Book Review: Scarecrow, Michael Connelly

I never expect to be disappointed by a Michael Connelly novel. And I never have been, not since the day I picked up The Black Echo, all those years ago. I’m no great fan of detective novels or police procedurals, but something about Connelly’s epic, mystic creation, Harry Bosch, resonated with me, and I’ve stuck with him ever since. Even his non-Bosch novels — the standalones Void Moon and Chasing the Dime, Blood Work, and his masterpiece, The Poet — kicked me in the jeans like no other mainstream crime writer. His latest creation, backseat defence lawyer Mickey Haller, has pounded through two fantastic books so far, with more to come.

Over the past few books, Connelly’s worlds are starting to converge. Terry McCaleb, the hero of Blood Work (played by Clint Eastwood in the film) pops up in a Bosch book. Jack McEvoy, the reporter star of The Poet, wanders in and out of other novels. Haller and Bosch have a connection. Even Cassie Black, the rascally heroine of Void Moon, rates a sneaky mention here and there. It’s always handled well, and never becomes a what-the-hell moment; the reader believes, easily, that Connelly is writing about a connected world of crime and criminals. It works. Connelly can do no wrong, and like I said, I never expect to be disappointed.

However.

I have just finished The Scarecrow, Connelly’s sequel to The Poet. Superstar crime reporter Jack McEvoy is back, this time serving out his last two weeks after being laid off by the L.A. Times in the midst of an economic slump that’s hurting newspapers. Where have I heard that story before? Oh yeah, it’s my life, except for the part about being a superstar crime reporter.

Connelly, a former crime reporter in Los Angeles, nails the crisis affecting newspapers in his first few pages. Brilliant stuff. Writing as McEvoy, he explains exactly why a 40-ish reporter who came of age in the 1980s is irrelevant in the 21st century, or at least why newspaper managers would think so. He said the same thing I’ve been saying in the six months since my employer told me a just-out-of-J-school kid in Toronto would be doing my job from now on for a quarter of the salary. I soaked Connelly’s words up, nodding, reading sections out loud to Elizabeth, saying “He gets it! He really gets it!”

But then it goes south. McEvoy, as he does, learns something about a seemingly straightforward murder case and before long is on the trail of an organized serial killer who uses the Internet as a weapon. After the first few random leaps of logic, I was still with him. Hey, I watch Star Trek. I can take random leaps of anything.

However.

• McEvoy figures things out that he shouldn’t be able to see, with the available facts. This book is told largely in first person, so we know what Jack knows.
• FBI agent Rachel Walling, another character threaded throughout Connelly’s books, does stupid thing after stupid thing, for no apparent reason.
• The killer uses the Internet in ways taken right from that Sandra Bullock movie, The Net. You know, like in real life.
• Too much happens too fast. The slow buildup and creeping menace of the Bosch novels — and The Poet, for that matter — is absent here; this was written like a John Grisham book: with the movie rights in mind from Page 1, if not already sold. There’s a stupid action sequence every 50 pages or so, and we are suddenly expected to believe that Jack McEvoy would be played by Bruce Willis circa Die Hard.
• Nothing makes much sense, until the ending, which is rushed, silly and suffers from McEvoy’s final, and telegraphed from the second chapter, deduction.

So was I disappointed? Yes. But to be honest, I kind of expected it going in, come to think of it. Connelly is really cranking books out these days — two this year, in fact — and something had to suffer. But every great writer is allowed a misstep now and then. It’s just too bad it had to be the book about the reporter, the book that started off with such personal depth for me.

I didn’t like this one much, but I quite enjoyed The Brass Verdict (the book before this one). And I can always go back and re-read Lost Light, or Trunk Music, or even The Poet again if I want to. You could, too.

Sometimes Will Smith Just Isn’t Right For The Part

Back in the late 90s, I was a reporter working at a newspaper in northern Ontario. I got a call one day from a friend who worked at the city’s science museum, a distinctive spot with a unique look and several key features. This friend gave me a scoop: film producers were in the city scouting the museum for a new movie.

“What movie?” I asked.

“It’s called X-Men,” she said. Well. My geek rockets fired and I had to put on a ruby quartz visor to contain my powers. As a lifelong X-Men fan, finding out that the film — which had been announced and was set up to shoot in Toronto — was coming to my city was like winning the spandex lotto.

I hustled the muscle all day, finally digging up enough of a story. Strangely, my editors didn’t see its value, but I pushed, and it made front page. But as I was talking to “unnamed film studio employees,” someone let a tidbit slip: Will Smith was in talks for the lead. This led me to a bit of a pause: Who, really, could Will Smith play in the X-Men movie? Was he going to be Wolverine? Cyclops?

It didn’t come to pass, as we all know. In fact, the movie wasn’t shot in the city at all; producers merely copied the look for Magneto’s cave and a few other sequences. I was thinking about this today, though, when I read that McG wants Will Smith to play Captain Nemo in his upcoming 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea movie.

Uh, no.

Comic writer Alan Moore got Captain Nemo right in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and this was carried over to the sucktastic movie version). Jules Verne wrote Nemo as an Indian prince, something subsequent filmmakers ignored. No, generations of kids saw an onscreen Nemo who looked like a typical sea captain: an old white man with a beard. Moore brought the real Nemo back, and did it well.

Will Smith can’t be Nemo. It would be epic turdity … but then, this is McG we’re talking about here.

Meanwhile, Jackie Chan is rumoured to be playing Mr. Miyagi in a remake of Karate Kid. This makes me want to watch the original again. Which I will soon do.

