Chicago born Jeffrey Deaver is definitely not one of our better crime novelists
More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol II
By Jeffrey Deaver
Pub. by Simon and Schuster
435 pp. $24.95
Some guys have all the luck. After careers in journalism, trial law and folk-singing (?!), Jeffrey Deaver decided that his true calling was in writing. With a string of bestsellers, some of which have been made into films (most notably, the Philip Noyce film “The Bone Collector” with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie), he is now quite a success. This is an enduring mystery far more potent than the ones he purveys in his books.
“More Twisted” grabbed me specifically because I disliked Deaver’s previous novels. This was a book of short stories and I figured they had to be better than what I’d read before. I was wrong. It was more of the same. There were three good stories out of 16. The characters are thinly developed, the plots are clever but all stolen from old movies and pulp novels and TV shows and the language employed, while attempting to sound upper-class British, are strictly from Mickey Spillane. In fact, Deaver makes Spillane sound like Shakespeare. In one instance he refers to to stolen goods as “perped merch.” It would be hilarious if it weren’t so embarrassing to the writer (and, by extension, the reader also).
Deaver doesn’t just telegraph future plot events to his readers, he practically sends them singing telegrams. Nothing that can be implied with subtlety is left to do so. Every important plot point is exclaimed with a raised fist. Deaver is the crime fiction equivalent of the protester marching in the street with a misspelled cardboard sign arguing for a cause he (the marcher) cannot understand or even identify.
His use of slang provides a perfect example. This, from the story “Locard’s Principle” and Deaver’s stalwart character, the invalid detective with the ridiculous name, Lincoln Rhyme:
“‘Been havin’ a DIS-cussion with one of my buddies. Here we are, all cozy in BK. ‘Hey, hey, smile when I’m talkin’ ‘bout you.’
Fred Dellray was on the other end of the phone, in Brooklyn apparently. Rhyme could picture him with one of his CI’s. The tall, lanky FBI agent, with piercing eyes as dark as his skin, ran a network of confidential informants – the chic term for snitches…”
In this passage Deaver lays bare all of his weaknesses as a crime fiction writer. He explains way too much to his reader. Immediately after setting the scene, he feels the need to tell the reader that the FBI agent is a black guy, that “CI” means confidential informant and that “BK” stands for Brooklyn (rather than Burger King). All of these details are things an attentive reader would have already noticed. Deaver treats his audience like they are fools, and perhaps they are.
To be as blunt as one of the clichéd murder weapons he so often employs in his stories, Deaver is to the mystery/suspense genre what Barry Manilow is to rock’n’roll. He is not on the guest list.
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