realized.
The Jack Ross series —
The Big Silence (1989)
The Desert Look (1990)
The Iris Deception (1996)
January 2nd, 2019 at 3:21 pm
The original review, I have to confess, was a bit more negative than this somewhat rewritten version you see here. I believe the essence is the same, however.
My reason for doing so is that while I don’t remember any of the story or the characters at all, I do remember the way Schopen made the desert setting such an important part of the story.
If I can remember that so vividly now, almost 30 years later, my thinking is that there could easily have been more to the book itself than I realized back then.
January 2nd, 2019 at 5:58 pm
Around this period many of the private eye writers were getting the vivid and memorable part of the genre right, but many were also struggling with the other elements of interesting people and mysteries to go with the vividly realized settings. I recall reading several really well written books in this period that ultimately didn’t move me enough to read another by the author because they seemed to get everything right but the reason I bought it, a hardboiled detective story, a bit like those cozies that are about everything but the mystery.
January 2nd, 2019 at 7:12 pm
To go along with this theory, David, and I agree with you all the way, is the fact that this particular book was published by Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press.
I always thought Otto was trying to push the field of mystery fiction into the more respectable realm of literature, and not always succeeding (as far as I was concerned).