John Lange

Before he was famous and before he had decided to eke out a living as a professional writer, Crichton wrote pulp detective fiction under the pen name of John Lange. These works are a little hard to come by as most used copies are collectors items and quite pricey. However, two of them were republished by Hard Case Crime. These two were Zero Cool published originally in 1969 and Grave Descend originally published in 1970. I ordered them and had a opportunity to read Zero Cool over the past week. The thing that struck me most about Zero Cool was the astonishingly poor quality of the writing.

I teach a course in writing and can attest to the fact that first time writers often make some very predictable mistakes. Events and actions are often unmotivated. Characters are non believable. Dialog is cliched. That sort of thing. Zero Cool reads like an undergraduate writing assignment. How could this be?

I should be clear that I am not attacking Crichton's writing ability. Indeed, I use Jurassic Park as an example of consummate writing technique. And, I started reading Grave Descend which is markedly better and published only a year later. In addition, Zero Cool is not his first published novel. I don't have the numbers handy, but it is more like the fourth or fifth. So, what would explain this lapse in writing skill?

I am going to speculate. This is a somewhat wild speculation and hopefully, later, I can accumulate evidence to support or refute it. I think Crichton was trying to write like Dashiell Hammet and doing a horrible job of it. Before I give my evidence for that wild speculation, let me point out that we know, from later works, that Crichton liked taking on writing challenges. Books like Eaters of the Dead, The Great Train Robbery, Travels, and Electronic Life are very different than his usual fare of cautionary science fiction. So, it is not out of the realm of possibility that he would try a Hammet pastiche.

Hammet's most famous work is The Maltese Falcon in which the lives of an odd cast of characters revolve around an elusive object (a statue of a falcon) rumored to be encrusted with priceless jewels. It is a fiction noir version of the Holy Grail. In Zero Cool we have an odd cast of characters whose lives revolve around the pursuit of a similar priceless object the Emerald of Cortez.

The dialog in Zero Cool is often the clipped repartee characteristic of fiction noir peppered with cynical, hard boiled remarks. Only it doesn't quite measure up to the masters. It sounds more like a twelve year old standing in front of a mirror with his t-shirt sleeves rolled up, eyes squinting to look tough, and a pencil hanging out the corner of his mouth to represent a cigarette saying words like doll and dame and don't be a fool.

The characters are also very weak. There are thugs, gangsters, villains, tough guys and mysterious walk-ons. All unbelievable except in the mind of a twelve year old Sam Spade wanna be.

I have to admit that I had to force my way through Zero Cool and was quite disappointed in the writing. I thought he had just not hit his stride yet. I could not understand how somebody who would get so good at this later could start off so poorly. But, when I started Grave Descend and saw the marked improvement, I decide that it wasn't just poor writing as much as it must have been an experiment.