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TWO MYSTERY NOVEL REVIEWS BY ALEX GRANT.

Jack Kelly’s MOBTOWN & Stephen J.Cannell’s THE VIKING FUNERAL

Jack Kelly’s "period" thriller MOBTOWN, set in Rochester, N.Y. in 1959, is a major disappointment after Kelly’s vigorous noirish ‘amour-fou’ book LINE OF SIGHT. The author’s fifth novel MOBTOWN has all the the right moves but they add up at best to a pathetic pastiche of Mickey Spillaneish skullduggery and dumbass thuggery . A classic P.I. tome pitting one Ike Van Savage against The Mob, Italian of course, Kelly’s MOBTOWN convinces on the level of period detail but lacks verve, élan, and dash in the writing. Trying to protect Mafia Don Petrone’s wife Vicky from her homicidal hubby Van Savage bumbles into one false lead after another leaving bloody mayhem in his wake everywhere he goes, and "That’s All F-f-f-olks!" Too tedious and faithful to the period-noir template.

Stephen J.Cannell’s THE VIKING FUNERAL features his desperado stop-at-nothing-psycho- cop Detective Shane Scully, a character akin to the Mel Gibson motor-mouth/death-wish character in the LETHAL WEAPON series of films. Scully is a warrior and a lover and like a well-trained pit-bull never lets go….Here he takes on the entire L.A.P.D. and the Colombian Druglords - as well as massive corporate interests - who profit monstrously from an illicit ‘shadow’ economy that launders money on a massive scale by providing Colombian bosses with duty free cigarettes, appliances and every known brand-name luxury item under the sun.
A band of ex-cop- brigands led by Scully’s best friend – charismatic crooked cop Jody Dean: returned from the dead no less – infiltrate this parallel economy for personal profit and Scully infiltrates the infiltrators/ infil-‘traitors’. Ho-hum. The action is fast and furious and entirely phony. The hot sex encounters equally bogus. And so it goes, from one anti-climax to a climax yet on to another anti-
climax. The previous Scully scuttlebutt – L.A.P.D. ‘rumours’ -chaotic thriller THE TIN COLLECTORS was marginally less preposterous and slightly better-rooted in a recognizable reality. Both a psychological ‘reality ‘, and a documentary ‘reality’

© Alex Grant 2003

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