Grave Descend

Grave Descend is the second John Lange book to be reprinted by Hard Case Crime. John Lange, of course, is a psuedonym of Crichton's. A couple weeks ago I commented on the exceeding poor writing quality of Zero Cool. But Grave Descend is much, much better. It falls quite a bit short of Ross MacDonald or Robert B. Parker. But, as far as your run of the mill detective stories go, it is quite good.

Grave Descend was published only a year after Zero Cool and it feels like it was written by an entirely different author. This, I believe, supports my claim that Zero Cool was a pastiche. I will go even further out on a limb and say that in places Grave Descend has a distinct Ross MacDonald feel to it and maybe there was a bit of mimicing going on there as well.

It would be fun to get the other Lange books and try to further this line of investigation. Unfortunately, those that remain appear to be quite pricey and I am not going to have immediate access to them. Hopefully, I will stumble on to one or two of them at used book stores or libraries. Or maybe more will be reprinted over time.

But, as of Grave Descend, we can say that Crichton can write a reasonably good detective story and had he stayed with it he probably would have ranked up with the best. Although these books are a bit rough around the edges they are no more rough that the earlier works of many of the masters. But, that was not his fate. Grave Descend was published in 1970. Few people today have heard of it and enven fewer remember it.

A year earlier he published a very different book which most people have heard of, and most people remember. In fact, it would begin to define him as a mainstream science fiction writer and a philosopher of technology. That book, of course, is Andromeda Strain and it would launch Crichton on the path toward literary significance.