Recently read: River of Darkness by Rennie Airth

[viktor_haag]

Competent (if a bit stilted in spots, especially the female characters) but not tremendously interesting.

I was prepped to be interested in Rennie Airth's "John Madden mystery", mostly because of the time period: detective story set in the aftermath of Great War England. But I should have heeded the back paper, where Robert Goddard comments "...takes what seems to be a twenties drawing room murder mystery and transforms it into an edge-of-the-seat serial-killer thriller."

As with so many "things that seem one thing but then turn into something else", River of Darkness is, sadly, not much of a twenties drawing room mystery, and also, not really much of a thriller either.

What it appears to be is yet another stock "serial killer chiller" book, and, frankly, I'm sufficiently tired of those to really never need to read another. The book's villain is of the "savagely competent" mode and not the "uber-intelligent competent", at least. And his competence is, to one degree or another, somewhat explained and rational. And the book's protagonist is, as is de rigeur, sensitive, intelligent, and also competent, but tragically damaged, needing psychological and sexual healing which he gets thanks to a progressive woman's attentions.

It's all there, and, as I say, competently written. And it has more than a mere dash of procedural detail in it. But it's all a bit too stock for my taste (it even has the traditional "Fatal-Attraction-Oh-Noze-He's-Not-Dead" ending, although in this case, again, reasonably rationally explained). The serial-killer-thriller genre is, to me, about as played out as the sexy-vampire genre: others may like it, but I'm tired and done with it.

The setting is reasonably interesting, the characterization is decent (moreso the men than the women), but I doubt I'll be buying any of Airth's follow-on books (although I might borrow them from library or friend). For me, a C+ or B-, mostly thanks to subject matter -- if you like the serial-killer-thriller genre, then I suspect this is a B+ book and you probably won't be disappointed.

Comments

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

I'm getting really, really fed up with the serial-killer pseudo-mythology -- in large part because it has almost nothing to do with the way most people tagged with the label operate in real life. Thomas Harris kind of ruined the genre for everyone else, in much the same way it became next to impossible to write epic fantasy after Tolkien had done his thing. And that's not the fault of either of those men, strictly speaking: it's because nobody could see anything but what they had done as models to follow.

I got an interesting perspective on this back when I was reading a book I go back to often -- Why They Kill, about how violent criminals are created. What struck me was how most violent criminals, including those tagged with the serial-killer label, were generally rather charisma-less creatures. But fiction is about the exception, not the rule, and so now of course the guy has to be this Soooper Geeenius who Toys With The Cops while Targeting His Next Victim.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Yep; totally agreed. In this book, the killer is a lot less "soooper" than in most examples of the genre; he's merely extra competent because he'd been trained to be so (strong military training for which he showed aptitude). In reality, I suspect that most "real life" serial killers would actually not be tremendously able to progress very far in a military life, but that's just a suspicion. I agree with your assessment of Harris and Lecter, and books I run across with "supah-genius" serial killers in them either get put back on the store shelf hurriedly, or they get flung against my wall if I get blind-sided by them (see my earlier capsule review of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (http://viktor-haag.livejournal.com/87620.html) for a similar experience).

There are so many other interesting circumstances for major crime, that the focus on serial killers is dreary to me. But oh well, it's a sub-genre standard for a reason: people latch on to genres and wear them out and you either connect to a genre or you don't.