A Hard Day's Death: Raymond Benson

It wasn’t Peter Flame’s best concert. His tour manager thought the aging rock star—once as big as Bowie or Lennon—seemed a little distracted. But when the manager stopped by his town house later that night, Flame was a lot worse than distracted—he was dead. It looked like Flame had hanged himself, but the coroner ruled it a homicide. Now it’s up to Spike Berenger and Rockin’ Security to find out who killed Flame…and why.

Was it his ex-wife? A former bandmate? A religious cult that had become Flame’s groupies? A member of one of the mysterious rock ‘n’ roll gangs terrorizing New York? With so many potential suspects and so many possible motives, only a rock ‘n’ roll insider like Spike could hope to wade through the rumors and the legends and find the cold hard facts…and a cold-blooded killer.

Raymond Benson's A Hard Day's Death was a phone call I could've hung up on in the middle and never come back to. Spike Berenger, employee of Rockin' Security (with a group of helpful employees that could be found at your average Justice League meeting), bodyguard to rockstars, with a side gig as a PI for 30 years, was on the phone and he was looking to find the killer of has-been rock god Peter Flame. I told him: fuck, you've got everything you could ask for and you know everyone from the mayor of NYC to Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson. What do you need me for? But he insisted on talking anyway.

It took me a few chapters to really identify what the problem was with A Hard Day's Death. Granted, there wasn't only problem; characters born of wish fulfillment private detective fantasy; they weren't unlikable, just dull; a mystery that didn't really have any clues; an absurd set of coincidences leading to a predictable 'one of my friends gets hurt' moment. These things just covered it up until I stumbled upon this sentence thought by Berenger:

"Joshua seemed depressed"

At that moment I thought: Really? Because I just read the past four pages of conversation between you and Joshua, and he didn't seem depressed at all.

Not long after that, I sussed it out. The 'show, don't tell' rule was being broken. From the overlong description of a roundhouse kick in the middle of a riot, the all but advertising language explaining what kind of guitar Berenger had, to the emotional state of almost everyone involved, there was a need to explicitly tell me what was going on. In some cases telling me was required, because the author doesn't use language to indicate the emotional states of his characters, or the abstract things they love. (If that Fender produces a great bottom sound, shouldn't that sound be described in some manner?)

Topped off with a 'Scooby-Doo' explanation at the end where the Berenger tells the cast exactly how he knew what he knew (I knew what I knew because it was predictable), it left me with the feeling that I had endured a long conversation with someone I couldn't get away from instead of reading a story.

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Dorchester Publishing Company
April 2008
ISBN-13: 9780843960631