Sun 16 Jun 2024
DENNIS LEHANE – Gone Baby Gone. Patrick Kenzie & Angie Gennaro #4. William Morrow, hardcover, 1998; paperback, 1999. Reprinted several times since. Film: 2007, with Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan.
Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are Boston PI’s.
They get hired to try to find a missing child. The child’s mother is a wastrel, a waste, heavy drug using, sexed up, alcoholic piece of used jet trash. And neglectful to boot, constantly leaving her young child untended, sunburned at the beach, or left to rot in front of the television. Yet she wants the child back.
Turns out the kidnapping is part of a much deeper conspiracy, and the mother was a drug mule who absconded with a couple hundred thousand dollars from some guys you better not mess with.
And the deeper Kenzie and Gennaro dive into things, the deeper the conspiracy goes.
The book is much longer than is my wont, clocking in at over 400 pages. But it came in #9 on the Thrilling Detective poll of the top 14 PI novels of all time — so that put it in my TBR.
It was alright. Compelling enough to keep me flipping the pages. But it doesn’t, to my mind, rank that high as a PI novel. It’s fine for a marginally disturbing beach read. But that’s about it.
Then again, I’m quite biased in favor of mid-century PI novels. I feel like something of the immediacy of the language, terseness, to the point-ness, joltiness, briskness, tightness, has been lost somewhere between the mid-century and now.
I can’t quite put my finger on it. But our language has become flaccid. It’s certainly not a problem unique to Lehane — he’s better than most. I feel like it infects/inflects most of our contemporary use of language.
And I’m no exception.
June 16th, 2024 at 11:58 am
I know what you’re saying. I have read a couple of Lehane books but have not been able to “get into” him at all. It’s like he’s trying too hard, and he is indeed too wordy. The characters all have to be way out there, rather than the ordinary lowlife Joes of the mid-century era. Like you, I’m struggling to express what we both feel.
June 16th, 2024 at 8:46 pm
The Given Day worked well. I didn’t like the way Dennis treated certain subjects and people, but that was personal, the book, an entertainment of value.
June 16th, 2024 at 10:11 pm
As far as I can remember, Lehane and my paths have crossed only with my watching the movie version of GONE BABY GONE, which I thought was better than fine but after which I decided I had no reason to read the book. The other way around, I probably would have. I glanced at the story line of THE GIVEN DAY and decided I had too many other books to read. It may have been my mistake, but if so, I’ve made a lot more them, all along the same line.
You can’t read everything, Wish I could!
June 17th, 2024 at 12:47 am
Much my reaction, flaccid sums it up well (true of too much popular fiction these days), though the child in danger thing didn’t work for me either, and the idea of this even being mentioned by anyone serious in the same paragraph as a top contender with the best of the genre is ludicrous.
No wonder the genre now seems to consist of bad writers trying to continue Spenser and overlong bestsellers that read like they were written by AI. I know there are still great writers working in the genre, but this questionable nonsense is just tiring.
The hardboiled genre has always depended on style, and this isn’t it. They are doing interesting things in Europe with the genre and the voice, but this is overhyped. It might work on the screen, but on the page it just lies there, another bestselling writer I can’t read because of flat uninteresting prose designed for seventh grade readers who are flunking English.
June 17th, 2024 at 2:49 am
Yes, some of the authors published by Europa Editions/World Noir are showing the way forward, I think. Also Deon Meyer in South Africa.
June 17th, 2024 at 12:36 pm
I haven’t read Lehane, but too many current mystery novels and thrillers read as if they could have been written by anyone. They all sound the same. I’d rather read a book that might not be as slick and smooth but has a distinctive voice.