I have a week spot for thrillers. And one of the more enjoyable thriller writers of recent years, up until now, has been Vince Flynn, who has written about the exploits of the super-bad-ass “iron man”, Mitch Rapp, who is to the special forces what the special forces are to the regular army. Good times.
Anyhow, I just started reading his most recent book, Memorial Day, and, suddenly, exactly the same thing has happened to him as happened to Tom Clancy. He’s suddenly so busy filling his book with shallow liberal-bashing, warmongering, patriot-act-praising and more liberal-bashing, that there’s no actual good book in there any more.
I was a Tom Clancy fan for years (his last couple have finally lost me) but I was never able to get through Vince Flynn’s first book. The book was about some serial killer who was murdering congressmen - and we were supposed to sympathize with the killer and feel that congressmen deserve to die. The plausibility of this wasn’t helped by Flynn making his hero a congressmen - who we were supposed to like because he was “different”. It took Clancy at least seven or eight books to get as far out there as where Flynn started from.
Flynn is a local here and a frequent guest on a radio show I listen to a lot. He’s even worse on the radio than in his books (which are little more than badly written, Tom Clancy style helicopter porn). In interviews, he’s violently pro-Bush, pro-war and anti-Muslim. He constantly says we’re in a war with Islam (yes ISLAM, not terrorists). He belittles concerns about torture as PC liberal whining. I’ve even heard him say that all Palestinians should be forcibly removed from Israel. The guy is a raving bigot and the worst kind of ultra-right, neocon asshole.
