Martin Shane came to Burnham to kill a man. Eight years earlier he and five other volunteered for Korea in Burnham, and were later captured by the Chinese. They were questioned and tortured by a slight, club-footed Chinese officer named Colonel Li. The men were captive for only a few days, but it was long enough for one of the men to be summarily executed and another to give Colonel Li what he wanted. And Shane came back to Burnham because he needs to know who spilled to Colonel Li, and punish him with his life.
Comes a Dark Stranger is an interesting study of cold war paranoia. Martin Shane received a severe head wound in Korea when American bombers raided the monastery where he was held captive, which took his memory for seven long years. The seven years between the last day at the monastery and a few weeks before the story begins are a blank, and the war is fresh on his mind. The cast of characters is straight from a 1950s film noir—a deformed millionaire, a shifty nightclub owner, a sweet but worldly club girl, a drunk and his bitter greedy wife, and the mandatory seemingly honest middle class lady.
The prose is an interesting mixture of Mr Patterson’s
normal, almost lyrical prose, and a more straight forward dark, shadowy prose. An example of the former is the opening lines—
“He
was drowning in a dark pool. The hands
of the damned were pulling him down, but he kicked and struggled and fought his
way to the surface.”
And an example from the later—
“There
was a narrow, dark opening in the opposite wall, and he crossed the street and
plunged into it as the car flashed back.”
The deep shadows and stark flesh of an urban
underbelly is palpable in much of the prose, and as I read the novel I was
reminded of the shadowy lighted films popular in the era heavy with paranoia,
betrayal, and fear. The paranoia is
central to the plot and the throughout the novel Shane hears the scrape and
slide sound of Colonel Li walking. It is
a sound he hasn’t heard since the Korea, but it is a sound that literally
represents the narrow edge between sanity and madness.
Comes
the Dark Stranger is different than most of Mr Patterson’s
novels, and while it seems rushed in spots and a tad over plotted, it is an entertaining
diversion. Its atmosphere and tone is
rich, and Martin Shane is an engaging protagonist—if seemingly unreliable much
of the time—who the reader easily identifies.
But the most interesting element of the novel is its experimental
nature. Not experimental in the macro
sense, but rather in the micro sense—i. e. Mr Patterson’s own body of work.
There is an interesting correlation between Harry
Patterson and Martin Shane. Shane
regained his memory when he fell and the shrapnel lodged in his brain
shifted. Harry Patterson was diagnosed
with something called essential tremor syndrome in his early seventies, which
is a neurological disease that caused shaking so severe he was unable to hold a
pen. He suffered a seizure at a friend’s
house, fell and struck his head, and the tremors stopped nearly instantly. In an interview with Reuters Mr Patterson
said, “In a way it is a bit like Lazarus.
It has been a blessing late in life—this unprecedented cure.”
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