Crime Beat

William Saunderson-Meyer comments on recent releases from Patricia Cornwall, James Patterson and John Grisham, big names in the business who continue to churn out novels on request.

This review first appeared in The Weekender

IT IS appropriate that Patricia Cornwell’s most recent novel is simply called Scarpetta — she churns them out with the mechanical efficiency of a McDonald’s burger palace, and they have sadly become similarly stodgy and only momentarily satisfying.

The series that spawned the entirely new genre of forensic fiction previously had haunting titles like Body of Evidence, All That Remains, and Cruel and Unusual.

But the books are no longer the cutting-edge forensic fiction they once were. Instead they have become crossovers, four parts soapie and one part polemic.

The soapie part is a throw- together of the trials and tribulations of Kay Scarpetta — a medical examiner or pathologist as they are called in the English-speaking world — her lover, and her eccentric and often dysfunctional entourage of assistants and family.

The personal manifesto part, which has become more obvious following her reluctant emergence from the closet as a lesbian, showcases at arm’s length Cornwell’s views on sexuality, gender politics and destructive relationships.

And where the early Cornwell novels carved out a plot with the efficiency with which a Stryker saw buzzes through a cranium, the more recent novels have become untidy and predictable, the professional skills those of a ham-fisted first-year intern. One can predict that if she had arrived at a literary agent’s door with Scarpetta when she submitted her first novel, Post Mortem, Cornwell would have remained unpublished.

There is always a serial killer since Scarpetta wouldn’t get out bed for anything less; Scarpetta always becomes the target; the petty jealousies and sexual tensions among her team combine to put her in danger but at the last moment everyone pulls through.

The writing is hurried, the effect leaden. Take this little gem, clearly unpolished, describing a telephone conversation between Scarpetta and her lover, “Scarpetta’s voice moved at the speed of sound.” Yeah, well. A bloody miracle if it did anything else.

If Scarpetta is a damp squib, James Patterson — one of the most successful living thriller writers, pulling in $50m a year — is a Tom Thumb cracker. There is some fizzle and pop in Run For Your Life but nothing that will take your breath away.

The protagonist, Michael Bennett, is something of a clone of Patterson’s most successful creation, detective Alex Cross. Both are athletic, tough cops with marshmallow hearts. Both are single-handedly raising their brood of kids. The only marked differences are that Cross is a black man and lives in Washington, and Bennett is white and lives in New York. It typifies the Patterson style: the thriller novel as mix-and-match with interchangeable parts.

Patterson is a veritable writing industry. Run For Your Life was written with Michael Ledwidge, and published in February. Maximum Ride, co-authored with Nat Rae Lee, came out in January.

Also in the mill are 8th Confession, in the Women’s Murder Club series, co-authored with Maxine Paetro, to be published in March; Max, in the Maximum Ride series, in April; Swimsuit, co-authored with Paetro, in June; Watch the Skies, in the Daniel X series, co-authored with Ned Bust, in July. In May, Patterson appears to be taking a well-deserved holiday, thank God.

Actually, there is nothing much wrong with Patterson’s books. They are entertaining and fast paced, albeit predictable.

But they are curiously soulless: behind the words there is nothing of the author, just the whirring of a robotic writing programme decanting ingredients according to a tightly scripted formula.

Some might level the same charges of conveyor-belt writing againstJohn Grisham, the doyen of the legal thriller, that taint Cornwell and Patterson.

His titles are all modern morality plays: men and women being ground to paste in the legal machine, who reach into themselves to find their true centre and then strike to redress the imbalance between law and justice.

There is a difference, though. Although this is his 21st novel in two decades, there is still passion in Grisham. His writing remains fresh, his themes — in this time of world economic meltdown sparked by greed and chicanery — are appropriately contemporary.

The Associate revolves around Kyle Mcavoy, who is one of the outstanding legal students of his generation but has a shameful secret from his past that could destroy his fledgling career.

Upon graduation from Yale he is blackmailed by a shadowy group of men into doing what would be the dream of most young lawyers: to take an obscenely well-paid job in New York as an associate with the world’s largest law firm.

His secret mission is to steal secrets of the firm’s biggest ever trial, a multibillion-dollar action between two defence contractors.

The Associate is vintage Grisham and reminiscent of The Firm, one of Grisham’s early successes, filmed with Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman.