An interesting pairing this time: The Liar by Steve Cavanagh won the award in 2018, while Ross Macdonald’s The Far Side of the Dollar did so in 1965. The most temporarily separated pairing so far – a gulf not likely to be beaten – but more interestingly, these are the first two I solved well before the ending chapters. Roughly halfway through both I spotted a sentence that was too clearly a gun being put on the mantelpiece, and that was that. My reaction to doing so, however, could not have been more different. Cavanagh’s “tell” sent me from mildly irritated to full blown impatient to be done with the book, while Macdonald’s made me grin somewhat fondly, because I couldn’t help but that think that without the benefit of 55 years of additional novels and storytelling tropes to inform me, he would have gotten away with it.
The other, strangely unifying point between the two books is the plot – both begin with the disappearance of a child from a wealthy household, and track a hired hand’s efforts to recover them in spite of the secrets the child’s parents continue to hold back. While the overall summaries sound amazingly alike across decades of history, the execution could not be more different, and this is what sets the two apart. The Liar is clearly influenced by modern thrillers, and tries to keep a foot in both the legal thriller and action thriller sub-genres. While I admire the attempt, it doesn’t work. Cavanagh, a lawyer by training, simply cannot mesh the two parts together sufficiently well, not least because each part is itself far short of superlative. Ridden with tropes and suspensions of disbelief that are a step too far, it’s hard to get truly involved in The Liar because it is so clearly fantastical. Our hero, Eddie Flynn, is a reformed con man turned defense attorney (this being a book partway through a series, we aren’t privy to the full back story here, but even the sketches we get seem cursory and don’t fill out the background enough to make Eddie particularly sympathetic or even knowable – he does sleigh of hand, hand-to-hand combat, and sophisticated legal strategies with equivalent ease) hired by a high-powered kidnapping specialist whose *gasp* daughter has been kidnapped. Eddie is hired to help get her back. Meanwhile, in the sub-plot that inevitably twines with the main, the reader is treated to flashbacks involving a mysterious arson committed years before, and a devious plot to bring that case to a final end.
I found that device to be crudely effective but, to me, it had a whiff of cheating about it. If part of the fun of books like these is that we move through the present and learn the same facts the protagonist does, at the same time, then planting other pieces of knowledge simply for suspense turns up the excitement at the cost of the intellectual satisfaction. Great writers can pull this off, and even bounce back and forth, but alas Cavanagh is not one of them. His characters are one-dimensional, and we can usually intuit their purpose and ultimate end after their first appearance. The drunken second wife who maintains contact with the mean bodyguard a second too long; the grizzled mentor who lives for justice even if he drinks too much; the opposing council who dresses in black and sneers; the FBI agent who is tough but fair. Nothing any of the characters do is a surprise given the transparent casting, so the plot is left to do the heavy lifting. Alas, The Liar whipsaws quickly between action and courtroom drama, such that we are never able to plumb the depths of what Cavanagh might have to offer us on either side. Moreover, the fact that Eddie is taken to crime scenes as a matter of course, or that he has a legal strategy prepared within seconds of dramatic courtroom events, feels more convenient than convincing. Yes, we know there were months of “off-screen” preparation, but Cavanagh so clearly relies on the shock value of bringing things out with no warning to the audience that the number of extraordinary occurrences compound on one another again and again until our suspension of disbelief is shattered. When I realized the “twist” we were building towards (the revelation of which made all further flashbacks tedious) I immediately knew the marching orders for the monochrome characters, who went about their jobs diligently for the remaining 50% of the book. Eddie as a character was left as some sort of wish fulfillment superhero, with periodically predictable thoughts about his ex-wife and child (surprise, the wife doesn’t like him, the daughter adores him) and…justice on his side? I have to call out one particularly bad characterization. The attorney Eddie faces off with is a woman who wears nice scarves in the courtroom, and has the epithet “The Silk Hammer.” This sort of first draft type material is left in all too often, and then contradicted – as opposed to being a respected attorney, she later morphs into a pathological prosecutor who can’t see beyond her job. At least most of the other characters are one-dimensionally consistent, but “The Silk Hammer” demonstrates the sort of uneven writing that makes this book a tough read. The blurb by Ian Rankin on its cover “Plotting that takes the breath away…” must have been taken either out of context, or with Mr. Rankin under duress. The Liar falls far short of the mark, and while Cavanagh has done a workmanlike job of assembling the ingredients for crime writing, this book reads like he needs much more polish and editing before the CWA should be thinking about awarding the Gold Dagger.
The Far Side of the Dollar, by contrast, stands up as a book whose DNA can surely be seen in its many latter-day descendants. Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer is infinitely more laconic than Eddie Flynn, and yet his character and motives are far more clear. A private detective hired to find a boy who has escaped from a reformatory school (where, it being 1965, corporal punishment is still very much around) Archer becomes entangled with the family as they do as little as possible to ensure his safe return after a kidnapper calls to ask for ransom. In the same way that watching a movie from decades ago makes one aware of changing conventions around pacing and plot construction, reading The Far Side of the Dollar does feel distinctly different – certainly, the opening scene with a security guard who is a World War I veteran immediately reminds us this isn’t a contemporary novel. Without feeling slow, there is a deliberation and spacing given to the book that lets all the characters – even the tertiary ones – live and breath. The prose is spare but stylish and informative. California, a background star of the novel, is fascinatingly drawn from the perspective of the 2020s. It still seems almost quiet, like the echoes of the Old West can be heard if you listen hard enough, and Hollywood isn’t yet a black hole around which everything revolves. Archer is articulate, dogged, and even sensitive. He isn’t an avenging angel, or the sole bearer of the torch of justice in a failing criminal justice system – he does his job and tries his best to get the best result possible. He doesn’t make the job his life, nor is he self-destructive. In his conversations with a former romantic interest and a teenage girl, a friend of the kidnapping victim, he shows himself to be caring, an adept listener, and wise without assuming his is the only wisdom.
As Archer moves deliberately through the plot, we get bits of poetry, philosophy, and psychology. While everyone in the book is clearly a character, they are recognizable as the essences of people that could actually exist as who act according to their own drives, means, and motivations as opposed to bodies that circle the protagonist. This makes the guns littered on mantelpieces far less obvious, although nonetheless there was a degree of specificity to an otherwise trivial piece of information halfway though that gave me an “aha” moment. Even knowing the likely plot outcome, however, Macdonald’s psychological depth made me want to read on to figure out the motive for the crime, and also simply to see how the characters continued to evolve in this state of punctuated equilibrium. This was a good decision because he had one final, elegant twist to throw my way that survives the 55-year gap intact- well done, sir. It is a mark of Macdonald’s fiction that, even having guessed the solution to the primary mystery, nothing in the plot felt inevitable, and that – combined with his lovely style – made reading the book a real pleasure. Looking over the list of books I have completed so far, I don’t think there is another book I would rather re-read (or at least skim for quotes!) save perhaps Whip Hand. The Far Side of the Dollar would never make any list of the most dramatic twists, or thrilling action scenes, or outrageous crimes, but it shows us how high the crime novel can fly by simply sticking to what is real, possible, and all around us rather than inventing unlikely escapades for even more unlikely heroes to address.
Overall, Lew Archer enters the ranking at #5 so far. I suspect, had Macdonald been writing a few decades later, he would be even higher as I cannot but be subject to the biases of my own life and times. For a novel from 1965 to beat out so many newer (and far better known) entries, however, demonstrates the lasting power of well-wrought crime prose – here’s looking at you, Agatha Christie! As for Steve Cavanagh, the effort was simply too sloppily executed. He gets points for aiming high, but he makes us so very aware of what he is trying to achieve that we cannot but notice how short he falls. Then again, Cavanagh is still active so he has the happy opportunity of continuing to improve – we shall see.
Updated ranking:
- Dick Francis – Whip Hand
- Ian Rankin – Black & Blue
- Mick Herron – Dead Lions
- Colin Dexter – The Wench is Dead
- Ross Macdonald – The Far Side of the Dollar
- Patricia Cornwell – Cruel and Unusual
- Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
- Bill Beverly – Dodgers
- James McClure – Steam Pig
- Gene Kerrigan – The Rage
- Steve Cavanagh – The Liar
- Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle
- Peter Dickinson – Skin Deep (not recommended)
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