The first part is the real point, and it applies to everything. Most people aren’t knowledgeable enough about everything they consume to judge quality apart from the broadest measures. We all pick our battles, so I spend a month researching running shoes but buy my wine in boxes.
Yeah, but I would assume most people ARE knowledgeable enough to know how people talk and act such that they could say it ain’t like in the book! Or maybe they just don’t want to pay the minimal attention that would make them think - “Hmm. THAT really came out of nowhere!”
Yeah - and you haven’t gotten to the big TWIST yet! 
Believe me - it gets MUCH worse.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking too much about this disposable trash, but the tagline under the title said something like, “The biggest lies are the ones we tell ourselves.” Oooh! Ya know what? There really wasn’t anything in the book about anyone lying to themself. Or any other “dishonesty/deception” than the undercover cop, various people fooling around, and general basic thriller type stuff.
Another thing that confuses me is that a friend gave it to me. Smart woman. Didn’t say, “Here’s a piece of mindless trash you might enjoy.” Makes me wonder why the hell she thought I would want to read it.
The plot wasn’t what bothered me. I think I could see what she was trying to do–use a lot of to be verbs to add passivity (not the same thing as passive voice) to the scene to lull the reader, then pop in a brutal flashback to shock and introduce unease into the situation. It’s a pretty common way to open TV shows.
She just didn’t pull it off. IMO, of course. So it fell flat. Whatever else you do, you don’t want your opening to do that.
That can be blamed on the publisher. She likely had no say in the matter at all (if she was even informed).
ETA: A few things most authors don’t get to choose:
- Blurbs and ad material
- Title
- Artwork
- Genre
Those are all in the hands of the publisher, at least until you get to be a big shot.
Or, they don’t really care about that stuff, and are looking for something different from their reading experience. That stuff might be a nice bonus, but it’s secondary to whatever it is they really like in the genre.
I think a lot of authors like Scottoline started out with one or more very good books, but after 15 or 20 they’re just filling in a formula, or maybe readers get tired of that particular formula. Jonathan Kellerman is another good example. His first 2 or 3 books are terrific, but each subsequent book was worse than the last.
This is the darn truth about both of them, Deaver and Scottoline. I differ in my opinion of JAJance. Her fall off in quality is there, but relatively minor.
One library system I used, decades ago, would just keep a count of the number of such paperbacks you took out versus brought back. It wasn’t worth the trouble of tracking which Harlequin editions you took out.
They’re utterly formulaic. My mother and I got into reading them, when I was college age. She had gotten one or two, and that first summer I worked at a store that sold a bit of everything - think low-rent version of Walmart! GC Murphy, I think. Anyway, when their paperbacks were due to be removed from sale, the front covers were torn off and sent back to the publisher, and the employees were permitted to take the destroyed ones home to read.
If a good, well-written novel is caviar, or at least Godiva chocolate, these were like off-brand Circus Peanuts. A certain amount of enjoyment and distraction, with nothing memorable or really satisfying. There were a dozen or so basic plotlines, only the names and locales changed.
It’s not just women and series romances: my father-in-law used to get cheapo spy / thriller novels all the time, and the family referred to them as “male Harlequins”.
I haven’t read any Scottoline, but perhaps her earlier books were better, good enough to get some attention, then she began just phoning them in.
These days, there is so much utter CRAP available on Amazon etc. since it’s cheap to publish a Kindle book. I’ve gotten “first book in a series” free on a few occasions, and so far I think only one of them was enjoyable enough to follow up by purchasing others; the rest have varied from “meh” to truly amazingly bad - stupid plots, glaring typos, near-picture-perfect ripoffs of more popular books, and sometimes stunningly bad phrasing and word choice.
Sometimes they’re just edited by someone from the wrong country, like one book set in Philadelphia that mentioned “accountancy” and “kerb” (versus “accounting” and “curb”) and another one set in the US that used “trainers” and “treacle” instead of “sneakers” and “syrup” (or “molasses”, and yes I know treacle is different, but most 'Merkins don’t know what it is).
Haven’t read Jance, but Deaver’s first two books are very good – “The Bone Collector” was his first, I think. Then he wrote a few that were interesting simply because of the information about obscure skills (quick-change artists, for example), and then I quit him.
I continue to read several authors whose first books were excellent, and later books were awful. After finishing yet another bad one, I wonder why I don’t quit. I think it’s because I know they’re capable of great stories so I keep hoping, and they usually have a distinctive writing style that appeals to me.
But I’ve picked up several books (I can’t think of a single example, of course) by first-time, unknown authors that were so poorly written, unoriginal, offered no coherent plot, etc etc, that I couldn’t begin to understand how they got published. My theory for these authors is they got published because they had connections with an editor at the publishing house. Why should writing be different from other jobs – who you know matters much more than what you know or what you can do.
Regarding Harlequins, I thrilled one of our local librarians when I left for college. You see, my grandmother kept 4 or 5 people supplied with Harlequins. She had lists of who she had given which books (did you know that they were numbered - at least back in the seventies). And even though my dad had eventually put his foot down, so that for every book that came in one had to go, by the time high school was over I had more than 2000 of them in boxes under my bed.
