A sun, screened: a review of David L. Lindsey's Heat From Another Sun.
Haven't done one of these in a while; let's see if it's more interesting than the usual Sunday meme, eh..?
Heat From Another Sun by David Lindsey (NY: Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.; 1985 [originally published in hardcover by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. in 1984; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 84-47587]; ISBN: 0-671-54632-5; 326 pps.) is the second novel in the Stuart Hadyon mystery series; Haydon is a scion of a wealthy Texas family who works as a homicide detective for the Houston Police Department. I originally read it in the mid-to-late 1980s and re-read it in the second week of August 2008.
Upon second reading I didn't dislike it as much as I did the first time (my rating of it on LibraryThing went from 1½ stars to 2½ stars), but I still think that the book fell far short of what it could've been.
When the book opens, Haydon is enjoying several months of leave owing to the events in the first novel in the series, A Cold Mind, blowing unconcernedly through his fortune by ordering scads of books (which aren't specified), gallery-hopping in search of fine art (Klimt is a favorite), and renovating and restocking the family greenhouse (which is dull, dull, dull), when his old friend and mentor Lieutenant Bob Dystal drops by to talk him into some consultancy work on a puzzling murder: an aging surfer dude-cum-video technician and camera jockey is found dead in one of the developer sinks at the video lab of the ad agency where he works, his throat cut, a couple of deep stab wounds in his chest. From here Haydon is gradually drawn into a much broader and grimmer mystery revolving around a legendary combat photographer named Ricky Toy; the boyhood chum who runs the aforementioned ad agency, Bill Langer; and a reclusive tycoon of sufficiently unusual physiognomy and dark appetites as to make him worthy of being a James Bond villain. (The tycoon's name, Roeg, has significance on more than one level, the most obvious of which is the fact that it rhymes with "rogue.")
This should make for a much more gripping story than is actually here, which accounts for my frustration with this book. The subject of Heat From Another Sun is the allure of violence (the title comes from a spiel that Roeg gives Haydon about two-thirds of the way through the book, and describes how he thinks of violence), and it's clear that Lindsey wants to probe the dark corners of this allure without falling into the trap of writing an exploitative pot-boiler. This intention is admirable, but one wonders if it can be consciously accomplished in a crime novel rather than in a clinical work of psychology or sociology. (And besides, sometimes an exploitative potboiler is exactly what the doctor ordered; writing them didn't seem to hurt Mickey Spillane's career any.) The moral outrage expressed by at least two of the characters at the goings-on comes off as preaching to the choir: like-minded readers shouldn't need to murmur "Amen" in response to the characters' revulsion, while readers who are more than a little sympathetic with Roeg's tastes may well be unwilling or unable to do so.
The last chapter muddies the waters even further, and casts serious doubts upon Haydon's moral authority. Unfortunately, the novel doesn't so much as conclude as fizzle out, as though Lindsey was finally anxious to be shut of it.
Lindsey overdoes the descriptions of how refined and cultured Haydon and his (gorgeous, exotic) architect wife are to provide further contrast with the violence in the world; I was incredulous that none of Haydon's fellow cops felt the slightest twinge of jealousy over his house, his wife, his car, his wealth -- he certainly doesn't have to work -- or didn't twit him, even just a little, over his fancy-pants, highfalutin and expensive hobbies. For all that Haydon's deceased father was one of the four main powers in Houston back in the day, he must seem as absurd and anachronistic a figure to his fellow detectives as Sherlock Holmes.
Lindsey's real strengths here are his running descriptions of Houston; one gets a sense of the city's astonishing growth, its oppressive, maddening climate, and its uneasy mélange of the dirt poor and the fabulously wealthy. (He also manages a nicely sinister descriptive turn in one of his crime scenes. Don't worry: you'll know it when you read it.)
As the book puttered along, I found myself wishing that if Lindsey didn't want to do justice to his subject that he at least would've had the grace to utilize the symbolism inherent in it: how much better Heat From Another Sun would've been if he'd made it more explicitly a critique of capitalism, with Roeg's taste for the old ultra-violence serving as a shorthand for how the capitalist system preys on the weak and the disadvantaged, showing scant regard for civil rights or international law if there's not a nickel to be made in supporting them. With a bit of mental acrobatics, one could read Lindsey's narrative that way, but it's not a terribly convincing interpretation, at least in part due to the fact that Haydon's role as a "white knight capitalist" -- an "angel investor," perhaps? -- isn't even sketched, much less fleshed out. No, sadly, what you see here is precisely what you get, and not a jot more. (Besides, Roeg's name would have to be changed in order to keep the critique of capitalism from veering into an anti-Semitic screed.)
According to the author's website, there are at least four or five other Stuart Haydon mysteries; after my second reading of Heat From Another Sun, I can safely say that I feel no burning need to track down any more of the books in the series in the near future.
