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May 24, 2007
Adventures with Bruce - An Open Letter to Bestselling Mystery Writers
Bruce is a voracious reader, devouring 2 or 3 novels a week. Due to this rapid pace, he is frequently forced to read mainstream stuff. This is a problem, because your standard New York Times Bestselling thriller tends to follow a few set patterns, the most common of which is the Last Chapter Twist. This is the one where the protagonist suddenly discovers that he or she has been looking at the wrong bad guy or trying to prevent the wrong crime.
Once you know this is going to happen, you tend to see the supporting characters in a different way. Still, the effort is worth it unless, for example, you figure out the real mastermind in the first chapter and spend the rest of the book waiting for the idiot detective to stop chasing the red herring.
In particular, if a businessman walks in wearing a What Would Jesus Do tie pin, it's a dead cert that he's also dumping toxic waste into the local children's swimming pool, and if there is a particularly pious preacher with a loving family, he's either abusing his daughter or his son is a deranged serial killer.
This has got to stop. Perhaps this sort of thing goes over well at parties, where the movers and shakers can tell you what a Good Thing You're Doing Exposing the Hypocrisy of the Religious Right, but that is cold comfort if there is no longer any point to reading the stupid book after page 10.
So if you write mainstream thrillers and you're working on your new novel about a crazed pro-life activist who's killing babies so he can pin the murders on the heroic workers at a nearby abortion clinic, consider that half your public is going to be able to predict all 400 pages from the first three sentences on the back cover, and that is probably going to cut into your profit margin.
More important than that, you have never seen what Bruce is like when he can't find something to read, and you really, seriously, don't want to.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Thu 2:56 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (1) | More Adventures with Bruce | Tags: books Christianity conservative culture elitism humor Jeffrey Deaver liberals Lincoln Rhyme satire The Empty Chair
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How does Bruce find time to read AND blog at the same time? Or does he delegate the blogging to you? I have two books I want to read, even started to read, but I just can't get motivated to pick them up again...I'd rather blog I reckon...or surf teh tubes anyway. Help! lol
Posted by: c.a. Marks at May 24, 2007 8:34 AM
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