Why I Hate Going To The Doctor

From the Archives
July 16, 2006
I had a doctor’s appointment today, with a specialist who was going to help unlock the mystery of what happened to me last winter. I had something serious enough to land me in the ICU, but so far the exact nature of it has eluded the doctors so far.
One specialist sent me to another. But as Dr. No. 2 is the only guy in town doing what he does, there’s a lot of demand for his services. My appointment was made in March for July 16 – a four-month wait.
So I got up early this morning and headed over there. When I arrived, I found two of the doctor’s staffers engaged in a deep conversation about someone’s home renovation. Another patient was waiting, and two different phones were ringing, but these two ladies were too busy discussing square footage to bother answering.
After a couple of minutes one of them turned to me, looked me up and down, and said, in an icy voice: ‘Can I HELP you?’
I told her who I was and why I was there. She started flipping through the appointment book, then said: ‘We don’t have you down for today.’
‘I made this appointment months ago,’ I said. ‘You called me two weeks ago to confirm.’
She sighed. I was clearly ruining her day. She tapped at the computer, then went to the file cabinet and got my file. ‘You cancelled,’ she said, reading it.
‘I didn’t cancel it.’
‘You did,’ she said, jabbing a finger at the page. ‘It says it right here.’
‘But I didn’t,’ I repeated. I stayed as cool as possible. I have always found that staying cool and calm has more of an effect on idiots than blowing up and shouting.
At this point, the second woman joined in. ‘The only way an appointment can be cancelled is if the patient calls and cancels it,’ she said.
‘Well,’ I told her, ‘I’m the patient, and I didn’t call to cancel it. I’m here now. I have been waiting months for this appointment.’
The phone had not stopped ringing throughout this entire conversation, but neither woman picked it up. The other patient was listening with interest.
‘Well, I guess we’ll have to give you another appointment,’ the first woman sighed. She flipped open her book. I couldn’t help but notice that most of the pages were empty.
‘Will this take another four months?’ I asked. I probably sounded a little sarcastic by now.
‘No, no,’ she said. She named a day a week or so away,at 8:30 in the morning.
‘I work nights,’ I said. ‘Do you have anything later in the day?’
I love this part: she looked down at the empty pages of her appointment book and said: ‘No. He’s booked up.’
As she wrote the information on a little card, the second woman, who had been glaring at me throughout this entire exchange, leaned forward.
‘In THIS office patients are required to call a week before their appointments to confirm,’ she said, almost in a whisper.
‘I didn’t know that,’ I said. ‘This appointment was booked through Dr. XX’s office. And you folks called me a couple of weeks ago to confirm.’
‘You still have to call,’ she said. ‘We tell every new patient that.’
The first one handed me the appointment card. ‘It says so right on the card,’ she said, joining in the butt-covering exercise.
‘See you next week,’ I told them. The first one squeaked out a half-hearted ‘Sorry about the mixup.’ As I left, I heard them slip right back into their talk about parquet flooring in the family room. My intrusion into their day was over.
Outside, I glanced at the appointment card. Call one week prior to confirm? Not a mention.

Supercouch

From the Archives
April 2006
Tonight I will tell you the tale of Supercouch.
Eighteen months ago, when I drifted to shore, rudderless and with a broken compass, I had to slowly rebuild, from the keel up. At first, this involved buying new clothes, books and – of course – laptop (the iPod full of my decades of music, luckily, survived the sinking).
And as things developed, I began to acquire furniture. Along with the cheap bookcases, $5 coffee table and dollar-store spatula, there was Supercouch.
It sat in a corner of Elizabeth’s bedroom, covered in folded laundry and cushions, and it was some weeks before I took note of it.
“You can have it,” said the lady, who has lived in Ottawa, Toronto, Victoria and Seoul, and points between. “It’s been with me forever. I’ve hauled this thing around the country, but I don’t want it anymore.”
“What colour is it?” I asked.
We both looked at it. “Not sure,” she said. And it was hard to tell. Pink? Brown? Taupe? Hey, it folded out (into a wobbly bed with an inch-thick foam mattress) and it was easy to carry.
So Supercouch came to live with me, and for a year was the centrepiece of my living room. It suffered through movies good and bad. It survived spilled coffee, toast crumbs and worse. And while I never did quite get a handle on what colour Supercouch was, I relied on it every day.
Sadly, though, the time came to retire Supercouch. It had to go. This, though, is a problem: in this city, you can’t just heave your furniture to the curb. The city trash crew doesn’t collect stuff like that. You can sort of gamble that someone will come along and think they made a good score, but I had to be honest – this was Supercouch.
I called the Salvation Army. They come and pick old furniture up and sell it – a win-win situation for everyone.
“What kinda couch?” the lady asked.
“It’s a pinkish brown foldout.’ I said. “I like to call it Supercouch.”
“I don’t think I can help you,” she replied.
I ended up calling a number in the classifieds: We Pick Up Anything. The lady there said she was “takin’ some gross old mattresses out to the landfill,” so she could pencil me in.
For thirty bucks, this tough woman in a full-length dress and rubber boots came and, together, we hauled Supercouch out to a beat-down pickup truck. We took out the foam, tossed it in first, then piled Supercouch on top of several ratty old things that might have been mattresses in the 1970s.
A spaniel-faced man sat in the front seat and watched. He said nothing. “He’s too crippled up to help,” Junk Lady grunted. His life must be an odd one, sitting there as his lady hauls other people’s crap around town.
She thanked me for the dough. I thanked her for the help. And Supercouch headed off to the dump.
Elizabeth and I watched it go, its butt end leaning out of the back of the truck, lopsided without its foam. In the natural light, Supercouch was definitely pink. Or maybe brown.
Elizabeth’s hand slipped into mine.
“Do you feel a little sad?” I asked, thinking of the one year Supercouch was in my life, and all the years it was in hers, from town to town, job to job, home to home.
She gave me the arched eyebrow. “Darling,” she said, “it was just a couch.”