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Philip Margolin, Executive Privilege: Margolin sent me an autographed copy for talking over some details for the in-progress sequel, so it’s probably churlish to say that I’m not a big fan of airport thrillers. But I press on nonetheless! An Oregon associate pursuing a death row inmate’s habeas case and a DC PI independently discover information suggesting that someone close to the President—perhaps the President himself—is a serial killer. It moves fast, anyway. The characters reminded me of Duplo toys: largely human-shaped, and moving around in an environment recognizable as an abstraction of our own; mostly not stereotypes, but not exactly identifiable people either.
But what I really noticed is how spoiled I’ve been by fanfic. And not just in the standard “fanfic is focused on stuff I like” way, though that too. But fanfic is the apotheosis of “give me just the good parts” not only at the level of plot/trope, but also certain aspects of writing. Margolin introduced his guy protagonist by having him look in the mirror. It’s cheesy and artificial and we have to let him get away with it because there are only so many ways a limited POV (standard in modern fiction) can describe the narrator. We don’t have to put up with it in fanfic, though, because regardless of source text fanfic gets to operate using audiovisual conventions: no description of main characters necessary. Skip the preliminaries, tell me something new.
Margolin is relatively competent with infodumps, and usually manages to have them well-motivated by the text: two people are out on a first date and telling each other their histories, or one lawyer summarizes an area of the law for another who is unfamiliar with that area. This is a problem for lots of plot-based stories, and it helps to have characters who canonically deal in infodumps, which I suspect is another reason I find it easy to like cop-types. It was simplest for Mulder and Scully: for them, infodumps were foreplay. Lex lectures Clark or, if Clark is unavailable, himself, because he’s always performing for someone, if only the imagined audience (which in his case is us). Sam and Dean tend to summarize, driving information out of dialogue and into narration, where I think it often fits best. Character backstory often has to be chunked too; one of the reasons Margolin seemed clunky was that he started out with what felt like too much description of backstory, though to be fair he left a good deal to be worked out later. See also: spoiled by fanfic, where we don’t need much backstory and so seeing what history characters reveal, if anything, tells you more word-for-word about the characters and the author’s take on them than it does in standalone fiction.
But what I really noticed is how spoiled I’ve been by fanfic. And not just in the standard “fanfic is focused on stuff I like” way, though that too. But fanfic is the apotheosis of “give me just the good parts” not only at the level of plot/trope, but also certain aspects of writing. Margolin introduced his guy protagonist by having him look in the mirror. It’s cheesy and artificial and we have to let him get away with it because there are only so many ways a limited POV (standard in modern fiction) can describe the narrator. We don’t have to put up with it in fanfic, though, because regardless of source text fanfic gets to operate using audiovisual conventions: no description of main characters necessary. Skip the preliminaries, tell me something new.
Margolin is relatively competent with infodumps, and usually manages to have them well-motivated by the text: two people are out on a first date and telling each other their histories, or one lawyer summarizes an area of the law for another who is unfamiliar with that area. This is a problem for lots of plot-based stories, and it helps to have characters who canonically deal in infodumps, which I suspect is another reason I find it easy to like cop-types. It was simplest for Mulder and Scully: for them, infodumps were foreplay. Lex lectures Clark or, if Clark is unavailable, himself, because he’s always performing for someone, if only the imagined audience (which in his case is us). Sam and Dean tend to summarize, driving information out of dialogue and into narration, where I think it often fits best. Character backstory often has to be chunked too; one of the reasons Margolin seemed clunky was that he started out with what felt like too much description of backstory, though to be fair he left a good deal to be worked out later. See also: spoiled by fanfic, where we don’t need much backstory and so seeing what history characters reveal, if anything, tells you more word-for-word about the characters and the author’s take on them than it does in standalone fiction.
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I don't know, I kind of like airport thrillers. They're sort of the fanfic of pro-fic, with fun tropes and good parts only narration. It doesn't have to make sense or have a message, it just has to kill a few hours.
Info dumps are tiresome, and while they perhaps are less needed in kiosk thrillers, they're also more clunky and noticeable because the quality of the writing is lower.
My favorites are Alistair MacLean, who writes suspenseful and often romantic whump fic, Dick Francis: suspenseful and often romantic whump fic, and Ken Follett: suspenseful and often romantic, not so much whump, but makes a point of having strong female characters.
The best of the genre is Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller, though. He has a lot of fun with the tropes, and it does not seem as if it were written in two weeks on a diet of coffee and take-away. I got my copy on amazon for 1 p. + postage, which was a steal considering what a great book it is.
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Most of the deaths occurred pre-presidency in this novel, so the time factor wasn't as severe as you'd think. Stranger things were said about the Clintons, after all.
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Strangers things were said about the Clintons? LOL.