#8
Mean Streets
By Terrance Dicks
Well, I wanted Bernice to get up to something different for a change, and here we are. There is no archeological dig in Mean Streets. After wittily griping about it in Ghost Devices, Bernice is now actually committing to her work on Dellah: she’s reasonably important and living on book royalties, in no mood for adventures, thank you very much. It takes a visit from Chris Cwej – which unwittingly triggers a Hitchocockian murder plot – to coax her into visiting an old haunt to solve a mystery. No trowel required.
Honestly, I’m not sure if this is a legit character choice for her eight books in or if Terrance just didn’t look at what she had already been doing (pretty consistently) up to now, vis-à-vis quite happily going on adventures, thank you very much. Like how Chris turns up entirely motivated by the death of Roz and determined to honour his friend. Okay, but why now? Has he been trapped in amber since So Vile A Sin? (We know he hasn’t: he’s been in five New Adventures since then.)
The reason for the (arguable) reset is probably the subject matter. You’ll have noticed a theme in some of Terry’s NAs, with the Al Capone era being visited in Blood Harvest and the futuristic crime haven of Megacity appearing in Shakedown. He loves noir and he’s not afraid to sprinkle some cheese on it. Well, it makes sense to dust off Megacity if he wants another go. The prologue is set during Shakedown and Mean Streets is a sequel to that book’s B-plot (which we’re only hearing about now). It’s a tenuous setup, and a fair amount of contrivance is needed so that Chris only has to mention a “Project” and “Megacity” in earshot to get Bernice involved, but it brings us back to prose like “The place was so corrupt that everyone had something to hide.” