Dan Brown's earlier thrillers

I've mentioned in passing one or two times that I'm editing a reference book on thriller writers for a Finnish non-fiction publisher. I've been reading Sidney Sheldon lately and let me tell you, it's no pleasure. I had to take a break and start Brian Garfield's The Paladin - it's the last one I haven't read yet. Garfield is God compared to some other writers I've been tackling with, even though The Paladin is not Garfield at his best.

I've been writing also the history of the thriller genre to act as a foreword to the whole book, and it is more difficult than it seems at first, since the boundaries of the genre are so flexible. I think I'm now finished with the article (I'd post it here, but it's understandably in Finnish only; well, that hasn't stopped me before) and just now I got to thinking: what kind of reviews did Dan Brown's early novels receive before he wrote The Da Vinci Code (which, in case you don't remember or even know, I thought was the worst book ever given its popularity and media attention)? It would be interesting to read them, since the reviews now are quite predictable. (I'm pretty ashamed of Nelson De Mille giving a blurb to Brown saying something like "Brown is pure genius". If this guy is pure genius, then I'm Jesus Christ.)

By the way, someone here claims that Garfield's novel The Paladin is stated being based "on fact". I'm pretty certain that Garfield himself says on his short preface that the novel is based only on what "Christopher Creighton" has told to be true. Garfield says that he can't know the truth himself. I'd believe Garfield only wanted to write a thrilling story.

Still on Brian Garfield

Finished Brian Garfield's Hopscotch (1973) late last night. It's great, as you would expect from Garfield. Very professional work, solid portraits of the spy bureaucracy (which must be closer to the truth than the usual spy novels) and a well developed portrait of depression of a middle-aged man. I hadn't read this before and I'm glad I read it now. Only one glitch: there's been so many exposé books about CIA in recent years that it seems a stretch that they are ripping up their pants for one in this.

I was checking on Garfield's bibliography and found out that he switched publishers almost from book to book, having novels come out from such small outfits as World (wasn't that a lending library publisher?) to such big conglomerates as Macmillan. So I have to take some of my words back when I accused the Finnish publishers for throwing Garfield around. He was thrown around by the American publishers, too. It seems, though, that that may have been his own choice, since his books are very different from one another. I read somewhere that Garfield said himself that he doesn't want to be pinned down, i.e. he doesn't want to be labelled as a thriller writer or a crime writer. Maybe that's the reason why he's had at least seven or eight publishers in his career.

I also got to thinking about his early books that came out usually as paperbacks. Most of them were Westerns (some of which are quite good), but his first crime novel was published in a hardcover by Avalon, another lending library publisher. The Rimfire Murders came out in 1962 under the alias of Frank O'Brian. Garfield has said that while he's not ashamed of anything he's written (not even his first Western novel he wrote while he was 18 years old), but he doesn't want his old books to be reprinted. It would be interesting to see his first crime novel back in print, though, maybe as a Hard Case Crime paperback. (There's only one copy in Abebooks, though it's not very expensive at $8.55.)

It would be also interesting to hear where he draws the line. His first novel under his own name was one of the first stories about the Vietnam war: The Last Bridge, in 1966. Could that be reprinted?

PS. Scroll down to see a link-infested list of American paperback writers translated in a short story form. There was something wrong with some of the links first, but I fixed that - hopefully.