Fri 8 Dec 2017
A PI Mystery Review by Barry Gardner: JEROME DOOLITTLE – Half Nelson.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[2] Comments
JEROME DOOLITTLE – Half Nelson. Tom Bethany #5. Pocket, hardcover, 1994; paperback, 1995.
I missed the fourth of Doolitttle’s tales of would-have-been-Olympic-wrestler-except-for-Carter’s-boycott, ex-pilot, now sort of PI Bethany, but fortunately these don’t require reading in strict sequence.
Bethany is at a Harvard gathering as his lover Hope’s request, to meet with a save-the-trees environmentalist who has received death threats by mail. He’s not able to help the man much, who flies back to Oregon to go about his business. When shots are fired at his house there, however, Bethany packs up and heads West to see what he can do.
The situation worsens drastically, and before it’s done Bethany is head-to-head against both Big Business and the FBI, and there have been more deaths than one.
I like Doolittle’s writing, and I like the not-in-the-data-banks character of Bethany, so I like the books. I have a weakness for one-man-against-the-system (damn, there’s a lot of hyphens in this review) stories, and that’s basically what these always are.
Doolittle is a good storyteller. What I don’t like is the unrelentingly liberal bias against business and authority in any form. Life just isn’t that simple, Jerome, however comforting it might be to think so. It’s still a damned good read, though.
Editorial Comment: My review of Body Scissors, the first of the Tom Bethany books, appears here. There were six in the series in all. A complete list follows that earlier review.
December 9th, 2017 at 12:05 am
The one thing left and right wing fantasy fiction of this sort has in common is it is so simplistic in its views, paranoia, and solutions it gets in the way of the story too often.
Even Bill Buckley had the good sense to entertain first in the Blackford Oakes books and propagandize second which is why they were well liked by right and left. If you can tell Russell Kirk was a leading Conservative economist by his fantasy and horror fiction you have seen more than I did.
I have no problem with politics in a mystery or thriller, but without a little balance it is pointless, unless we are speaking of extremes, and even there without balance the view can be childishly simplistic.
A good example of a Conservative writer, who, for some of his missteps,went beyond his own political views for the story is John Buchan who has heroic and helpful Socialist characters in both THE POWER-HOUSE and A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY, and a ultimately heroic conscientious objector in MR. STANDFAST, because his view of people was not wholly colored by their politics.
December 9th, 2017 at 1:27 am
Well said, David. I haven’t read this one, but I’m sure that Barry’s assessment of Doolittle’s political views is right on target.
I went back to re-read my review of the first one, and I see that even though Bethany was (at that time) primarily a political consultant of sorts, I didn’t seem to pick up on anything more political in the story than that.
So either I didn’t see it, or that there wasn’t any, and Doolittle’s shift in that direction developed (or became more obvious) as the series as it went along. Either scenario is quite possible.