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Mike 's Reviews > Fidelity
Fidelity
by Thomas Perry
by Thomas Perry
Perry must be one of the most reliable thriller writers (or is it just reliable writers) working, the George Sisler of suspense, not a game-changing showboat that everyone natters on about, but on base about 3/4 of the time.
Perry plots cleanly but minimally; he doesn't fuss about big twists or major developments, but usually sets up a couple of characters who are after (or escaping from) one another. Here, it's a recently-widowed Emily Kramer, whose private eye husband was killed, and whose life was more complicated than she knew. Meanwhile, the guy (Jerry Hobart) hired to kill him has now been hired to kill her. Start your engines.
But Perry does two things (here, and there, and everywhere) remarkably well.
1. Streamlined but fastidious detailing of how people do things. I've got this real jones for heist films, for watching people carefully plot the mechanics of stealing something. Perry excites me in a similar way, making strange and unfamiliar activities seem do-able. When you're trying to shoot a guy, what steps do you take--as a matter of course--so that the job gets done, and you don't? When you're trying to shed your identity, or find a piece of hidden information, how? Perry writes with nailbiting intensity about such acts.
2. A remarkable attention to the mindsets of his characters. Hobart, the assassin, is no clean sociopath, but instead seems believably human, acts for reasons that--slowly, with the same kind of painstaking attention to detail--Perry reveals in his character's actions. Characters don't sit down and cogitate; we're rarely dipping in their streams of consciousness or privy to their private thoughts. It's more a matter of tying small insightful details to the way they remember, the way they respond to people around them. One of the characters in this book is something different at the end than I perceived him/her to be at the beginning, and yet you couldn't pinpoint some big reveal: the shadows slowly creep in, and before you know it, this character's quite dark indeed.
Maybe he does three things, 'though this third notion is tied to the above: Perry is very, very attentive to the ways women are mistreated by men, and he focuses in consistently and thoughtfully on how his women characters find themselves most fully by escaping, evading, losing the men in their lives.
Good book.
Perry plots cleanly but minimally; he doesn't fuss about big twists or major developments, but usually sets up a couple of characters who are after (or escaping from) one another. Here, it's a recently-widowed Emily Kramer, whose private eye husband was killed, and whose life was more complicated than she knew. Meanwhile, the guy (Jerry Hobart) hired to kill him has now been hired to kill her. Start your engines.
But Perry does two things (here, and there, and everywhere) remarkably well.
1. Streamlined but fastidious detailing of how people do things. I've got this real jones for heist films, for watching people carefully plot the mechanics of stealing something. Perry excites me in a similar way, making strange and unfamiliar activities seem do-able. When you're trying to shoot a guy, what steps do you take--as a matter of course--so that the job gets done, and you don't? When you're trying to shed your identity, or find a piece of hidden information, how? Perry writes with nailbiting intensity about such acts.
2. A remarkable attention to the mindsets of his characters. Hobart, the assassin, is no clean sociopath, but instead seems believably human, acts for reasons that--slowly, with the same kind of painstaking attention to detail--Perry reveals in his character's actions. Characters don't sit down and cogitate; we're rarely dipping in their streams of consciousness or privy to their private thoughts. It's more a matter of tying small insightful details to the way they remember, the way they respond to people around them. One of the characters in this book is something different at the end than I perceived him/her to be at the beginning, and yet you couldn't pinpoint some big reveal: the shadows slowly creep in, and before you know it, this character's quite dark indeed.
Maybe he does three things, 'though this third notion is tied to the above: Perry is very, very attentive to the ways women are mistreated by men, and he focuses in consistently and thoughtfully on how his women characters find themselves most fully by escaping, evading, losing the men in their lives.
Good book.
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Thanks, Gio. Damn, you keep reminding me of the Goodman. Last time you raved, I bought it, but I buy everything and now it sits on a shelf with so many other bought books. I'm going to bump it up that interminable queue; I have to read it so that I can talk more with you.Heists: David Denby once said heist films were popular with filmmakers because they echoed the experiences (frustrating, collaborative, prone to error) of filmmaking. Intriguing... yet I think I've always been interested in the structural repetition of such films. There's the prep, the plot all laid out... then there's the performance, inevitably different. This strikes me as a neat metaphor for the experience of genre, the inevitable differences of each repetition.
But when I'm feeling less high-hatted I simply admit: I love plots which seem to move inexorably toward a failure to fully control plots. Certain conspiracy thrillers fit neatly here (the exposure of the Powers inevitably contaminating or just killing the hapless investigator), many horror stories (picture the gloomy "oh god of course" as you hear the knocking at the end of "The Monkey's Paw"), and so many crime narratives. You've noted before to me how sick and perverse I must be to be so smitten with escapist takes on the failure to escape.
I think you'd like Perry. Go try his Jane Whitefield novels, which started with _Vanishing Act_.
this is interesting, mike, because the thrust of my comment is that heist and other complex collaborative plots WORK, and that's why we like them. i keep thinking of spike lee's Inside Man. the pleasure for me is entirely in the fact that the plot gets carried out, albeit with glitches. what would be the pleasure of a failed plot? or am i getting you wrong? the glitches are meant to scare you into doubting the plot, whereas it ultimately holds -- must hold. can't think of any heist fiction in which the plot that doesn't work. it would be a failure of genre. am i right?
I don't think so--it seems to me that many heist films are about the inevitability of chaotic interference, of unplanned problems. For instance, Rififi: the heist goes well, but the aftermath is one horrible problem after another, and the outcome suggests that the precision of planning, execution is for naught. (A great heist film that's hard to find is the Quebecois Pouvoir Intime. A perfect plot--to steal a whole armored car, and then break into it in seclusion--is thrown awry when the thieves end up with a guard trapped in the vehicle.) Donald Westlake has made a pretty great living off bad heists played for comic effect (his Dortmunder novels) and thrills (his Parker novels, writing as Richard Stark); I'm even more drawn to the darker versions (like the recent The Lookout).
