Coulda Woulda Shouda

Three tales that, to varying degrees, ought to have been better than they are.

-----

David Gibbins is one of the most frustrating thriller writers working today. He has a command of language and style that's more than tops in the field, a sense of place and nose for historical mystery that include some well-trod backdrops like Atlantis as well as lesser-used but equally fascinating arenas and the ability to create some characters that vary enough to be a lot more like real people than most of their companions on the airport newsstand bookshelf.

But he can't keep his stories together to save his life.

Archaeologist Jack Howard and his partner, Costas Kazantzakis, are investigating a Victorian-era mystery and shipwreck that itself has ties to the even more mysterious era of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Howard and his team, traveling along the Nile, trace the steps of a British soldier charged with relieving British forces at Khartoum in 1884. But Akhenaten's reach may prove long enough to endanger the modern expedition as it comes closer and closer to uncovering his secret in Pharaoh.

Gibbins alternates sections between the Victorian and modern expeditions, even though the earlier trip's narrative does nothing that couldn't be handled in either a single Cussler-style flashback or by being woven into the modern team's story. The team uncovers evidence, deduces what happened, and then we read what happened as it happened. It wastes a tremendous amount of time and dissipates any momentum the present-day narrative generates by forcing us to stop and reset every few chapters in order to follow a story whose end we already mostly know. The narrative attention deficit disorder hamstrings Gibbins time and again and keeps him from taking a place at the ranks of some of the smartest and best creators of genre fiction.

-----

Speaking of Clive Cussler, some of the best of his "co-authored" works have been the more recent "Oregon Files" novels by Jack Du Brul. Mirage is the latest, and finds Oregon commander Juan Cabrillo and his team at first attempting to rescue a longtime benefactor but winding up in a plot by a rogue Russian admiral to make himself wealthy by destabilizing relations among the word's maritime super-powers. Throw in some strange experiments by the 20th-century genius Nikola Tesla and the original incident behind the "Philadelphia Experiment" legend, and you have a recipe with a lot of ingredients.

And you also have one that doesn't really gel very well. Mirage seems more like a connected set of short stories about the Oregon and her crew than a coherent novel. It probably would have been better off presented that way or re-tooled until the three separate stories better matched up with each other. As it is, we have a second act in the book when the Oregon plays a role in recovering lost covert-ops money from Iraq in an entertaining caper that has nothing to do with the main story. It feels far more like filler than anything else, and even the second act of the main story doesn't connect strongly to the first.

Du Brul writes better than most of Cussler's other collaborators -- he writes better than Cussler himself, although there are higher bars to cross -- but Mirage lives up too much to its title, an illusion promising a good yarn but ultimately not at all what it seems to be.

-----

Christopher Farnsworth's Blood Oath introduced Nathaniel Cade, a 140-year-old vampire who has been bound by a mystic oath to serve the President of the United States and defend the country against threats that the usual forces can't even dent, let alone defeat. Cade and his new handler, former political rising star Zach Burrows, are back in The President's Vampire, attempting to deal with the latest plot by The Shadow Company to bring the world under the dominion of some of the universe's darker forces.

I gigged Blood Oath for Farnsworth's retreading some familiar elements and not doing everything with them that he could, and he unfortunately continues this pattern and even adds to it in Vampire. Zach again gets himself in too deep against the forces of darkness and needs Cade to rescue him, proving more danger-prone than Daphne herself, and Farnsworth again makes it tough at times to figure out who's doing, saying or skullduggering what.

In Cade, Farnsworth has a fascinating character -- why does a being who believes himself to be eternally damned decide to be a patriot and fight for what's right, and how does he manage to do this when he is constantly surrounded by those who are to him what cattle and other food animals are to us? It would be worth exploring, but instead of doing that by focusing on the president's vampire, The President's Vampire spends its time with the president's vampire's handler, the president's vampire's enemies, the president's vampire's handler's enemies, the president's vampire's enemies' victims, and so on. Plus, for a novel that wants us to opt in on the side of a supernatural being who believes in the ideas of true good and true evil, Farnsworth's narrative drips with cynicism and cheap shots at thinly-disguised versions of political figures he doesn't much care for.

The President's Vampire is froth, but it could have been the froth of an enjoyable dessert or adult beverage if its writer had decided to try harder. He didn't. So it isn't.