When I took them to the library to donate, the librarian was so happy. Oh, their regulars were going to be thrilled! There were so many that they didn’t have! And due to the honor system (previously explained above) they didn’t have to spend the time or money checking them into the system. They could just put them on the honor rack wherever there was room. And there were enough to keep restocking.
I believe they were numbered in the late 90’s as well.
This. Also, there is clearly some gender preferences going on here. I have read all the Lee Child books and John D. Macdonald Travis McGee books more than once, and written an article about McGee, and we can throw in Robert B. Parker too, and there are formulas and uninspired plots, thin characters, and more in all of them. As the friend who introduced me to Travis McGee put it, "basically, it’s Travis meets girl, Travis gets girl, girl gets killed, Travis gets killer,Travis gets girl all the way through. And the covers all look a lot a like. Macdonald knew and played to this, thus naming each Travis book with a colour so readers could remember if they’d read it or not. Plus ça change, and chacun à son goût.
They’re basically marketed as low-quality easy-reading trash, though. As a young teen I went through a phase of buying those romances (Mills and Boon in the UK, exactly the same thing), just because they were often literally a penny at charity shops. A few actually weren’t that bad at all, not heavy literature but decent characters with mostly plain language used well. A few years later, after Bridget Jones’ Diary, could probably have been published as “chick lit.”
Most were fill in name, fill in place, add, situation, bingo! And that’s what people wanted and expected when buying those books. I mean, sometimes you want junk.
Apologies for two separate posts. I think most people seem to have missed the fact that you were talking about a best seller.
Detective fiction has a lot of badly-written stuff, but usually it’s just a bit bad. Inconsistent characterisation, plots that don’t actually work, that sort of thing - it’s still readable and enjoyable.
There’s a British TV show called Agatha Raisin and there was a deal on the books it’s based on. They’re shit-scrapingly awful. I had to look up when they were published to figure out which year they were written in, because it seems like the 1960s but with mobile phones - people still refer to each other by terms like “Mrs Raisin” if they don’t know each other well, single mothers are referred to as being newly acceptable, the cop whose parents are from Hong Kong is referred to by a racist term… The actual murders don’t really work or make sense. None of it does.
The only good thing I could say is that the sentences and paragraphs generally make sense. Actually, two good things - I did like the main character, but would have liked her more if I knew which century she was living in. And there are at least a dozen of these books, selling very well, with a successful BBC series off the back of them.
Funny you mention Kellerman, as he wrote the prev book this person gave me. The Museum of Desire. That didn’t strike me as so horrifically written, but just so over-the-top w/ gruesome sex crimes and Nazis.
Well, she was trying to make you think the protagonist was a potential terrorist or something, which I suppose is why she was valuing it up.
But besides the clunky characters and stilted dialogue, there would be sections I actually read several times to try to figure out, “What the hell just happened? What the hell was she trying to suggest?” Only to give up and assume it was just shitty writing.
Unfortunately, I also recently read a really bad nonfiction - In Search of a Kingdom
Laurence Bergreen. Another guy w/ several published books. Fascinating topic - Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth. But just horribly written. I got the impression he war trying to emulate Simon Winchester. - but just failed miserably. Unfortunately, I stuck w/ it cause I really wanted to learn more about the subject.
He’s still a pretty good writer, provided you like his style, and the latest books are probably better if you haven’t read the first two for comparison. (Warning: they also don’t have cheerful subject matter). A lot of the problem is that he’s developed his main characters about as far as they can go without major upheavals, and maybe run out of plotlines that don’t require multiple ridiculous coincidences for resolution. But he’s the only author I’ve read who, after several lame books, came back with another really good one. So, naturally, I’ll keep reading in hopes he does that again.
Don’t dismiss the “so bad it’s good” angle either. Sometimes the crappy aspect is a feature not a bug.*
And sometimes you just don’t want something intellectual, or deep. You just want something basic and cheesy. When I was a teenager, V.C. Andrews was all the rage.
It’s like sometimes I want to watch costume dramas and documentaries, other times I want to watch horror movies and stupid cartoons.
*Let’s face it: Harlequin novels can be fucking hysterical. And my friends and I used to love to watch those stupid Lifetime movies and make fun of them.
Speaking of gender differences in appreciating novels, especially mystery novels, the crappy J.A. Jance book I mentioned features a villainous female character who at one point complains about a book she’d read that was all about relationships and had a slew of loose ends that were all neatly tidied up at the end. I’m not sure if that was intended as irony, or a stunning lack of self-awareness on the author’s part.
That same book was full of asides about characters’ makeup and wardrobes, which for many readers is probably a feature, not a bug. I used get an attack of roll-eyes when mystery/detective fiction bogged down into lengthy lunches, but found I enjoyed brief digressions of that kind in Michael Connelly’s books. I’d get hungry reading his descriptions of tacos served up at Mexican food trucks or the selection at famous L.A. restaurants.
My wife will often tell me a book she read is good, but that I wouldn’t care for it as it is a “chick book.” About relationships and feelings.
Not to say I am all about plot and explosions and such, but there is some hard-to-define aspect that can make a book appeal to us differently.