Sharks Never Sleep: Library Edition

Rating:
Summary: Another Delightful Opus
Review: In the series' third outing Nolan once again hits one out of the park, successfully evoking the spirit of bygone Hollywood glamor. Once again we have the Black Mask boys chewing up the scenery amid spectacular movie sets, Spanish-era estates and a heavy who will strongly remind them of Bing Crosby. But hidden amongst all this is a surprise: the story of an authentic California life. Erle Gardner of Perry Mason fame was born in Oroville, spent a year at Palo Alto High (Paly), defended the rights of Chinese in Oxnard and later moved to Ventura and then Hollywood. As a westerner at that time, Gardner was a bit less sophisticated than his counterparts Hammett and Chandler who hailed from the east coast and England respectively. At a 1997 mystery seminar I heard author Nolan wondering aloud just how to write a novel in the Gardner style, which in many ways is an absence of style really. Nolan needn't have worried. He pulls off this story about the return of a lost love just fine and, anyway, apart from the occasional special effect, his style matches that of only one writer anyway: Nolan. As it should be. It's true that the old saw "show me instead of telling me" can sometimes be applied, but Nolan has a lot of ground to cover and overall does so quite well.

Rating:
Summary: Flatfooted.
Review: The gimmick (Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler solving a real mystery together) is entertaining enough, and Nolan eventually builds a enough of a plot to keep most readers going, but I must say I found the book a big disappointment. Despite the little lectures on California missions, the changing editorship of Black Mask magazine, and so forth -- and the pointless cameo appearance of cardboard cutouts labeled Mae West, John Barrymore, etc -- there is no sense at all of life in the '30s. At first I thought the flatfooted style was meant to be a comment on narrator Erle Stanley Gardner's writing, but at his worst Gardner wasn't this banal, cliche-ridden and tautological (again and again, a character's speech will be tagged with a clause summarizing its contents or explaining its already-obvious intention.) But okay, we don't always look for any kind of style in a certain kind of whodunit, and Nolan does deliver a decent mystery. What I couldn't stand -- I wouldn't even have finished the book if I hadn't been stuck in a hotel room with nothing else -- was the constant stream of anachronistic language. The whole point of this entertainment is that it takes place in the '30s, but again and again, the stock phraseology comes from the '70s or later. The Bing Crosbyesque character is "laid-back", someone keeps a "low profile", a celebrity funeral is a "media event" attended by "death freaks." Once would be an irritating but forgiveable slip-up, but when it keeps happening page after page, the carelessness of it becomes downright insulting.