It's Hard Being A Guy Who Isolates Himself From Society

It's that time again!

Deadpool: [To make peanut butter sandwiches with our feet?]

Adorable Baby Panda: To go to the river and splash around?

Atticus: To spin the Wheel of Morality?

Never, no, and not without clearing it with lawyers. It's time to discuss a book!

Assembled Characters: Aww, that's bogus.

Now, don't be that way. There are actually a couple of books I finished in the last few days, but one of them was a bit unusual, and I need some more time to digest it, so tomorrow for it. Maybe.

The Hit and The Marksman, Brian Garfield - These are actually two stories in one book, both by the same author. Well, The Hit is a story, The Marksman was originally a screenplay* Garfield wrote in the '80s, that's he's since slightly modified into a rough short story.

Both stories feature main characters who have given up on life. In The Hit, it's Simon Chase, former journalist and cop, who now lives in the hills above Reno (I think**) in the 1970s. He's grown disillusioned by years of trying to get criminals put away, only to see their organization buy whoever was needed to get said criminals released. Now he lives off his pension and scours the desert for rocks which might contain gems he could sell.

With The Marksman, it's C.W. Radford (no first name, just initials), who survived time in a prisoner of war camp, has a bullet in his head from his time there, and spends his days washing dishes at a diner run by the other American soldier at that camp. He hardly reacts to anything at all.

In both cases, a woman drags the protagonist out of their shell, willingly or not. For Chase, it's Joanne, who he had a thing with. She works for one of the organization's higher-ups, who's now dead, with the very important contents of his safe gone missing. Since that safe had a film that kept her in line, she's a suspect, and with her past connection with ex-cop Crane, so is he (especially since he's the fist person she contacts for help). Thanks a lot, lady. For Radford, he saves a lady being attacked at the diner, she responds to him kindly, introduces him to a few friends, who want to use him for a patsy.

The Marksman actually reminds me of the Mark Wahlberg/Danny Glover movie from a year or two ago, Shooter (The Shooter?). Radford's an excellent shot, but not using that skill, and people with questionable motives*** decide they can pin their ill deeds on him, play it up as a vet gone round the bend. At which point he becomes Jason Bourne and John McClaine rolled into one, eluding a building (and eventually a town) full of cops searching for him, then he drives a police motorcycle through a bunch of cubicles and offices to escape, makes a weapon by tying two police nightsticks together, and similar stuff.

To be fair, Garfield admits this was only a preliminary version of the story, third draft at best****, which explains some of the questionable plot developments, such as a cop taking a weapon from one of the baddies in the climactic battle, then carrying it with him, and trying to use it at a critical moment. That's evidence in an assassination dude, don't start firing it, that's probably contaminating it, or damaging the chain of custody, or something!

Both the stories are entertaining in their own ways. The Hit is more of a suspense/mystery, though I'm not sure whether the reader is supposed to put the evidence together and figure out the party responsible for all the trouble.

* In an introduction to it, he says the producer was disappointed because the story was too old-fashioned, meaning it had a beginning, middle, and end. I guess that producer loved the '70s Western Valdez is Coming, which ended ambiguously, and with the primary impetus for the plot still unresolved.

** It's somewhere in the desert, since Chase mentions it's hot enough the asphalt is bubbling, but isn't quite soft the way it gets at 127 degrees. It has a "Strip", but it's definitively not Vegas, and it's not Carson City, since they mention the state capital in a way that suggests it's somewhere else.

*** They assassinate people they deem impediments to freedom. I'm unclear whether these people were heads of terrorist organizations, or peace-oriented folks that would have lead to the U.S. being less militarily overwhleming in the Middle East, or what. Except they eventually decide they need to kill the police comissioner in town, who's considered incorruptible, which you'd think would be a good thing. So I can't decide whether the bad guys or hypocrites, or idiots.

**** Not being familiar with the process, I'm unclear how many drafts a story might normally go through. I don't think any of the papers I wrote for various classes went through more than three drafts, and most only had two. 'Cause I'm awesome. And lazy.