Sun 13 Nov 2011
COLLIN WILCOX – Power Plays. Random House, hardcover, 1979. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, December 1979. No paperback edition.
Much to the surprise of everyone involved, an apparently minor traffic accident on the streets of San Francisco unexpectedly coughs up the body of a murder victim.
Found stabbed to death in the back seat of one of the cars is a one-time Washington columnist who in recent days had reportedly been hot on the trail of a surefire comeback story. The trail of the killer leads Lt. Hastings of Homicide on a merry chase as well. Higher and higher he goes into the upper echelons of the rich and powerful on both coasts; at stake is nothing less than his job itself.
A lot of fast-paced action scenes keeps the story’s arteries pumping, leaving little time-out for the usual details of Hastings’ home life. What makes this not the totally successful peek behind closed doors it’s intended to be is a certain naiveness in such matters — and a lack of depth in terms of the muck that’s being raked up.
If it matters, though, Hastings as a character pleases me, and I liked the book anyway.
Rating: B.
Bibliographic Data: Collin Wilcox, 1924-1996, wrote a total of 21 Lt. Hastings novels. Power Plays was the 10th in the series. One of the books, Twospot, was a joint venture with Bill Pronzini, with Hastings and Bill’s “Nameless” PI sharing the detective work. In another of the books, Except for the Bones, Wilcox’s other series character, theater director Allan Bernhardt, makes an appearance.
November 14th, 2011 at 7:20 am
TWOSPOT was the only one I read. It was OK.
November 14th, 2011 at 12:23 pm
I confess to having read only three or four of Wilcox’s books myself, but his police procedurals were quite popular for a long time.
Hastings’ cases were often of the larger-than-life variety, including the one I reviewed here, but as I also said in the review, this one doesn’t spend much time with his home life, as many of the others did.
As a brief aside, there is a controversy over whether or not “naiveness” is a word or not.
When my spellchecker did not recognize it, I looked it up. The correct word to use is “naïveté,” but that didn’t really express what I meant in the context of the review, so I kept it the way I had it when I wrote it.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100801125853AAXztas
November 14th, 2011 at 5:43 pm
Yeah, naiveness was a new one on me ,too.
Naivete ,as I see it, can, when used in English, also be spelled without the accent and double points.
The Doc
November 14th, 2011 at 5:50 pm
Right. There aren’t many words in English that absolutely require accents or umlauts or other foreign flourishes. But to my mind, neither naivete or naïveté expressed what I thought I was trying to say, and naiveness did. For whatever that’s worth!
November 14th, 2011 at 6:22 pm
Yeah, simply make more English ,as you go along, if the need arises !
The Doc