Ed here: Every once in awhile there's an on line review of my
first novel, which I wrote in 1983 thanks to the enormous help of my friend Max
Collins.
Otherwise I don't ever think about it. It's just one more book
on my personal shelf.
But it was reviewed yesterday by a Russian journalist and I
thought his take was interesting. It captures what I dimly recall trying to do
with the book.
I had a bad day when the first review came out. PW didn't like
it much but said it was a "first novel with promise." Then an Iowa
City friend of my said that the guy who ran the famous bookstore there said it
was a pretty bad novel.
Better news from Booklist: "a slick, fast-paced, witty
mystery." And from Library Journal: "The book has great strength in
the cynical, sardonic, witty voice of the narrator. An auspicious debut."
And Newsday gave it an outright rave: "Thoroughly entertaining this (hate
letter to the advertising industry) is executed with flair and
conviction." Then the agent I shared with Loren Estleman sent him a galley
and Loren wrote me praising it. He liked the way I used the advert agency as a
noirish set piece and the way I turned the Mad Men scenario into hardboiled
fiction.
Britain, France and (I believe) Germany took it and it sold just
well enough to get me a second contract.(There would be two movie options.)
A week after I'd sold Rough Cut I sold a horror novel I'd written the
same way--get up every morning at five, work till seven and then shave, shower
and head for the little ad agency I owned.
Here's the review from Ray
Garraty:http://longwalkwithbooks.blogspot.com/2014/11/rough-cut.html
Michael Ketchum is a partner in a small advertising agency.
Michael seems to be the only one who really works there, not only looking after
the artistic side of the business, but also taking part in the creative
process. The other advertisers, starting with Michael’s partner Denny Harris,
are preoccupied by different activities: looking for mistresses on the side,
stabbing each other in the back, scheming, drinking during working hours, at
best, doing nothing.
Michael suspects that his partner Harris keeps the biggest
client wife's named Clay Traynor as a mistress. If this secret will emerge,
Traynor is likely to stop working with Michael’s firm, and the firm simply will
go bankrupt. Michael hires a sleaze private detective to gather evidence on
Harris. With photos from a private detective Michael goes to his partner to
confront him and put pressure on him. In the Harris’ house the corpse of his
partner greets Michael. Michael, scared, doesn’t report crime to the police,
and soon someone kills another agency employee and another. Michael must find
the killer before Michael will be the next.
After Rough Cut Gorman will write a few dozen
books, but in 1985 this will be his debut. The circle of the novel's characters
are only employees of an advertising agency, and the action rarely spreads
beyond the office and apartment of the protagonist. This makes the mystery
local, and the atmosphere stuffy. Everyone is a suspect, and the suspects die
one by one. Could the killer be a secretary? The agency employs envious cowards
and careerists that even secretaries are not to be excluded.
The intrigue expertly is stretched until the very end, and I can
assure you, you will not guess who is a killer.
I also quite enjoyed the novel because of the presence of a bad
private detective. If usually private detective is a knight on a white horse, a
hard man, walking down the mean streets, and in these cases invariably P.I. is
a main protagonist, in this book the private detective Stokes is an aahole,
blackmailer and sissy, and not the main character either. I have not seen such
disgusting private investigator in a long time.
Gorman’s prose is another pleasant surprise, not rough cut at
all, the refined product.
«After my divorce, and before I felt much like falling in love
again, I spent many evenings alone in my bachelor apartment feasting on
Stouffer's frozen dinners and using self-pity the way other people used drugs.
I also got into the habit of approximating a sensory-deprivation tank by
sitting in the bathtub, throwing back several gins, and coming dangerously
close to dozing off in the hot water.
Which is where I was three-and-a-half
hours after somebody knocked me out at Denny Harris's house.»
This is conscious, adult, men's prose, surprisingly assured for
the detective genre. Rough Cut is a pleasant debut.
Автор: Ray
Garraty на 8:24 PM
So there is this: "the guy who ran the famous bookstore there said it was a shitty little novel."
ReplyDeleteAnd then there is this: I cannot think of a writer who has not had to deal with "shitty little" comments from "shitty little" know-it-alls.
But you clearly now have cause to laugh at the "shitty little" bookstore gnome.
And -- as a bonus -- you've enlisted a new reader. So, I'm off to Amazon to see what I can find. All the best from a humble old fart who knows a little bit about good writing.
P.C. I corrected the "shitty little novel" thing because I don't recall his exact words. Which is why I didn't put it in quotes. I changed it to something like" said it was a bad book." He isn't a gnome for not liking my book. Not everybody was nuts about it. I cited it only to show that coming on the same day as the review I didn't feel that I was off to much of a start. Thanks for writing and. Hope you like the book.
ReplyDeleteRead this a few years back, Ed, but didn't realize it was your debut. I, of course, love it. Now I'm gonna read it again! Oh, and the bookstore guy was probly a descendant of the guy who rejected Melville's opus, dismissing it as, to paraphrase, some damned thing about whales.
ReplyDelete