Hit man

The flimsy logic of Ridley Pearson's latest crime novel, Cut and Run, does not take away from its enjoyment, writes Michael Agger

Ridley Pearson writes best-selling crime novels. He's a best-selling kind of guy. He plays bass guitar in a band with other best-selling authors like Stephen King and Amy Tan, and he recently collaborated with the best-selling columnist Dave Barry on a children's book, Peter and the Starcatchers, a prequel to Peter Pan that quickly became a best seller. Like many successful people, he divides his time between locations, in this case St Louis and Idaho. (Which, when you think about it, is more of a best-selling author state than, say, Montana, which has been overrun with sensitive midlist writers.) On his personal web site, Pearson relates that a young adult novel is scheduled for publication in September, and he also details his various projects in television and film. About his poetry, he remains coy.

While Pearson may be a cross-platform modern content provider, his crime novels remain his core business. It's a good moment for the genre, as we live in a restless era. Presumably there are readers out there who enjoy strolling through the mind of a serial killer while sitting at home on an old couch surrounded by sunlight. But the crime novel thrives in airports, on commuter trains and among the treadmill rows. (It also does well on audiotape.) A Pearson book would not be my first choice for an extended stay in a cabin in the permafrost. On a 22-hour plane ride to Tokyo, however, Pearson would be my man.

Pearson's latest novel, Cut and Run, is what is known in the trade as a "stand-alone." Urged on by their publishing houses, crime writers tend to write series. They introduce a character, and if the audience is there, they can extend the run for 6 or 7 more books. Pearson's original success was the continuing Lou Boldt-Daphne Matthews series, which draws its momentum from the romantic tension between the main characters. But when a crime writer tires of his creations he will sometimes produce a new set of sleuths -- hence, the "stand-alone", a venture into virgin territory and a chance to increase the readerly flock.

The hero and potential franchise player of Cut and Run is Roland Larson, a federal marshal who dates on the job. He begins an affair with the witness he's protecting, Hope Stevens, a computer expert who has the goods on the Romeros, a secretive family involved in Medicare fraud. Some of the best contemporary crime writers introduce us to a particular milieu -- George Pelecanos, for example, who sets his novels in the African-American byways of Washington. In Cut and Run, Pearson's characters inhabit a generic world that you might call thrillerland, a place of violent weather ("The fall night air slapped him"), postcard-worthy locations and daft reasoning: if you need to track down your lost lover, concentrate on cities that offer performances of Shakespeare. She always loved Shakespeare.

Flimsy logic like this is what we expect, and it does not impair the enjoyment, or the escapism, of Cut and Run. Pearson designs his plots with the simplicity of a ball drop. Larson must protect Hope from an assassin who razors up his victims, and also recover Penny, the daughter he never knew he had. The action set pieces unfurl with declarative ease, and the closest Pearson ever comes to pointless exposition is to relate that Penny likes "Gogurts, pancakes and flank steak", none of which play a later role in the story. With its narrative economy and rock-'em-sock-'em encounters, Cut and Run is not that different from a modern action movie, except in one major respect: the sex scene. What has become a chaste fade to black in the cinema remains, on the page, a heaving rhapsody. The stars get naked.

What, then, is the secret of Pearson's best-selling success? He's a storyteller, meaning that he's ruthless, trimming anything that distracts. He's also winningly conventional. The crime novel, for all its clinical descriptions of murder, is at heart a conservative entertainment. It excites and plays upon our fear of death, but it rarely introduces any real existential panic or sorrow. Especially in Pearson's hands. Sure, the heroine's mobile will go off at precisely the wrong moment, but we know that in the end the killer will be caught, that justice will be served, and that the hero will arrange it so that the little girl gets the dog she wanted. Every so often, the reader gets what he or she wants too: a little comfort food for the mind.

MICHAEL AGGER

Michael Agger is an associate editor at Slate.com