Becker's Ring
Steven Martin Cohen
Simon & Schuster pbk, £9.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)
Simon & Schuster's received wisdom says Steven Martin Cohen's second is a dark, daring fusion of Blue Velvet with Pulp Fiction; experience pegs it for a nasty, confused, and, worst of all, badly written piece of lurid procedural shlock. Imagine, if you must, Silence of the Lambs directed by Michael Winner.
New York City. Someone is shanghaiing freshly paroled car-jackers, only to return them to society weeks later, mouths sewn-tight and hands surgically removed, the stumps brilliantly grafted in a loop. The so-called Hoopers are a public sensation - TV nuts'n'sluts shows, merchandising; the whole shebang - while the cops work tirelessly to nail the patently unhinged sawbones responsible. The brilliant but unconventional (stop me if you've heard this one before) Lieutenant Brent Kramer is on the case and, accompanied by the brilliant but unconventional Nigel, is determined to bring justice back to these mean streets.
Cohen is an artist, author, inventor and engineer, which makes one wonder if he shouldn't nominate a single discipline and master it. Preferably not thriller writing.
Becker's Ring is of the sub-Thomas Harris school, researched to exhaustion, heaving in numbers enough to make even poor Stephen Hawking's head spin. The thing the copyists forget about Harris is that for all the detailed cataloguing, his novels are perfectly pitched Thrillers, written with real cinematic stride. Cohen's book is dragged down by its particulars, suffocating under the weight of scholarship. Small matters like characterisation and pacing are tossed aside in favour of the most shameless stereotyping this side of Patricia Cornwall. His dialogue is frankly execrable.
Worse yet, the entire novel strives to hide its reactionary agenda beneath a thin veneer of decency. Cohen paints a distinctly cartoonish canvass, its insights into criminal psychology inept, the vigilantism shallow, and its treatment of "gender confusion" just plain offensive. The novel deals crudely with the supposed crudity of the mass media - would anyone really consider the covey of Hoopers suitable as kiddie toys, even in America?
Ultimately, Becker's Ring is found as wanting as Harris-wannabe Derek Van Arman's risible Just Killing Time, its promised weird, wild originality sacrificed on the altar of mediocrity. It operates in ostensibly similar territory to Jonathan Kellerman, and while the latter's writing may be only a marginal improvement, his plotting is tighter, characters sharper, and, unlike Cohen, his books don't leave a bad taste in the mouth. *