Eugene Weekly : Books : 07.13.06

Well-Groomed Rubbish

Phillip Margolin's newest isn't worth the pain.

BY SUZI STEFFEN

PROOF POSITIVE, fiction by Phillip Margolin. HarperCollins, 2006. Hardcover, $25.95.

Warning: Spoilers ahead. In thrillers, it's bad — it's very bad — to be a well-groomed man. Not because you might get killed, of course; that would be too easy, too … Agatha Christie. No, in contemporary potboilers, a well-groomed man brings to mind the most successful villain of the genre: Hannibal Lecter.

Perhaps a reader with too many mysteries of all sorts under her belt should resist reading thrillers, even ones with Oregon faux-literary connections, for she will occasionally come across passages like this: "His manicured beard and mustache gave him the look of an eighteenth-century count. When he moved, it was with the grace of a duelist." This character, whom we'll call Our Fair Duelist (OFD), next opens expensive champagne and spreads crème fraîche and caviar on blini. (For those of us less, er, groomed than OFD, blini are small, yeast-leavened, buckwheat pancakes, originally from Russia, or so says www.ochef.com) By the way, the caviar is from endangered sturgeon, but OFD has connections.

This makes nuance-sensitive antenna rise. Could the law enforcement professional, caviar-and-champagne swilling OFD be … gasp! … a killer? Of course, we're only on page 9, so perhaps Margolin is merely leading readers down the primrose path of self-congratulatory hubris, only to spring a startling surprise around page 247.

Don't bet on it. Theoretically, the thrill comes from wondering which other characters understand that a trimmed goatee and a taste for fish eggs equal egotistical murderer, but those thrills are slight indeed.

Aside from semaphoring the identity of the (very) bad guy — who is tripped up in stellar fashion by lying on his résumé — Margolin commits other writing misdemeanors. He forces his characters through awkward blow-by-blow descriptions of small actions. He writes dialogue with chunks of legal exposition wedged in between painfully stiff small talk.

This might be most egregious in a spot where one sorta bad guy (a drug kingpin) meets his lawyer during the pretrial hearing. The man has been to jail many times after many trials. He asks his lawyer, "Any chance I'll get out today?" Well, no, but here's a looooooong explanation for us. "So why bother if you know we're going to lose?" he next asks. Dear drug kingpin, why ask this question, the answer to which you know all too well? Ah, the reader might not have been to jail a zillion times. Fitting exposition into a plot challenges writers, true, but for creating character, this solution is weak at best.

There's also the little matter of what some might call the sincerest form of flattery. Amanda Jaffe, a criminal defense lawyer, and her father Frank, also a defense lawyer, lead the good guys' charge. This book is the third in Margolin's Amanda Jaffe series, which began in 2000. Doesn't Eugene author Kate Wilhelm write a successful thriller series, one that began in 1991, starring Barbara Halloway, a criminal defense attorney, and her father … um … Frank, an … um … criminal defense attorney? Have both Franks' wives died, leaving husbands and daughters bereft? Hmm. And what about the name of the guy Amanda's reluctantly interested in — Mike? Isn't that the name of Barbara's former lover? If Margolin follows Wilhelm any further, we don't think Amanda's Mike is long for the world.

On the other hand, at least Mike isn't too well groomed.

BOOK NOTES:

The Junie B. Jones Stupid, Smelly Bus Tour comes to Eugene with giveaways, theatrical performance and more, 6:30 pm 7/15, Barnes & Noble … 3rd Annual Writers' Fair: Go! Write! Travel Writing, with speakers Myrna Oakley, Gail Davis and Brandon Barnett, 1:30 pm-3:30 pm 7/16, Downtown Library … Phillip Margolin reads, noon 7/18, OSU Bookstore, Corvallis … Alison Clement reads from Pretty is as Pretty Does, 7:30 pm 7/18, Powell's on Burnside, Portland … Oregon Book Award winner Scott Nadelson reads from The Cantor's Daughter and Poe Ballantine reads from Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire, 7:30 pm 7/20, Powell's on Hawthorne, Portland … A discussion with Jenny Kurzweil, author of Fields That Dream: A Journey to the Roots of Our Food, and Edible Communites founder Tracey Ryder, 7:30 pm 7/20, Powell's on Burnside, Portland … Brian Doyle (The Grail) reads, 7 pm 7/24, Powell's, Beaverton … Maryann Carver reads from What It Used to Be Like, 7:30 pm 7/24, Powell's on Burnside, Portland … Shelley Jackson reads from Half Life, 7:30 pm 7/26, Powell's on Burnside, Portland … George Ouzounian reads from Maddox and the Alphabet of Manliness, 7:30 pm 7/27, Powell's on Burnside, Portland … Eugene writer Christopher Perdue recently won second place in the 2006 Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor Competition. Congratulations!