Books

The pro

Robert Crais’s winning formula

By WILLIAM CORBETT | February 27, 2007

HIS MOMENT: Crais’s brutal protagonist punishes transgressors with impunity.

During dinner parties nowadays, everyone, writers included, talks about movies. Rarely does a “serious” novel dominate conversation, but crime novels sometimes have a moment. Readers have a thirst for formula fiction. We want the pull of narrative and the comfort of the tried and true with a twist, an edge, something original to the writer. Not original in the sense of Proust or Joyce, whose novels can be measured only against fiction that is dissimilar but considered to be of a like stature. The crime novelist has to be a professional, for his work will be measured against Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald (no need for first names), Leonard, Connolly, Mankell, and Child, the masters of the form. Robert Crais is a pro. The Watchman is his 14th novel, but it’s my first, and now I’ll have the pleasure of catching up with him.

The Watchman is “a Joe Pike novel” — Pike being the silent and deadly half of a two-man team. His partner, in all but name only, is the funny and dogged Elvis Cole, the gumshoe of the two. Pike is, like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch, an ex-soldier. Like Bosch, Pike served in Vietnam, and like Reacher, he’s capable of sudden, deadly violence. He’s a master of Asian martial arts, his body a scarred and tattoo’d weapon. The Pike-Cole partnership is one of Crais’s fresh wrinkles, but the most interesting wrinkle is Pike himself. Like Chandler’s Marlowe, he’s a knight, but his killing force and near total indifference to the deaths he causes make him feel contemporary. He is a man in a permanent state of rage (not that he knows it) who because of his profession (in this novel he guards a rich young woman) is free to think and act with little emotion and afterward feels no remorse. Pike can do what Americans of whatever political stripe seem to want to do: punish transgressors with impunity and be in the right. His father abused him as a child, and that gives him even greater moral authority. In crime fiction you can load the dice and still, if you write with force as Crais does, come up a winner.

Crais offers abundant detail, especially the lab work provided by John Chen of the LAPD — Pike served three years with the police before leaving for reasons that The Watchman makes clear. The author is also convincing in his depiction of the geography and real estate of Los Angeles (America’s city of private eyes), a key element in the plot. His deadpan driven prose carries you along in a style that is the essence of hardboiled. (“The coroner had five unidentified stiffs, and now he would have two more.”) Crais permits himself no darlings in the manner of Chandler’s wicked similes. (The closest he comes is: “She wanted to touch him. She wanted to reach out the way you always want to reach through the bars at a zoo to touch the big animals.”) He delivers the pleasure of process, and you solve the case with his detectives, absorbed by the twists and turns the plot takes.

In his Paris Review interview, the Nobel Prize poet and communist Pablo Neruda answered a question about what critiques of capitalism he could recommend by pointing to American crime fiction. The crime in Chandler, he noted, is often blackmail. Money, and rich people, are motive forces. Crais is heir to this vision, only the numbers are much bigger than in the old days, and when they reach over nine figures betrayal has all the motive it needs.