Wed 31 Mar 2010
ROBERT CRAIS – Indigo Slam. Ballantine, paperback reprint; 1st printing, February 2003. Hyperion, hardcover, June 1997.
To begin with, there are two small mysteries here. First, why did it take so long for a hot book by a hot author to make the move from hardcover to paperback? (At the moment, the paperback is ranked 4087th in Amazon’s listings, a fact which will be far out of date by the time you read this, but as far as private eye detective paperbacks go, this is Pretty Good.)
And secondly, since this is the seventh Elvis Cole novel, why it is that this is the first one I’ve read? I have no answer. I do have a large backlog of books to read, though — is that an excuse? I probably should have started with the first one (The Monkey’s Raincoat, a paperback original from Bantam in 1987), but this one just came out, it looked inviting, and so in I dove.
Refreshing it was, too. Crais is a smooth writer, and he manages to juggle a couple of unrelated plot lines in quite acceptable fashion. If nothing else, Cole is good at multi-tasking. What gets the book going and is its main point of focus thereafter are Cole’s clients, three young children whose father is missing. Thanks to the short prologue, we know more than Elvis does, but he fills in the gap soon enough: their dad is a drop-out from a Federal witness protection program.
In backtracking Clark Hewitt’s trail, Cole has help from his laconic, all-purpose partner, Joe Pike — whether they admit it or not, an entire generation of private eye writers has definitely been influenced by Robert B. Parker — and the stakes keep growing higher and higher. I’ll skip the details. Read the book.
In between run-in’s with various mobsters of every ilk, almost all of them with guns, Lucy, the love of Elvis’s life, is having trouble with her ex, and in the middle, of course, is our hero.
If the story itself is little more than ordinary, the reason is because the people who are in it who are quite remarkable. The kids who Elvis is working for are superbly drawn: the youngest rather quiet and shy, the boy in the middle suitably bratty, and the oldest, well at 15, she’s been their mother of the other two for quite some time, and as such, she’s simply terrific.
[UPDATE] 03-31-10. The current Amazon ranking for the paperback edition is #16,211, not bad for a mystery that’s nearly 13 years old (but still in print). Unfortunately for me, this is still the only book by Robert Crais that I’ve read. Re-reading my review just now, I’m stumped. I really am.
March 31st, 2010 at 2:13 am
I read the first two Elvis Cole books, but while I agree with everything you say about them for some reason I just didn’t sign on for the series.
It’s hard to say why, Crais can certainly write, and Cole is a well drawn character in a well drawn milieu, but for whatever reason that wasn’t enough. Maybe I need to get my feet wet again and see if I like the waters better.
March 31st, 2010 at 9:11 am
I’ve read most of them–not the newest and I missed 2-3 when he seemed to be merely going through the motions.
Initially I actually was rather offended by how derivative Pike was of Parker’s Hawk, but Pike’s back story when revealed eventually won me over.
*Indigo Slam* isn’t close to Crais at the top of his game.
For my taste Crais’ best would include *Free Fall*, *The Watchman* (the first of so far two Joe Pike-centric thrillers), *Voodoo River*, and probably *Lullaby Town*.
I notice that of those favorites, only *The Watchman* is relatively recent. Hmmm….
March 31st, 2010 at 10:34 am
I’ve been thinking it over this morning, David, and the only reason I’ve come up with as to why I didn’t read the Cole books when they first came out is that I considered them as little more than Spenser clones.
Not that that’s so bad, nor was I particularly offended, to use your word, Rick, by the similarities, but on the surface, they didn’t exactly promise anything new, either.
I may have been wrong about that, and certainly by this time Crais has forged his own path and has split off — I would assume — in a number of ways from the model established by Parker in his books.
But I’m amused by your last comment, Rick. Whenever most people talk about Parker, they almost always say his earliest books were best. Now you’re suggesting the same thing about Crais.
— Steve
March 31st, 2010 at 6:05 pm
The Spenser cloning may have been what ‘put me off’ this series, though I liked the equally cloned Fiddler series. But I notice looking back I stopped reading Crais about the same time I dropped Parker.
And I learned a long time ago there are perfectly good writers and series that should appeal to me that for some reason just don’t get the job done. I think that’s the case here. The books just wasn’t quite different enough to hold me.