In today’s installment of “Tangled Yarns Undermines His Credibility as a GAD Purist and Aficionado”, I am introducing myself to the oeuvre of popular novelist Harlan Coben, writer of many NYT-bestselling suspense thrillers. Specifically, I’ve read the first novel in Coben’s series of sports-themed mysteries about Myron Bolitar, a former Duke and Celtics basketball player, who, after recovering from a career-ending but impermanent injury, has become a Harvard law graduate and a Manhattan-based agent for many athletes, a couple of whom are even famous. This book came out in 1995, meaning that we’re past both the Golden and Silver Ages of detective fiction. And certainly this kind of action-packed private eye story is more far-removed from the fair-play tradition than some of my other endeavors, like Cornell Woolrich and Ruth Rendell. Deal Breaker is stylistically aligned closer to the lineage of hardboiled writers – Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, John and Ross MacDonald – than to any of the authors I’ve reviewed on the blog thus far. Even though it’s not a fair-play murder mystery and it doesn’t pretend to be, I still found Deal Breaker full of action, intrigue, character, and witticisms.
As mentioned, Myron Bolitar is a sports agent in NYC, whose own experience having been on the precipice of international fame as an NBA player and then falling from grace gives him an unusual level of empathy for his clients, many of whom find themselves on that same precipice Myron left off on. One of these clients is Christian Steele, who has just graduated from (the fictional) Reston University as a star quarterback, and is about to be signed to the Titans (a fictionalized version of the Jets before they were called the Jets.) While Myron is struggling to work out Christian’s contract with the Titans’ slimy but lucrative owner, Otto Burke, Christian comes to Myron with chilling news: he’s just been sent a lewd picture of his girlfriend Kathy Culver, who has been missing for 18 months, from an anonymous source, on top of other incidents which seem to indicate that Kathy may be alive, and that her disappearance is connected to the recent murder of her father Adam, ostensibly a mugging gone wrong. Myron decides to investigate for the sake of Christian’s well-being, but also has a personal stake in the situation. Myron was previously in a serious relationship with Kathy’s sister, Jessica, and as he digs deeper into the truth about Kathy’s disappearance, becomes again entangled with Jessica.
The pace of the book is frenetic. There are many plot threads that dance around one another ceaselessly for nearly 400 pages, with each aspect of the story seeming to just barely border the others at first until, slowly, the entire picture of what’s going on becomes clear. Coben has a knack of ending a chapter with a cliffhanger, then focusing on a completely different thing in the next chapter. Normally this would annoy me – it’s the kind of weak shtick that weakened some of Carr’s could’ve-been-great books – but somehow Coben manages to pull it off. Many times this sequence of cliffhanger-non sequitur-resolution will cascade on itself, with the pause after one cliffhanger resolving another earlier cliffhanger, and then going back to resolve the newest one. Because of the readability of Coben’s prose, after an end-of-chapter plot twist, I wanted to go on to the next chapter, and even after finding that it doesn’t answer the most recent question, still kept reading on to find out what that answer would be, and even after that kept reading because the momentum of adrenaline from the prior revelations continued.
Coben manages not to lose sight of the plot itself, though. There is a clear linear realization of the investigation of Kathy’s disappearance, from the first hints of her possible resurrection and the initial accumulation of facts to the uncovering of long-buried secrets and eventually the trapping of the culprit. At the same time, the other conflicts are fleshed out and resolved in parallel, such as the conflict concerning Christian Steele’s Titans contract and Otto Burke’s sliminess, the possible rekindling of love between Myron and Jessica, and the slow burn of a domestic drama in the Culver household, once apparently happy but now marred by discord and tragedies.
There is a clear strength of character in this novel, whether said character has a large or small role. Coben is best able to showcase and develop his characters by the terse, witty dialogue he writes. The way certain characters will return an insult or other verbal attack directed at them gives a quick but significant insight into their personality. For example, Myron’s one-liners underscore the dichotomy between his tough, crude external self, and his vulnerable, empathetic internal self. Likewise, the dialogue we get from Windsor Horne “Win” Lockwood III, Myron’s college roommate, friend, benefactor, bodyguard, and a charismatically psychopathic billionaire WASP, highlights his own unique personality, one that is dominated by narcissism and lack of caring for humanity, but still piqued by such excitements as golf, prostitutes, guns, and Tae Kwon Do, the latter of which he uses to surprisingly deadly force. But the characters’ personalities themselves, too, are memorable in and of themselves. Win, as just mentioned, is a very unique character, and was my favorite in the book – every scene with him is a delight, in a slightly creepy but still enjoyable way. Myron’s secretary Esperanza, formerly a pro-wrestler known as “Little Pocahontas”, is strong and capable, always looking out for herself and for Myron as well. Other characters who seem to stand in the way of Myron’s investigation or of his client’s goals, like Otto’s right-hand man Larry Hanson or Sheriff Jake who was a lead officer on Kathy’s case, are shown at first to be cold and uncooperative but are slowly revealed to be more complex, having their own particular motives and the same kind of abilities of empathy that Myron has.
