The Mediterranean Caper by Clive Cussler

I'm interrupting low-content mode with a disappointing announcement. The Mediterranean Caper sucks.

I'm in Milwaukee on my layover to Nashville and I've got nothing to read for the rest of the trip now. I only got to about page 36 of the book before "hero" Dirk Pitt slapped a woman he'd just met two minutes ago. His reason: she was still grieving over the husband she'd lost in a car accident nine years before.

Here's Dirk's explanation:

"That torch you carry around is as worn out as an overcoat. I'm surprised someone hasn't taken you over a knee and spanked it off. So your husband was dashing. So what? He's dead and buried, and mourning over him for all these years won't resurrect him from the grave. Lock away his memory somewhere and forget him. You're a beautiful woman - you don't belong chained to a coffin full of bones. You belong to every man who turns and admires you as you pass by and who longs to posses you."

I repeat: he met this woman two minutes ago. Classy.

Of course she immediately sleeps with him.*

Because I was stuck on the plane with nothing else to read, I trudged forward, but finally gave up when Cussler hinted that Dirk doesn't know that dinosaurs and humans never existed at the same time. Or maybe it was when Dirk throws a temper tantrum for no good reason than that the scene was getting a little stale and needed livening up. So much for Cussler's Dirk Pitt. I don't care if it was written thirty years ago, I can't get through it. I'll stick with the Matthew McConaughey version.

*I hear that it's revealed later that the girl has a reason for having sex with this jerk, but that doesn't make his belting her any easier to get past.

Hawke (Ted Bell)

This one didn't even make the 100 Page Rule. And I so wanted to like it too.

I had to go to the DMV not too long ago and realized as I was out running errands beforehand that I'd brought nothing to read. So I popped into a Barnes & Noble and browsed until I found Ted Bell. Hawke, the first novel in his Alex Hawke series, looked promising. There's a picture of a boat, a reference to "high adventure," a comparison to Clive Cussler (whom I've never read, but have always meant to), and a romantic, swashbuckling name for the hero.

Turning the book over I saw that the hero is the direct descendant of a legendary privateer and a decorated Naval hero himself. There's also something about a top secret assignment in the Caribbean. I bought the book right away. Unfortunately, I only made it to page seventy-two.

It began promisingly enough. Young Alex Hawke is on a yacht trip with his parents when modern-day pirates board the boat and orphan the boy. Bell writes the scene convincingly and horrifyingly. I felt real fear and sorrow for the poor kid. It's only when we flash forward to years later that things start to come apart.

Alex overcomes his adversity to join the British Navy and not only better himself, but to become annoyingly perfect. He's rich, he's charming, he's adventurous. The only flaws I could find in him before I gave up are that he's no good at golf and that he doesn't know how to break up with women very well.

I could've stuck it out if that's all that was wrong, but I was already irritated by the time I got to page sixty-eight, which is where I started questioning my commitment to the book. Four pages later, I closed it for good.

What's happening on page sixty-eight is that Alex is trying to track down a lead on a missing submarine and is in a Caribbean bar interviewing a couple of former Soviets who now traffic in high-end military equipment like hovercrafts, helicopters, scud missiles, and - hopefully - submarines. Alex has heard that the men had recently been arguing over a girl (the argument makes them late for their meeting with him) and that one of them had abused her.

The knowledge doesn't seem to affect his attitude towards the men; in fact, he sort of feels sorry for them at first. Bell writes:

Looking at them, Hawke felt a twinge of pity. At one time, these two cold warriors had surely been formidable men, accustomed to a sense of purpose, power, and command. Now they had a dissolute air about them, stemming no doubt from too much sun, too much rum, too little self-respect. It was more than a little humbling, Hawke imagined, to be peddling the arsenal of your once vaingloriously evil empire.

But Hawke's empathy for the Russians quickly changes when he realizes that the waitress serving them is actually the girl the men were fighting over. Seeing abrasions on her wrists and ankles, he becomes a different man.

Now, I get the difference between "hearing" that someone got rough with a girl and seeing the results of it for yourself. It's now how I'd react, but I understand that maybe Alex is the kind of guy who'd let it go until he was confronted with the evidence. In fact, it would make him a more interesting character if he was that kind of guy. It would be a significant flaw that I'd be interested in watching him overcome. But that's not the case here.

On page sixty-eight (aka Chapter Five), Bell retroactively paints Alex as the kind of guy who brooks no tolerance for anyone who would abuse a woman. Words like "unbridled loathing" and "sodden degenerates" are used. Bell tells us, "In Alex's world there was right and there was wrong. And there were no shades of gray."

First of all, my worldview doesn't leave me very patient with folks who see everything in black and white. Abusing someone weaker than you is always wrong, but I'd want to hear the whole story before passing final judgment. Was the girl armed? Was she threatening one of the men in some other way? Did she have information they needed? This new Alex of Chapter Five doesn't care about those questions. His "no shades of gray" policy immediately makes me question whether or not I want to keep reading about him.

But more than that is the sloppiness in the storytelling. Alex already knew that at least one of these guys had beat up a girl. And he felt badly for them; related to them even. Turn the page and now he's outraged. He quickly adjourns the meeting, invites the men back to his boat for further discussion, and when they leave he promises the grateful, gleaming-eyed waitress that he'll take care of them and they'll never bother her again. She all but folds her hands and says, "My hero!"

The inconsistency between the nonchalant, businesslike Alex of Chapter Four and this vengeful Alex of Chapter Five is what made me throw up my hands and put the book away. And it's too bad really, because a series of books about a pirate's descendent who travels the world fixing unfixable problems sounded awesome to me.

Publishers Weekly's review of it (on the Amazon page in the link above) makes me glad I quit now though. It calls Alex "a cartoon" and the book itself "a pirate book for adult boys (that) ... tips over into unintentional parody more often than it should." Maybe instead of reading "the new Clive Cussler" I should try some actual Clive Cussler instead.