Jason Pinter: Fury

I read earlier (eight years ago!) a pleasant paperback novel by Jason Pinter, The Mark, and wanting to read something lightweight I picked up his later novel, Fury (Raivo in Finnish translation). I thought it was better book than The Mark, but I also have some reservations about it.

Fury reads a bit like a private eye novel, since the lead character, Henry Parker, is a newspaper reporter who narrates the story in first person. He meets a stranger, who looks like a homeless person. The stranger says he wants to speak about something important. Parker won't hear the man, but finds out next morning that the man is killed. Then the police come to him and tell him the dead man was his brother. Parker starts to dig into the story, feeling guilt and frustration, since he believes he could've saved his brother's life if he had just stopped and listened to him. And then his father is believed to be the killer and is taken into custody...

Fury is a fast-paced thriller with hardboiled overtones and with sensible amounts of grimness. It's an old-fashioned book, reminiscent of early wrong man novels and films and some classic newspaper stories, though Pinter has tried to bring his heroes into modern day, sometimes with a bit forced results. There are some implausibilities in the book (why won't the stranger say he's Parker's brother in the first place?), and some characters are a bit lifeless. There are some very talkative scenes, but still this is an entertaining book.

This is no Forgotten Book, but here's nevertheless a link to the on-going series of blog posts.

Jason Pinter's The Mark and John Rector's The Cold Kiss

As this is a literary blog and not really about my personal life and what I've been doing lately (it used to be, but as I've grown older and wiser [hah!], I've decided to go for an alternative), it has to suffice that I write about the books that I read during our 1½-week trip through Finland. Well, let me say this: we went first to Mänttä to visit my relatives, swam in the lake nearly all the time and visited the Mänttä Kuvataideviikot art thing, and then we went to Nokia to visit my dad and went to the Särkänniemi amusement park and Ottilia made me go to the new Motogee thing and I have to say I almost started to cry when it finally - after 28 seconds - ended. And then we went to Pori to visit my mother and just tried to chill out - which is near impossible in this temperature. (Over 25 Celsius all the time and no rain.)

Okay, the books. Jason Pinter is one of the newer thriller writers who hark back to the older traditions of the genre and don't write high tech thrillers à la Tom Clancy or don't go for the huge historical conspiracies like Dan Brown and his followers. The Mark, his first novel from 2007, is very reminiscent of the wrong man thrillers of the 1930's and 1940's. In fact, the novel could be labelled "noir", unless one wants grimness and an unhappy ending from one's noir. In The Mark Pinter creates his series character, journalist Henry Parker, who's involved accidentally in killing a police officer and becomes a most wanted criminal. Parker decides to solve the case before the police catch him, just like many heroes of the films from the thirties and fourties.

There's much to like in the book: the narrative is catchy, the pace is good, the description about journalism and journalists is good (Pinter is a journalist himself) and there's not much padding. I thought however that there were some implausibilities that nagged me from the halfway on, and the romance felt a bit forced and clichéd. I notice now - after having finished the book over a week ago - that I don't remember much about the book. But I guess that's one of the criteria of entertainment: you don't want to think too much about it. Me, I could've wished for more.

John Rector's debut novel, The Cold Kiss (out now from Forge in hardcover), was more to my taste: a noir novel that has the grimness that's required in noir. Rector's minimalistic style and the plot reminded me very much of the classic noir paperbacks of the fifties and writers like Day Keene, Gil Brewer and Richard Deming. Of course Rector, writing in the 2000's, is more open about sex, drugs and violence than his predecessors, but the picture he paints about human evil is no less chilling than with Keene or the other writers. The Cold Kiss is essentially a thriller set in a snowbound roadside motel where there are only a few people, one of them seemingly dead.

One of the best things about The Cold Kiss is how Rector reveals facts about his characters little by little. You get to know them and feel for them and even when they are not the best of people, you have to sympathize for them and hope the best for them. Even though they seem pretty stupid and do unnecessarily nasty things.

I can't much say about the plot, since there are lots of twists early on. I can say, though, that mentioning Scott Smith in the back cover copy gives too much about what will happen in the book. These things said, I must admit that the book is just a bit too long, maybe by 20 or 30 pages. I also guessed who the bad guy in the book is - there are too few characters in the novel. And the ending could've also been just a bit grimmer. There's a hint of ambivalence in the end, but I could've wished for more. Let's make it clear, though: an excellent debut.