Heat From Another Sun by David Lindsey (NY: Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.; 1985 [originally published in hardcover by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. in 1984; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 84-47587]; ISBN: 0-671-54632-5; 326 pps.) is the second novel in the Stuart Hadyon mystery series; Haydon is a scion of a wealthy Texas family who works as a homicide detective for the Houston Police Department. I originally read it in the mid-to-late 1980s and re-read it in the second week of August 2008.
Upon second reading I didn't dislike it as much as I did the first time (my rating of it on LibraryThing went from 1½ stars to 2½ stars), but I still think that the book fell far short of what it could've been.
When the book opens, Haydon is enjoying several months of leave owing to the events in the first novel in the series, A Cold Mind, blowing unconcernedly through his fortune by ordering scads of books (which aren't specified), gallery-hopping in search of fine art (Klimt is a favorite), and renovating and restocking the family greenhouse (which is dull, dull, dull), when his old friend and mentor Lieutenant Bob Dystal drops by to talk him into some consultancy work on a puzzling murder: an aging surfer dude-cum-video technician and camera jockey is found dead in one of the developer sinks at the video lab of the ad agency where he works, his throat cut, a couple of deep stab wounds in his chest. From here Haydon is gradually drawn into a much broader and grimmer mystery revolving around a legendary combat photographer named Ricky Toy; the boyhood chum who runs the aforementioned ad agency, Bill Langer; and a reclusive tycoon of sufficiently unusual physiognomy and dark appetites as to make him worthy of being a James Bond villain. (The tycoon's name, Roeg, has significance on more than one level, the most obvious of which is the fact that it rhymes with "rogue.")
This should make for a much more gripping story than is actually here, which accounts for my frustration with this book. The subject of Heat From Another Sun is the allure of violence (the title comes from a spiel that Roeg gives Haydon about two-thirds of the way through the book, and describes how he thinks of violence), and it's clear that Lindsey wants to probe the dark corners of this allure without falling into the trap of writing an exploitative pot-boiler. This intention is admirable, but one wonders if it can be consciously accomplished in a crime novel rather than in a clinical work of psychology or sociology. (And besides, sometimes an exploitative potboiler is exactly what the doctor ordered; writing them didn't seem to hurt Mickey Spillane's career any.) The moral outrage expressed by at least two of the characters at the goings-on comes off as preaching to the choir: like-minded readers shouldn't need to murmur "Amen" in response to the characters' revulsion, while readers who are more than a little sympathetic with Roeg's tastes may well be unwilling or unable to do so.
The last chapter muddies the waters even further, and casts serious doubts upon Haydon's moral authority. Unfortunately, the novel doesn't so much as conclude as fizzle out, as though Lindsey was finally anxious to be shut of it.
Lindsey overdoes the descriptions of how refined and cultured Haydon and his (gorgeous, exotic) architect wife are to provide further contrast with the violence in the world; I was incredulous that none of Haydon's fellow cops felt the slightest twinge of jealousy over his house, his wife, his car, his wealth -- he certainly doesn't have to work -- or didn't twit him, even just a little, over his fancy-pants, highfalutin and expensive hobbies. For all that Haydon's deceased father was one of the four main powers in Houston back in the day, he must seem as absurd and anachronistic a figure to his fellow detectives as Sherlock Holmes.
Lindsey's real strengths here are his running descriptions of Houston; one gets a sense of the city's astonishing growth, its oppressive, maddening climate, and its uneasy mélange of the dirt poor and the fabulously wealthy. (He also manages a nicely sinister descriptive turn in one of his crime scenes. Don't worry: you'll know it when you read it.)
As the book puttered along, I found myself wishing that if Lindsey didn't want to do justice to his subject that he at least would've had the grace to utilize the symbolism inherent in it: how much better Heat From Another Sun would've been if he'd made it more explicitly a critique of capitalism, with Roeg's taste for the old ultra-violence serving as a shorthand for how the capitalist system preys on the weak and the disadvantaged, showing scant regard for civil rights or international law if there's not a nickel to be made in supporting them. With a bit of mental acrobatics, one could read Lindsey's narrative that way, but it's not a terribly convincing interpretation, at least in part due to the fact that Haydon's role as a "white knight capitalist" -- an "angel investor," perhaps? -- isn't even sketched, much less fleshed out. No, sadly, what you see here is precisely what you get, and not a jot more. (Besides, Roeg's name would have to be changed in order to keep the critique of capitalism from veering into an anti-Semitic screed.)
According to the author's website, there are at least four or five other Stuart Haydon mysteries; after my second reading of Heat From Another Sun, I can safely say that I feel no burning need to track down any more of the books in the series in the near future.