Sun 15 Mar 2015
RAYMOND KHOURY – The Devil’s Elixir. Dutton, hardcover, December 2011. Signet, premium paperback edition, August 2012.
This is the third in a series featuring FBI agent Sean Reilly and his close lady friend, Tess Chaykin, who’s been along with him on his two previously recorded adventures, neither of which I’ve read, nor did I need to. This one stands on its own very well.
In physical size, the book’s a bruiser. It’s over 500 pages of tall premium paperback pages long, almost all of cramjack filled with small print, and after a month or so of short reading bursts just before bedtime, I’ve finally finished it. It begins with Michelle Martinez, one of Reilly’s former girl friends calling on him for help. Her boy friend is dead in a house invasion, but she and her four-year-old son luckily managed to escape their assailants, a gang of guys with guns completely unknown to her.
Reilly rushes cross-country to be at her side, which is when she tells him that her son is his. After that, all hell breaks loose. A Mexican crime lord is trying to track down the formula for a wildly hallucinogenic drug discovered centuries ago by Indians dwelling deep in Mexico’s densest inland jungles. Hence the title of the book, of course.
Let me not dwell on the 500 pages this book is long. Khoury’s writing style is one that can be skimmed read very quickly. There is a lot of action, ending in many deaths and much destruction, and before you reach the end, any doubts you have have about the existence of reincarnation will be shaken to the core. Well, maybe.
I hope I won’t be spoiling anything for you by telling you that all ends well, except for the bad guys and one loose end that will carry over to the next book in the series. My one complaint might be that after so many pages, the end for the main bad guy, a particularly nasty gentleman at that, comes far too quickly and easily.
All in all, though, I’d have to say that I got my money’s worth from this book. But while it’s solid enough entertainment — nearly a month’s worth, for me — here I am at the end of this review, and I find that I’m struggling with something crucial. I can’t find anything to point out to you about the book that would tell you why I’ll be reading another of Sean Reilly’s adventures any time soon, for I’m sure I won’t. If your results have varied, feel free to let me know.
March 15th, 2015 at 4:04 am
Like a good many of todays thriller writers Khoury does good set ups and then can’t deliver. His endings tend to peter out. The villain in his first book pretty much just walked off a cliff. It was even more disappointing on screen in the mini series.
Where I give credit to Cussler and James Rollins (who much to my surprise has become a favorite) and even Ted Bell, who is more problematic, is that they do deliver most of the time in the dastardly villains deserved demise.
Every Khoury I’ve read feels as if he is as tired as I am when he gets to the end, and knowing there is not going to be a payoff just makes it harder going to read.
He obviously loves the research and the set up, but he doesn’t care much about the reader or he would work harder on the climax. It’s almost like reading a book with the last pages torn out.
I know it was done with irony, but you should not have crossed out ‘skimmed’. It’s the only sane way to read one of his books.
March 15th, 2015 at 10:05 am
Sean Really tells his part of the story in first person, while the rest of it is told in third. But at the end of the book we still do not know Sean Reilly as a person, other than the basic emotions of anger, revenge and love, as forthright about himself as he tries to be. Khoury is very adept at keeping the story going at this level, but for me, this book is a very good example of read today, forget tomorrow.
March 15th, 2015 at 4:03 pm
Khoury is the Chinese food of thrillers, an hour later you want to read something because you can’t recall what he wrote.
Which, I’ll grant is part of his popularity. Nothing sells like cotton candy writing (I know, metaphors shaken not stirred and mixed badly). There is never a point in his books when you can’t put it down, or even don’t want to. I can imagine readers laying one of his books down ten pages from the end. Most people buy one, read a chapter a night for a month or so and at the end buy another copy of the same book because there was nothing distinguishing about what they already read once.
I had a dog who loved cotton candy, but it disappeared as soon as he took a bite and he would search his mouth with his tongue looking for something to chew. That’s a long way to go for one, but a perfect metaphor for these books. There is nothing to sink your teeth into.
But then at times I want cotton candy.
I am not attacking them, if they can make big money more power to them, but Khoury is emblematic of a type of writer who often hits the bestseller list, but whose appeal is basically that they write undistinguished Dick and Jane prose with virtually no character development. They are movie of the week books. Once in a while one rises to the level of big dumb summer blockbuster (and I confess a certain addiction to some of those as I used to read Irving Wallace or Harold Robbins).
But there are writers whose work I just don’t bother with like Khoury, James Patterson, John Grisham (whose themes are serious enough but his writing and characters off screen make Perry Mason look like literary fiction), David Baldacchi, and Lee Child who grace all the book displays and are perennial bestsellers, but frankly don’t display the energy or storytelling gifts of a Harold Robbins or Irving Wallace. Their work reminds me less of the pulps than it does the Nickel Library and Boys Own Paper serials of old; just start writing and keep going until you have the proper wordage.
Even the hacks in pulps invested something in their readers to sell magazines. To me these writers operate on the level of you liked the shit in my last piece of crap here’s more of the same with the exact same phrases, characters with new names, and enough suspense, tension, and mystery to not quite fill a child’s toy tea cup; the same nutritional value of a little girl’s tea party too.
They do epic research on many things but it is presented in large undigested chunks like Dennis Wheatley’s historical and war novels — here is everything you need to know about the Russo-Finnish War, now let’s move on. It worked for him, he sold (sold not had in print) sixty millions books in his life time (of course as prolific as he was that was about one copy of each).
That said, most of them can’t hold a candle to Wheatley who was interesting if not always good. Most of them would have a hard time competing with William LeQueux as writers. Compared to them John Creasey is Balzac.
Carrol John Daly and Harry Stephen Keeler were among the worst writers ever (Keeler in a class of his own), but they are readable because they believed in what they were writing, they were not hacking it out. I don’t get the feeling these writers are compelled to write, it just ended up paying better than their day job.
One reason young adult fiction exploded, aside from Harry Potter, is that those writers believe in their stories. I might find TWILIGHT unreadable, but I see what it offers its fans and sincerely delivers on. The same for its polar opposite (not really, they are basically about the same things)FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, hideously written S&M semi porn, but written with a sincerity that shows.
Sorry to rant, well, not really, sorry about any toes stepped on, well, not really, but this seemed like as good a review as any to air those views.
March 15th, 2015 at 4:40 pm
Rant well taken, David, and well spoken.
One point in Khoury’s favor, though, is that I finished the book, and there many of the blockbuster thriller genre that I don’t. I put them down and never pick them back up again. You don’t know about it, because I dislike embarrassing either the author or myself by reviewing books I haven’t read.