I plan to conclude my literary rant (see two previous posts) but first, another totally cool and fantabulous thing that blogging hath wrought - yesterday I got a new comment on a post nearly three years old: Your rant about your inkjet printer actually saved my team from hours of frustrating troubleshooting, not to mention missing a very critical deadline because that &*"&$(*/&$() machine would not print.

I just googled "hp business inkjet 2600 jammed unable to eject paper", found your blog, told him "hey, there's some girl on the internet who says we have to poke the paper sensor, which is supposed to look like a little black thingy". And guess what, it worked!

So thanks!

That makes me really happy, that a rant originally intended to at most be cathartic actually helped someone. Warms the cockles of my withered, dessicated heart, it does. Seriously.

So now, heady with printer-helping success, onward with part three of my series in contemporary literary criticism:

Jumping The Shark, Part Three

Patricia Cornwell started her Kay Scarpetta series with the brilliantly written Postmortem and followed it with the entertaining and compelling Body of Evidence and All That Remains. I had some minor issues with the characters even then, but the mysteries were suspenseful and interesting.

The Lucy character bothers me. My overall impression is that Cornwell woke up one day and thought, “Ooooh, I want to be all cutting-edge and hip so I know! I’ll make one of my main characters a lesbian!” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, some of my bestest friends are lesbians, but Lucy is written so patronizingly and condescendingly that it’s utterly nauseating. I can’t point to a specific phrase or paragraph, but my overall impression is like - imagine an infinitely patient and cheerful nursery school teacher that's too perky for her own good - “Hey, kids, this is Lucy. Lucy is a LESBIAN. What can we learn from Lucy the Lesbian? Why *make a smiley face with dimples* lesbians can be attractive! And smart! And successful! But *make a sad face with frownies* Lucy has emotional hurdles to overcome because it’s not always easy to be a LESBIAN, kids. Aw, look at the professional difficulties Lucy’s lover-friend Janet has, because Janet is a LESBIAN too, but Janet has to hide being a LESBIAN because Janet works for the evil FBI which hates LESBIANS.”

I contrast Lucy with Jonathan Kellerman’s detective Milo Sturgis, whose homosexuality is mentioned in the novel only when it is pertinent to the personal narrative, in the same way a character might be tall, or blond-haired, or left-handed. It’s a fact about Milo, not a hidden fact or a shameful fact, but a descriptive one; to borrow from a review by Charles Deitz, "Milo’s sexual orientation serves merely to round out the character and is a source neither of comedy nor pathos". Lucy’s lesbianism, on the other hand, is farcical even without being mentioned every two seconds (which it is).

There were a few other things that got on my nerves but I was willing to ignore them in favor of a fast-paced, intriguing bit of fiction, which carried me forward through the series until the woeful, stinky, waste o’paper piece o’crap that is Black Notice.

Not only is the reader supposed to believe that the Commonwealth of Virginia is so backward that in the year 2000, they do not have their own computer system or e-mail network, but instead rely upon (wait for it) AOL – AOL! - for internal communications, but that Kay Scarpetta, supposedly intelligent enough to have earned a law degree, a medical degree and the position of Chief Medical Examiner of the State of Virginia before the age of forty (a factoid which I must admit has caused me a bit of willing-suspension-of-disbelief choking previously) is TOO STUPID to figure out that, once her official e-mail account has been compromised, she could save herself a lot of time, trouble, Official Reprimands and cyber-sleuthing if she, I dunno, CHANGED HER FREAKING PASSWORD. Can I take a moment to reiterate how freaking ridiculous it is that government employees of the Commonwealth of Virginia are supposed to be using AOL as their official business e-mail client?!? Actually, the e-mail address of the chief medical examiner of Virginia is [blahblahblah]@vdh.virginia.gov which I found out in like 3 seconds by Googling it. But that’s not as bad as the other plot thread, which has officials at Interpol – get that, INTERPOL – so baffled that they have no other option than to summon Scarpetta for a consultation. Yeah, that could happen. I’m sure that all the time, the GBI gets so frustrated and flummoxed that they have to summon coroners from several states away, and that’s the poor ol' puny little GBI, not INTERPOL. Uh-huh.

So appalled by that monstrosity, I didn’t read any other Kay Scarpetta mysteries until a recent excursion to Border’s when I found Predator on a sale table. No wonder it was on sale…contrived plots, unbelievable coincidences, uneven narrative and Cornwell also commits the aforementioned heinous crime of Authorial Sloppiness. A plot point hinges upon a certain government law regarding standards for electronic health care transactions, privacy standards, etc. which Cornwell refers to as “HIPPA”. It’s not HIPPA, for fuck’s sake! It’s HIPAA, because it stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act! And if you’re not sure, Googling it takes 3 seconds! And if it’s too much bother for the author, where is her editor in all this?!? AAAGH!

But to put a rotten cherry on top, the main characters of Scarpetta, Lucy and Marino have morphed into utter caricatures of their former selves. It’s too pathetic to be laughable, and to top it off, Lucy's weird behaviour is now because she has a brain tumor. Probably brought on by rampant LESBIANISM, kids! Bah! Well, I think it’s time to quit reading a series when I’m truly, physically disappointed that the killer gets captured before murdering any of the main characters, don’t you?

To be fair, it's not like I hate everything, so here is a list of authors that in my opinion have never Jumped The Shark:

• Terry Pratchett: (who is first on my list for a reason). Terry’s writing is so brilliant that I want to leave earth and go live on the Discworld. True, I like some sets of characters more than others – for example, I’d rather read about the witches of Lancre than the Night Watch, but I love these novels from first to last. The fact that I am a human female embodiment of Rincewind doesn’t hurt.
  
• Stephen King: I like some of his novels better than others, I was displeased - and frowned darkly in his general direction - at what he did with Roland the Gunslinger, but my likes/dislikes are pretty evenly placed throughout the body of his work – which is sort of a pun, “The Body” being pure, utter genius in every letter and punctuation mark. Anyway, it’s not like only his early stuff rocked; as much as I loathed Dreamcatcher, that’s how much I loved From A Buick 8. Go, Steve!
• Neil Gaiman: I have not the vocabulary to properly praise the brilliance of The Sandman, his prose novels are wonderful as well and if I ever happen to accidentally produce a daughter, I’m naming her Coraline.
• Chris Grabenstein: Maybe it’s a bit premature to put Chris on this list since he doesn’t have the prolific body of work that the others do, but I like his detective John Ceepak, narrator Danny Boyle and his style of writing better with every novel I read - and Slay Ride is one of the most compelling suspense thrillers I've read in a l-o-n-g time.
• Dean Koontz: again, an author whose body of work includes things I liked and things I didn’t, but it’s not like only his early stuff is great. Lately I’ve really enjoyed his novels featuring protagonist Odd Thomas.