There are a lot of gratuitous depictions of sexual content and violence in the book. The plot is more or less opened by the discovery of a nude photography of Kathy Culver in a pornographic magazine, and Myron chases down this lead by looking into the world of phone sex, by way of creepy high school teachers. On the violence side, many of Myron’s interactions, especially on the sports agency side of things, seem to include some kind of skirmish or scuffle. One of our first glimpses into this is when Myron’s car tires are slashed by a goon warning him to lay off of a client who is (illegally) contractually obligated to another agent; Myron puts him temporarily out of business. Things escalate when said goon’s buddy tries to assassinate Myron and Esperanza, only to have his head blown clean off by Win. There is much more where that came from, as well. Perhaps this is not the book for the squeamish, but rest assured the many violent scenes help to portray the characters of Myron and Win versus the kind of world they move around in, and the lewd content described ends up playing a significant role in understanding the breakdown of the Culvers’ domestic bliss.
A more specific aspect of Deal Breaker I found interesting was the minutiae about New Jersey included by Coben, who grew up in the state and (according to Wikipedia) even went to high school with Chris Christie. Coben gives particular attention to NJ’s admittedly horrible highways, such as the NJ Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, and his descriptions of them clearly come from someone who has had to suffer those two dystopian wastelands of highways countless times. Mentioned as well is the unvarying suburban layout of many neighborhoods in northern NJ, a reminder of the sudden change from urban sprawl to suburban white flight in the 1950s. Coben even gifts us with interesting pieces of Jersey trivia, such as how the Meadowlands Arena, where the Titans practice in the book (and which has been abandoned for a few years in reality,) was once named in honor of unpopular former governor Brendan Byrne, to the dismay of many. Coben loves his home state, for all its strengths and flaws, which really comes through his portrayal of it.
The mystery plot is alright, but I didn’t read Deal Breaker for that specifically and it’s more of a feature of the novel than a highlight. Kathy’s disappearance is initially coupled with the murder of her father, and about halfway through there is a second murder, of someone else closely connected to Kathy. While much of the book showcases Myron’s investigation of the disappearance and the murders, it is mostly a series of interrogations and appraisals of scenes of interest. Most of the pure detection Myron does is either handled off-page with the help of Win and others, or is never given a cohesive rationale. Again, not that I minded this, but I want to make it clear that this isn’t fair-play nor does it pretend to be. However, the solution given by Myron is pragmatically satisfying, implicating a conventionally surprising party and laying out the general scheme of the crimes. There was actually one “clue” which I found rather clever, especially for a book not focused on cluing (ROT13 Puevfgvna’f rkphfr sbe gur svatrecevagf va Anapl Freng’f erfvqrapr naq ubj vg pbasyvpgf jvgu jurer fnvq svatrecevagf ner.) Another part of the solution I liked is that the way Myron “traps” the murderer into proving themself guilty is portrayed in such a way that the reader could fall into the same trap, essentially buying into the lie that Myron gives in order to bait the murderer, because Coben does not point out that it is a lie until after all is said and done. I for one did.
Finally, I did want to point out that there was one funny connection I found between the Myron Bolitar series in general and the more clue-orineted side of GAD. Think about MB Sports, and its general setup of personnel. We have Myron, the agent who is willing to play dirty for his clients but who still truly cares about them. Esperanza is the secretary who may have a bit of a “will-they-won’t-they” relationship with Myron but is still her own confident woman. Win doesn’t actually work for Myron, instead running his own unrelated company, but still provides detective legwork and personal security for him. Remind you of anyone else? Because while I was reading Deal Breaker it suddenly hit me that this setup could very well be a unique take on Perry Mason, where Perry=Myron, Della=Esperanza, and Paul Drake=Win, with the criminal law background switched out for that of sports agency. Of course I have no idea if this was specifically Coben’s intention, but nonetheless I thought it to be a nice intertextual rehash, similar to House‘s medical-diagnosis take on the Sherlock Holmes layout.
Deal Breaker was in every way possible the exact kind of book I thought it would be, and it was a blast to read. Coben is able to create well-rounded characters, put them in a multi-layered but always controlled plot, and move them around different settings, between the seedy underbelly of New York City and the placid suburb of Ridgewood. Anyone who wants to see where the private-eye genre has gone since the days of Mike Hammer and Lew Archer should definitely check this book, and the whole series, out if they haven’t already. And if, like me, you are supposedly a GAD purist, crazy about clues and impossible crimes, it may still be worth your time to give Deal Breaker a chance. Sometimes it is by exiting our comfort zone that we find new things we truly enjoy.
New Horizons Challenge: 8 works out of 25
Author: Harlan Coben
The Challenge Requirements so far:
1/3 works translated into English
4/3 works written in English after 1970
1/2 works that are hardboiled or noir (I consider this more thriller than noir, even if it’s in the same vein as Chandler et al.)
2/2 works written by an American minority author
0/2 works with a musical setting
Other Reviews:
Bitter Tea and Mystery, Blue Mood Café, The Book Addicted Girl, Book Journey, The Book Review, Book Vue, Regarding Arts, Shell Louise
Tangled Yarns 