Tue 27 Oct 2009
TMF Review: JONATHAN VALIN – Final Notice.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[7] Comments
JONATHAN VALIN – Final Notice. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1980. Paperback reprints: Avon, 1982; Dell, 1994. TV movie: USA, 1989 (with Gil Gerard, Steve Landsberg, Melody Anderson).
I’m a little behind. This is the second adventure of private eye Harry Stoner — it’s just now in paperback — and the third is already out, begging to be read.
The metaphor is apt. If anything, I found this one even more readable than The Lime Pit, which started to get more and more funny-tasting the deeper Stoner began to dig into the corruption surrounding the city of Cincinnati.
There is more of the same in this one, plus lots of gore. Stoner is called in when a psychopath starts slashing up nudes in a library’s collection of art books. He thinks it’s only a prelude to the real thing.
At his side in tackling this case is a library security guard named Kate Davis, who is both female and liberated. She makes Stoner feels old and tired at thirty-seven, old-fashioned and chauvinistic. Kate is of a younger generation, and falling in love with her leaves Stoner feeling slightly bewildered. He is also pleased.
Valin has a fine feeling for what makes people what they are — not just the killer, but everyone. The constant attempts to psychoanalyze the killer could have been downplayed a little, and Valin doesn’t quite catch the same edge that exists between human relationships that Robert B. Parker usually does, but as a mixture of character study and action adventure, it is seldom done any better than this.
The fast and furious climax works out almost the way you’d expect it to, but the twist that comes with it just might catch you leaning the wrong way.
(slightly revised).
[UPDATE] 10-27-09. Jonathan Valin wrote eleven Harry Stoner books over a period of 15 years, which is a pretty good run, but one I think should have been longer. I confess, though, that while I have all of the books in the series, I’ve never gotten around to the later ones. (I believe I’ve read all of the first seven.)
But as to why the series ended, the usual guesses are as valid here as they are for many other authors. Sales may have fallen and/or Valin simply ran out of things to say about the character.
Until I discovered it again just now, I’d totally forgotten that there was a TV movie based on this book. What’s strange is that I simply don’t remember if I watched it at the time or not. It’s not available on DVD, as far as I’ve been able to tell, so I just bought it as an out-of-print video tape. The reviews on IMDB (only 2 of them) aren’t very positive. The big complaint is that it was filmed in Toronto, not Cincinnati!
The Harry Stoner series —
1. The Lime Pit (1980)
2. Final Notice (1980)
3. Dead Letter (1981)
4. Day of Wrath (1982)
5. Natural Causes (1983)
6. Life’s Work (1986)
7. Fire Lake (1987)
8. Extenuating Circumstances (1989)
9. Second Chance (1991)
10. The Music Lovers (1993)
11. Missing (1995)
October 27th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
The movie with Gil Gerard was okay, nothing great, but he was well cast as Stoner. Don’t know why the series ended, but it could be because people like you and I seem to have burned out on them about the same time. I stuck with Jeremiah Healey and Stephen Greenleaf a bit longer, but abandoned all three not long before they stopped writing them.
October 28th, 2009 at 9:32 am
I’ve found “Extenuating Circumstances”, “Missing”, and “The Music Lovers” among the top 5-6 titles in the series. They are among the 40-50 mysteries that I wind up rereading with pleasure every few years. (“Fire Lake” is on that revisit list too.)
Stoner strikes me as being among the most believable individuals of all hard-boiled (narrating) detectives…
October 28th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Valin was one of my favorite mystery writers when he was active, but when I reviewed “The Music Lovers,” in “Walter’s Place” 99:3 (January 1994, I described it “as an undernourished novel about the theft of some valuable LPs [that]does not serve well either vinyl collectors or mystery fans….Nice jacket, though.”
In recent years, Valin has been writing for “The Absolute Sound” and “Perfect Vision,” and, for a time, was the very readable bibliographer of vintage RCA Living Stereo records. His musical interests seemed finally to have eclipsed his interest in writing fiction.
I see that Rick rates “The Music Lovers” among the best of the Harry Stoner series. I liked Valin enough to wish that I had saved my copy of this novel for a return visit. I certainly didn’t like to think that Valin went out on anything other than a high note.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Walter, that was a kind–and appreciated–manner of telling me that my recommendation of “The Music Lovers” was at best wrong-headed. 🙂
I enjoyed the sardonic portraits of the obsessed music collectors in “The Music Lovers”. And I always enjoy Valin’s delineation of wounded survivors of the 1960s, being a child of the 60s myself.
I will freely admit that “The Music Lovers” lacks a certain emotional weight that “Fire Lake”, “Missing”, and “Extentuating Circumstances” provide.
October 31st, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I think all the Valin novels I’ve read are very good, but I’ve had one problem with them. Please, read here:
http://pulpetti.blogspot.com/2009/06/saturday-forgotten-book-jonathan-valins.html
October 31st, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Please follow the link Juri provided if you’d like to read more, but I hope he doesn’t mind if I summarize his thoughts by quoting one line:
“…but I don’t like the way he treats sexuality. In all of his books I have read (which makes three) the bad guys are sexually frustrated or perverted, and in Valin the so-called perversion always means ‘evil’.”
Well, maybe that was two lines. I think that Juri’s right, in that sex in one form or another is very much a part (if not the underlying motivation) of the Stoner books.
I’d have to read them again to say more myself, even whether good or bad, so I won’t, but sometimes certain impressions do last.
Juri also includes a link to Jeff Pierce’s Rap Sheet blog, and an piece there which expounds on Valin’s winning a survey which answered the question, Which long-missing crime novelist would Rap Sheet readers most like to see publishing new books again in the near future?
http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2006/10/please-come-back-kids.html
December 18th, 2010 at 11:35 pm
[…] Final Notice (reviewed by Steve Lewis). A complete listing of the Harry Stoner series follows the review. There was only one more to come after The Music Lovers. […]