Hard Rain Indeed

Hard Rain Falling, by Don Carpenter, came highly recommended by someone whose record is sterling so far. It was also cited on The Rap Sheet in their anniversary celebration list of the crime/mystery/thriller books "most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten or underappreciated over the years". So, I found a used copy (if that's really what you call good condition Alibris, you are using the word in ways Webster never intended) and gave it a try. I mentioned the whopper case of readers whiplash it gave me in a previous entry but I never weighed in on what I thought of the book itself.

I liked it, if like is the right verb for something that turns your head so completely. Maybe it's just me but it wasn't really a crime novel, at least not in the traditional sense. Or maybe it's that it's not a crime novel in the modern sense. I don't know anything about Carpenter (no Wikipedia entry even) or what he hoped to accomplish with the book but with its up close and personal look at juvenile delinquincy and the protaganist's growing awareness of society's ills and his part in them it seems to me the author was hoping for a bigger statement than the thrills of a 'mere' crime novel. (Think more Crime and Punishment than cops and robbers.)

If that is the case the purpose certainly wasn't served by the cover-on my Fawcett edition the nude couple on the front seem to belong to another book entirely (I assume it's supposed to be sex but it actually looks more like Greco-Roman wrestling)-or the oh so macho blurbs. One on my edition says "Carpenter writes like a cement mixer at full throttle" and I know of another that speaks of his "jackhammer prose". Not being much into construction metaphors myself, I was shocked no one mentioned the obvious Theodore Dreiser influence. Now, Hard Rain Falling didn't make me wanna kill myself like Dreiser and it's true that no one (especially Fawcett in 1964) ever made a bestseller calling something "the new American Tragedy!" but it still seems like a big miss.

So if you're looking for a serious story, well told I would recommend Hard Rain Falling. If, however, you like your crime novels with patter and banter you should probably look elsewhere.