The Watchman by Los Angeles based Robert Crais, is the first of his novels focusing on Joe Pike, instead of his usual wisecracking ex-Ranger, Elvis Cole. For those not familiar with the American mystery/crime author, Crais has worked on scripts for television shows such as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice and L.A. Law. His Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novels are numerous; eleven novels featuring the duo have been published up until date. Throughout these novels, the role of his Joe Pike character has mostly been supportive, a secondary to Elvis Cole.
In this novel, set in modern L.A. (note, write what you know best), Joe Pike is faced with the task of protecting the life of Larkin Connor Barkley. Miss Barkley is a young heiress to a rich, multi billionaire father, who’s more intently focused on strengthening his family’s vast empire. As of a result of her negligence, she has been living the wild life, partying 24/7 in the nightclubs littering the city of Angels. Unfortunately, one night she gets caught up in a “wrong place, at the wrong time” situation and soon after find herself running for her life with cold-blooded killers on her tail. To protect her precious ass, Mister soldier of fortune, Joe Pike is wired in. How does a seemingly unrelated person like Joe gets involved, you may ask. Good question. Money ? No, it’s not the money. In fact, Joe doesn’t even want money - like true Soldier of Fortune. If it is not about the bounty, then what is it about? To explain this ‘plot hole’, we need to go back in time. Years ago a certain boy was kidnapped who needed to be tracked down by Pike and Cole. However, it was fairly impossible to do this on their own, so they decided to hire the help of a guy named Jon Stone. The man price’s was simple, one day he would call Joe for a job and Joe had to say yes. That was the price and Joe paid it. Now, when the tide is rising, Jon Stone calls. Joe says yes and rapidly finds himself battling a South American drug-cartel money launderer and his gang. The Department of Justice seems unable to cope with the problem, so Joe Pike is on his own in this tricky situation. No biggie, for a man of Pike’s caliber:
“I qualified as a scout/sniper and served in Force Recon, mostly on long-range reconnaissance teams, hunter/killer teams, and priority target missions. I’m black belt qualified in tae kwon do, kung fu, wing chun, judo and ubawazi. I like to run and work out. I like to read.” (p. 82)
Or is it?
The reason I am spending so much time outlining the plot and the main characters is to show you how ridiculously this all sounds when you analyze it more carefully. Certainly, with this type of action packed story, you need a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief, but even so, there are limits. Robert Crais went right of the charts with this one. From the bat off, the novel didn’t not work for me and it got progressively worse. I might be in the minority here, judging from the unanimous praise the novel got from the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Times and other major newspapers, but I thought the novel was flawed.
Primarily the novel seems to suffer from an inconsistency in the details. When an author leaves many threads hanging or just plainly contradicts himself, this is cause for frustration. For example, Robert Crais spends a lot of time characterizing Joe Pike as the guy who never smiles or talks. His dialogues with other characters are pointy, with short staccato replies. The character Elvis Cole (among others) references more than once to Joe’s typical style of making phone calls. All good and well. Then at page fifty, we find the following scene:
“Cole was building up the sandwiches when Pike’s cell phone rang and Pike brought the phone out to the deck. Cole layered the vegetables onto whole wheat bread, spread the layers with hummus, then placed the sandwiches back in the grill pan to crisp the bread. The running water suddenly stopped and its absence was loud in the silence. A few minutes later, the girl came down to the hall. Pike was still outside with his phone.” (p. 51)
This is just one of the many irritating inconsistencies I’ve encountered in the narrative. Maybe one shouldn’t be bogged down by minor details, but I cannot shut my eyes for them and pretend they don’t exist. Apart from the inconsistency, some details also seem ridiculously out of place. Details such as Joe being a vegetarian or the way Cole’s cat is described, (”The cat blinked as if it was falling asleep, then abruptly licked its penis. Cats are amazing animals.”) are not tuned with action packed plot. Would readers empathize more with Joe Pike if they know he’s a vegetarian? Of course not, it doesn’t have any importance to the overall story.
Related to this is Robert Crais’ failure to create compelling characters. I would not say I had difficulty empathizing with a character caught up in a life-threatening situation, that’s quite easy - just let yourself be sucked right in. No, what I’m alluding to here is how two dimensional Joe is as a character. For more than ten novels, he has been the sidekick and it shows in Robert Crais’ writing. His non-talkative nature doesn’t sit with the character development, as it is in the interaction with other characters, where a character usually displays personality. The essential life-spark was lacking in the dialogues, resulting in a rather lifeless, flat dialogue. Ultimately, it affected the characterization as well, as one can’t just display character purely based on hit and run action scenes without explaining what drives ‘the man behind the wheel’. Maybe sticking with a first person perspective would have been the more suited point of view here, reckoning it’d probably have forced Crais’s hand on the characterization of his protagonist. The attempts Crais did make to focus on Joe Pike’s more vulnerable side seemed contrived and artificial.
Not to mention that most of the cast seemed to fit the mold perfectly. Larkin exactly behaved the way you would expect from a stereotypical, spoiled teenage girl, say a younger version of Paris Hilton. Elvis Cole, partner in crime, wasn’t particularly innovative either. The few chapters ‘airtime’ the character actually had, didn’t do his characterization any good. Instead, it confirmed my earlier assumptions of the staleness of his characterization.
Another weakness of the book had to with the predictable way the story unfolded. I had seen the manner in which the loose plot lines were tied together, coming from miles ago. Rest assured I won’t spoil the read by revealing the plot, but suffice to say, the antagonist was all but given away in one of the early scenes of the book. Also, the novel contains an astonishing number of ‘revelations’, information important to the plot that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. Elvis Cole plucks information of the bad guys right off the internet, John Chen (one of the most atrocious, moronic secondary characters I’ve seen in a while) identifies fingerprints on some guns and then proceed to link the prints to the confidential files of Ecuadorian mobsters, Joe Pike suddenly has some streetwise contact willing to help him out, a guy named Frank Garcia, who happens to be closely connected to the cartels in South-America - just to name a few revelations that completely stopped my suspension of disbelief dead in its tracks. This actually added up to the number of unrealistic, unbelievable details I referred to earlier on.
The only thing I am willing to credit Robert Crais for in this novel, is the pacing. The novel is structured in typical fashion: short hit and run scenes, bursts of dialogue and keeping the action packed chapters down to the minimum length - all to maximize the pace. He did succeed in pulling off a fast read, I clocked it in under four hours (which is quite fast for my standards).
Rounding up this review, I think it is safe to conclude Robert Crais’ The Watchman was an extremely unsatisfying book to read. Even though the pacing was well ‘maximalised’, the rest of the novel fell flat. The novel suffers from countless inconsistencies and small details that are ridiculously out of place in this thriller. Robert Crais also fails to create a compelling protagonist or an interesting cast to go along with. Joe Pike has always been the sidekick and it shows in Robert Crais’ writing. Reading The Watchman is like driving in a Fiat Multipla, you can hit the speed limiter alright but you’ll still be driving in one of the ugliest cars on Earth.
4/10
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