Stuff like that... I think successful heist vs. flawed/failed heist are both generically "acceptable." (Which is more fun? Hm.... I like 'em both...)
Wow, Mike, this book sounds fantastic; at least by my standards. You've pinpointed everything I like about crime fiction/heist thrillers when done well, as well some major things I dislike (e.g., big twists, sudden switcheroos).I've never read anything by Perry before, but this sounds like a great place to start. I'll have to read it when it comes out in paperback.
You'll like Perry, Adam. This isn't a heist thing--I think he's done one sort-of-heisty thing (_Metzger's Dog_)--but mostly they circle 'round chases. Almost everything of his before this ought to be around in good cheap paperbacks.... I think I read his first novel (_The Butcher's Boy_) when it came out and have been hooked since.
Yeah, I got that from the description, but since the discussion here was largely about heist plots, they were on my mind.The Denby quote about heist films appealing to filmmakers because fictional heists mirror the controlled chaos and collaborative nature of filmmaking is probably true, but I think there's a larger appeal to anyone who works in a creative field. There's a scene in one of the books in Richard Stark's Parker series (I think it's The Black Ice Score), in which Parker is being driven around a site which a group of men want to rob, and Parker is turning vague ideas around in his head. He knows that while he has no idea yet what's going to happen exactly, eventually he will have a single idea that will crystallize into a full-fledged plot. When I read that I thought to myself, "Well, that's a pretty obvious metaphor for the creative process of writing a novel, isn't it?"
Oh, and by the way, I looked up Perry's bio and saw that he was born in Tonawanda, New York, and attended Cornell University and the University of Rochester. As a native of Ithaca, New York, I gotta support the locals, so he just jumped several places ahead on my "to-read" queue (most of which is not listed on Goodreads, because it would just be too depressingly long).
Ithaca, eh? I'm from Brockport, outside Rochester. And Perry's Tonawanda connection was what first drew me to him.Small blah blah. I have the new Parker novel sitting here, fresh from the local library...
Dirty Money? I've read all the Stark novels (including the not-very-interesting Grofield hardcovers) up through Flashfire. I'm looking forward to catching up, but I kind of overloaded on them a couple years ago and am spacing them out more now.Also, while I liked Backflash and Flashfire, I thought the series (and the Parker character) just made more sense in the '60s. Still, Westlake set a pretty high bar with the first dozen novels; for my money they're still some of the best heist thrillers of all time.
A, agree about Grofield. Those felt like a bust.B, I've read my way up through 'em all--and I mostly agree that Parker's best read in (against?) the context where he first emerged. I first came to these books after seeing Boorman's "Point Blank" and tracked down the novel from which it sprang, and while that film is stylistically another kind of beast it--or maybe Lee Marvin--distill the tone so perfectly. I glutted myself on the books, buying 'em up on ebay, and then,
C, found myself Parkered out. But paced at one-per-year, the way Westlake kicks them out, they go down smooth.
What are other good heist novels? Off the top of my head, I'm drawing a blank. There's a nice twist in Philip Kerr's vaguely-sci-fi _The Second Angel_, where the thieves plot their score via virtual reality, and things go wrong in some particular ways, and this sets up some nice tension as we await the real job... but alas the book isn't that good, fizzing out quickly.
It's true, there aren't too many good heist novels that immediately spring to mind. Most crime novels about scores seem to treat them as something to get out of the way so the real intrigue of the narrative can begin. Maybe that's why I liked the Parker series so much; because those books really focused on the mechanics of assembling a crew, coming up with a plan, securing equipment, and then executing the plan. That stuff is really interesting, or at least it can be, and I think too many crime writers ignore all the little details because they think that they're boring. Or maybe it's just hard to write about heists well.I don't know. One good heist novel that springs to mind is Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery. It's historical fiction, but contains a lot of the same elements that I liked about the Parker series, in particular all the meticulous detail.
I've heard Edward Bunker's Dog Eat Dog is a great novel about an armed robbery, but I haven't read it yet.
That's too bad that the Philip Kerr novel you mentioned fizzles out. I read his World War II-era trilogy of PI novels that took place in Berlin. I thought they were pretty good. I also read Dead Meat which I thought was OK but not great. After that none of the flap copy on his books appealed to me strongly enough to want to pick them up.
I liked that Crichton one. I recall the Bunker book as being pretty good, but more about the criminals than the crime... but it's been a while.Yeah, Kerr's detective stuff was grand, and he's returned to them lately. But in between there's a lot of stuff trying to be Crichton, and it's for the most part weak tea.
clearly, you conquered me with the last paragraph, but, also, i too am a fan of heist fiction. what i like about heists is not so much the unveiling of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of a criminal act as the slightly paranoid pleasure heist fictions offer in the construction and execution of something very complex involving a variety of acts and agents. i like my paranoid pleasures subtle and once removed, so i can't do truly paranoid fictions, but heists, heists i can do. the realization of the highly improbable through exquisite calculation and seamless group work: that gets me every time. i think part of the pleasure is that i don't believe it for a second: not that the highly improbable might come true or that exquisite calculation might work, but that a group might work seamlessly. so, any heist fiction that shows irreparable cracks between the group members is a blow too many for me to the suspension of disbelief. the whole edifice come down. i put down the book or walk out of the theater.
a heist metaphor in reverse: allegra goodman's Intuition, which reconstructs the perfect, seamless way in which a group failed to work, in the face of an apparent success. one of my favorite novels of the last ten years.