Another week, another look at a book which put me on the path to the classic detection obsession which occupies my every waking moment.
No surprise, it’s…
Blood Work (1998) by Michael Connelly
How I encountered this book
Having stumbled across the work of Michael Crichton and Philip Kerr as related in the last couple of weeks, I’d read a broad range of thrillers from my school library — from the Jason Bourne novels of Robert Ludlum to Latitude Zero (1998) by Windsor Chorlton (there’s a reason you haven’t heard of that one…) and everything in between. Ever on the lookout for contemporary authors, I was taken by a boxset for sale in the catalogue of the remainders company The Book People offering ten novels by “current masters of the crime-thriller genre”…all, not coincidentally I’m sure, published by the UK house Orion (my memory’s hazy, but I think this was early 2000). Not only did this get me reading Robert Crais and start a love affair with Orion’s crime output (and I’ve already talked about how influential that turned out to be), it included the authors I’ll be talking about this week and next: first up, Michael Connelly, with Blood Work (1998) being one of the titles included in that very boxset.
What’s it about?
Terrell ‘Terry’ McCaleb was an FBI profiler working cases involving serial killers when, due to a rare blood condition, a heart attack cut his career short in his late-40s. Eight weeks post-transplant, he’s approached on the boat where he lives by Graciela Torres who tells him that her sister Gloria was murdered two months previously and, given that she shared McCaleb’s rare blood type, it’s a virtual certainty that the heart McCaleb received was hers. With local police making no headway on the apparently random shooting, Torres asks if McCaleb would be willing to look into the murder. McCaleb agrees, and of course makes all manner of shocking discoveries along the way…
Any seeds of detection?
Pleasingly, yes. Connelly was a reporter for the L.A. Times before becoming a writer, and all twenty-plus of his books that I’ve read — well, all except career low point Chasing the Dime (2002) — have a solid basis in procedure and process. He knows that an investigation can only be progressed by evidence that offers a new perspective on a crime, rather than just because someone swans in and says they’re looking into something, and so McCaleb has to go about his task with justification behind his actions. The investigation done by the LAPD runs into a wall early on and, with ever-mounting workload, has been shelved by the pair assigned to it, and McCaleb reviews the evidence, finds the cracks, and prises them apart with mostly very pleasing rigour.
For the classicist in me there is also much to enjoy. There’s a repeated refrain of something that is quite breathtakingly subtle, and were John Dickson Carr to employ exactly the same approach I’d be raving over it and so I must give Connelly credit for a superbly clever piece of hiding. Additionally, there are two pieces of classic GAD styling in this, too — including a clue-drop that screams in your face and most people will simply sail past. Indeed, it’s on account of my memory of these two aspects that I had wanted to pick this up for some time now, and that urge has given rise to this series of posts. Was I accurately remembering how explicitly some things were shown, as I failed to do with a particular Agatha Christie title? Is the early introduction of a key piece of misdirection really as blatant as I recalled? In both cases the answer is pleasingly “yes”: puzzle fans would, I imagine, get quite a kick out of the game Connelly plays here, with McCaleb a pleasingly old-school investigator in the Amateur Detective mould, and a plot that, while perhaps not standing up to full scrutiny, would take a lot of even very well-read GAD fans by surprise.
I say that now, and so guarantee that I will endure a tidal wave of “Well, I saw it coming”s from all y’all, but at least you’ll get to feel smug about spotting one of what I consider to be the best twists hidden in plain sight in a (relatively) contemporary crime novel. Goddamn, it’s 21 years old. Dude, I need to stop doing this to myself.
Can you go home?
Oh, man, do I have a lot of thoughts on this here. Probably the starkest difference that struck me rereading this was how the justification for investigation was so different in GAD, and how it’s surely this which has led to the development of the modern crime-thriller genre. In GAD, detectives detect because they’re detectives — S.S. van Dine would be delighted by this, no doubt — and they’re on the scene of a crime. Sure, Miss Marple talks about Evil and Lord Peter Wimsey would reflect on the nature of the job he was doing in sending so many men to the hangman, but for the most part these people — Dr. Lancelot Priestley, Miss Silver, Inspector Cockrill, John Poole, Superintendent Battle, Mrs. Bradley, Inspector Edward Beale…whatever their idiom — detected a crime in their vicinity because, well, someone had broken the law and therefore it bore looking into. But for a modern reader, that perhaps isn’t enough, and so we get justification:
When he was an agent, he had carried with him a bottomless reservoir of rage for the men he hunted. He had seen firsthand what they had done and he wanted them to pay for the horrible manifestations of their fantasies, Blood debts had to be paid in blood. That was why in the bureau’s serial killer unit the agents called what they did ‘blood work’. There was no other way to describe it. And so it worked on him, cut at him, every time one didn’t pay. Every time one got away.
And more justification:
When he had been with the bureau, he had been driven and consumed by a mission, a calling. And when he carried it out and was successful, he knew he was making a difference. Better than any heart surgeon, he was saving lives from horrible ends. He was facing off against the worst kinds of evil, the most malignant cancers, and the battle, though always wearing and painful, gave his life its meaning.
And even more justification:
McCaleb believed there was a sacred bond between the victim and the investigator. All homicide cops understood this. Some took it straight to the heart. Some less so, simply as a matter of psychological survival. But it was there in all of them. It didn’t mater if you had religion, if you believed that the soul of the departed watched over you. Even if you believed that all things ended with the final breath, you still spoke for the dead. Your name was whispered on the last breath. But only you heard it. Only you knew it. No other crime came with such a covenant.
I’ve only read one book by Connelly, one of the Bosch series Echo Park. It was… OK, I guess. I might read more by him later but I don’t feel in any rush to do so.
I found his detective acceptable and the book didn’t irritate me in the way some modern crime can. On the other hand, it does have those features which I can live without – too much reliance on psycho/serial killers (and I think I said before that I’m beyond bored with this device now), and too much padding related to the ‘tec’s private life.
I sense there’s enough of these features in the book in question here – and it blights so much of current film, TV and literature for me. Everything has to fold into the arc, and it’s a weird combination of geekery and soap that turns me off.
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Yeah, by the time one reads Echo Park you really need to be a bit invested in Bosch as a character in order for the personal life stuff to not feel like its just spinning wheels. He’s written a handful of books that I’d consider pretty much the peak of the crime writing genre — Trunk Music, Angel’s Flight, The Closers, The Reversal — and when he’s on form, and if you like that sort of thing, I don’t think there’s anyone writing today to touch him.
It’s true that “everything has to have an arc” has become a bit of a distracting element of modern crime writing. I suppose the need to relate is deemed more important these days. And, fine, these things go in cycles — this now feels like an echo of the growth of domestic suspense in the 1950s — and while a “state of the nation” crime novel of the sort George Pelecanos used to write would turn me right off I guess publishers have to put out what’s popular and so will sell and make them money. Which seems fair; no-one’s going to work for free.
There is, of course, a cart-and-horse argument there, but I don’t feel I have the oversight of the current genre to make it…
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“He was facing off against the worst kinds of evil, the most malignant cancers, and the battle, though always wearing and painful, gave his life its meaning.”
He was facing off against the worst kinds of evil? Not against perfervid purple prose he wasn’t.
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It is, yeah, a little overwritten at times. He got much better at that, it must be said…
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You can’t go home. Home moves.
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