Mirabile Dictu

Okay, I have to confess: James sort of got on my bad side in an interview I read with him here while back, wherein he tried to tell me that his character (bearded gay medievalist mystery writer) was not him (bearded gay medievalist mystery writer) because his character is a vampire, while James, of course, is not. Dude, come on. If you’re a 14-year-old girl posting your American transfer student at Hogwarts fic, it’s no use telling me that Aurelia Ravenswing Gryffindor Slytherin Dances With Elves is not a Mary Sue just because she’s a witch and you aren’t. I expect a guy in his 50s to be able to come up with a better Gary Stu defense than the average 14-year-old girl.

Anyway.

These books have been a huge, huge, huge disappointment to me, because I read a short story of his with the same character and loved it. The character, Simon Kirby-Jones, was a riot in the short story - funny, bitchy, snarky, and all-around fun to spend time with. Saying this is not so much true in the books is a huge understatement. The character in the books is intolerable. He’s utterly twee in a pompous, self-congratulatory way, and has that communication style that its proponents probably think of as “roguish” and the rest of us think of as “Jesus Christ, get this freak away from me before he gets a weird look in his eyes and starts telling me all about the secret life of his Precious Moments figurines.” Also, the main interesting thing about the character - to wit, that he’s a vampire - more or less falls completely by the wayside in the second book. If there’s a point to his vampirism other than a gimmick that’s never really made use of, I’m not seeing it at this point.

The first book was tolerable; though, sadly, not because of Simon. The first book was redeemed - nay, pwned - by Jane, a little old lady who was made a vampire in the days of Elizabeth I and doesn’t - always - follow the Old Ways. Well, dude, if I told you what was hidden in her garden you would totally worship her too. Sadly, in one of the author’s less wise judgment calls, Jane does not look likely to be a recurring character, and without her to balance out the main character’s relentless self-important buffoonery with her edgy goth granniness, the series just falls to shit.

The writing is… okay, let me talk about the writing here for a minute. Now, I can see how authors like Anne Rice and JK Rowling don’t have editors, dearly though they need them. But somebody like Dean James, whose books you have to order online because it’s more than your life is worth to try to find them in the stores? Why the fuck does this man not have an editor? Why has someone not sat him down and had a come-to-Jesus talk with him about this annoying quirk of everyone using everyone else’s name in EVERY SINGLE LINE OF DIALOGUE, a thing I managed to overlook in Darkly Dreaming Dexter but that is so much worse here that it drives me absolutely batshit?

What’s worse is that I think the writing is trying for ironic and self-referential, but it’s missing by a long shot. And someone - either the character or the author, I can’t tell which, though I definitely have my suspicions - is the type who just beats every single point to death. To DEATH. And laboriously explains why every joke is funny. At one point Simon makes some comment about his own writing, referring to it as “deathless prose,” and then goes on to point out to us that, hey, in his case that comment is totally accurate! Because we would totally not have picked that up on our own! The comment would have been funny if he’d left it alone, but he can’t, because he is the type of person who tells a joke and then is like “Get it? Get it? Because horses have long faces, see, so when the horse walks into the bar -”

Which, you know, if your character is really truly that type of person, okay; but it’s annoying as fuck. You know it, your readers know it, everyone knows it but your character. (In an ideal world, I mean, though probably not in this case.) The way to deal with that, it seems to me, is to acknowledge that your audience is being fucking annoyed. Show other characters being fucking annoyed too, even if you have to work it so that your POV character picks up on it but misinterprets it or something. Invite the reader to be annoyed with a whole community of fucking annoyed people, instead of leaving them to roll their eyes on their own with no one to commisserate.

Also, sort of following on that - you know, there’s a good way to do self-important characters and a bad way to do self-important characters. Good way: Hercule Poirot. Bad way: Simon Kirby-Jones. Poirot is not a smug asshat all the time, or even most of the time; it’s just, every now and then he comes out with “Sacre bleu! How dare he have a more luxuriant mustache than I have!” or some placid comment about the superiority of his little grey cells. But then, we’re not living in Poirot’s head, either, which is fortunate because first-person is a narrative style that magnifies every character(ization) flaw. Because we’re in Simon’s head, we can’t get away from the relentless, weirdly camp smarminess; it’s right there on our heels through the whole book, chasing us down long empty participles and dark adverb clauses like some horrific, cackling clown, and there’s not a sentence’s respite.

Blanket statement, here: I think the mass-market mystery industry needs to rethink this glut of first-person books. First-person is a heinous bitch to pull off, and as far as I can tell the last mystery writer who managed it without suffocating under the miasmic cloud of Sue-ism was Agatha Christie. Say what you like about about Christie, I really doubt that that guy in The Moving Finger or the doctor in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd were authorial self-inserts. Like I said when I last posted about mysteries, I really don’t think it’s good strategy to gamble a book sale solely on my willingness to become the author/character’s BFF on two pages’ acquaintance.

Especially not this character. Dude, I’m serious, he’s like Dolores Umbridge without the quill and the lurking evil. “Hem, hem. May I speak to you, George? Have you forgotten your name, George? Shall I remind you no fewer than thirty times during the course of a four-page conversation, George? Also, George, does it bug you when I poke you in the ribs with my finger? Hahaha, George, isn’t that funny? Hem, hem.”

I might be willing to risk another short story or two by this guy. Another book? Fuck, no. I would be reduced to, like, ripping the pages out and drawing glasses, mustaches and horns on them with a black sharpie, where I wasn’t just stabbing the pages into big black Rorschach cards of SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPness.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 8:35 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.