Thu 9 Apr 2020
M. K. WREN – King of the Mountain. Conan Flagg #8. Ballantine, paperback original; 1st printing, January 1995.
I happened to find my copy of this one soon after posting my archived review of Seasons of Death, number five in the series. Some of the discussion that took place in the comments that followed was whether this was a cozy series or not. This was based on the fact that not only is Conan Flagg a private eye, but he is also the owner of a bookstore in Portland OR. And not only that, but the bookstore has a cat, which is featured in silhouette at least on the front cover of all of he paperback editions of the series.
I’m still not so sure about the earlier books, but I can now tell you that King of the Mountain, the eighth and final book in the series is most definitely NOT a cozy. Flagg is a guest at a family reunion in an isolated area of Oregon near Mt. Hood, and neither the bookstore nor the cat are mentioned, except perhaps once and then only in passing.
The King family, as it so happens, is one of those highly dysfunctional families that makes being involved with them so uncomfortable to outsiders looking in – which includes both Flagg and we, the readers – and murder so inevitable. I’ll start out by saying that the story is a good one, but it’s also a frustrating one. We know as soon as Flagg reaches the mountain lodge where the family is gathering that disaster is soon to happen, but after seventy pages in, it has yet to do so. That’s a long time for any sense of tension to keep building.
But then, when it does, it’s a method of murder that I have never read in a mystery novel before. I won’t tell you more, but afterward the story becomes a throwback to those old Golden Age mysteries, where the rest of the group are completely snowbound for days on end, all the while knowing that one of them is a killer.
If this sounds like a story you’d like to read, up to this point I’d agree, and say that you should. But the ending seemed quite an arbitrary one to me, with the killer’s (or killers’) motive not at all consistent with the characters’ profile as established up the point of his/her/their revealing. Wren was a good writer, but I really do think the ending could have been thought out a lot better.
April 9th, 2020 at 8:10 pm
The series is incredibly uneven, and Wren never does do endings very well, but Flagg is far from cozy, though I suppose you could call him a cozier Travis McGee.
You nail it with the writing being good, but the whole thing should have been thought out better, at least the ones I’ve read.
April 9th, 2020 at 8:22 pm
A cozier Travis McGee? That’s a very apt suggestion. The stories are not cozies, but every once in a while they (or this one) verge on the hard-boiled. The key word, though, is “verge.” No more than that.
April 10th, 2020 at 9:32 am
I liked this series a lot, and had several communications with Wren at the time, including and on-line interview. By the time this last book was being written, she was struggling with her publisher and knew this would be the final book.
One point, the bookstore wasn’t in Portland, it was on the coast west of the city.
April 10th, 2020 at 11:34 am
Thanks for the correction. Rick. I slipped up there.
As for the book itself, there was a point, about 3/4 of the way through, that I thought it was going to be an undiscovered classic. Wren was an excellent writer, but I think it needed some editorial tweaking to get the ending across, which it sounds like she didn’t have.