It's Clearly Not the Next da Vinci Code, and That's About the Best You Could Say
Amazon says:
Banes & Noble thinks:
Author: James Twining Title: The Double Eagle Genre: thriller
Once upon a time there was an entrepreneur with too much money and, apparently, too much time on his hands. And although, as was once famously sung, money “Can’t Buy Me Love,” it’s becoming increasingly obvious that money can buy me a publishing contract – or, at least, give me the industry contacts necessary to make certain that my substandard manuscript doesn’t meet the same fate as a gazillion others at the bottom of some assistant editor’s slush pile. And so some no-talent hack who’d made a pile as an investment banker can become a “best-selling” author. Gimme a break… and I’ll give you The Double Eagle in return: gladly.
The world’s rarest coin has been stolen. Or has it? there are but three known surviving examples of the famous 1933 US twenty-dollar gold piece, affectionately known as the double eagle, all of which are apparently accounted for. So what is one doing in the belly of a murdered ex-priest turned low-rent fence? Good question – especially since there are another five stashed in the vault at Fort Knox. Oops: there were five more… they seem to be missing! Enter the FBI and long-legged, hazel-eyed, cocoa-skinned Jennifer Browne. Oh, sorry, make that Special Agent Jennifer Browne; a woman with a “history.”
As Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant reminded us half a century ago, “to catch a thief you must set a thief.” That’s apparently how Browne ended up teamed with Tom Kirk, erstwhile CIA industrial spook turned world-class cat burglar turned respectable London dealer in antiquities. An elaborate murder frame-up puts Kirk on the run with Browne in tow, skittering from one European capital to another on the trail of the missing coins, a sublime Fabergé egg, and a billion-dollar auction of stolen antiquities. One certainly wonders if the two – who are obviously destined for one another – will have time to do the horizontal bop as they stalk the elusive Cassius, capo di tutti capi of the stolen art world. On second thought, one doesn’t wonder; one assumes. The quality of the writing is sufficient that the moment you learned that there was both a male and a female character, you knew they's be screwing by chapter six...
Throw in a few grisly murders by a stereotype heartless assassin, spray around double crosses like a tagger in an underpass, dump in a boatload of red herrings, season with more clichés than a drag queen convention and there you have it: James Twining’s debut novel. Take it… please.
1933 Gold $20 Coin [saperaud / wikimedia commons]
How bad is this book? Never having read J D Salinger’s shopping list I don’t know it for certain but I’ll bet it’s more interesting (and less predictable) than Twining’s debut effort. It is not just that the plot is chucky-jam full of stereotyped situations and hackneyed characters – heck, some fair to middlin’ literature is riddled with stereotype and cliché. It’s not just that the dialog reads like something out of a middle-school skit – some kids in middle school actually write fairly well. It’s not just that plot threads merely truncate without resolution or that the author apparently didn’t doany research (other than sartorial). It’s not that the plot is jammed with those places where you stop and say to yourself, “You’d have to be an idiot to believe that!” It’s that there is simply nothing about this book that redeems all those weaknesses. This is yet one more example of the genre I call the “how on earth can someone who writes like this get a book contract!?” genre… Here – see if you agree. Witness this particularly migraine-inducing snippet of purplish prose:
”Walking through this evocative pageant, his jacket slung over his shoulder, Tom turned, almost without thinking, into the Piccadilly arcade; a marbled oasis of delicately curved windows crammed with shoes, vests and ties, until he found himself outside his favorite shop, on the right, about halfway up.” The Grammar Curmudgeon took two aspirin; said he’ll call me in the morning.
Here are a few other winners that somehow slipped past the Harper Collins editorial staff (who were perhaps too stunned to react by this point):
”She swung onto Divan Yolu, the tires squealing reluctantly over its polished cobblestones.” Reluctantly?
”The ingot flashed through the air like a heavy blade, climbing slowly on its upper trajectory and then accelerating fast as gravity powered it home.” Ugh – he needs a physics lesson.
”He was set up. His prints were deliberately left at the scene while mine were wiped.” Somebody doesn’t watch enough “CSI”!
Suffice it to say that if an established author wrote dreck of this magnitude, s/he’d lose that multiple-book contract in the blink of an eye – but “fresh” “new” authors like Twining are lauded for their… their what – originality? prose? vision? Or are they merely lauded for their freshness and their newness?
Mama always said that if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say anything at all. So I suppose I should say something nice about the author. Hmmm… let me think… err… ummm… no! wait! I have it! he knows a lot about expensive clothing (in much the same way that Jonathan Kellerman does) and he’s well-versed in $100,000 wrist watches. Oh – and he also only mentions the Knights Templar once, and he informed me that Louisville no longer calls its airport Standiford Field. He does, however, need to take a trip to Kentucky some time so that he knows that the area around Fort Knox can't reasonably be characterized as “lonely farmsteads and barns [standing] marooned in [a] flat landscape like small wooden islands.” It’s actually pretty hilly – and heavily populated – in the area.
Whatever the case, there’s bad news for readers everywhere: a second Tom Kirk novel is in the works, scheduled for December 2006. I’m not planning on setting my alarm, however, and I don’t advise that you do so, either.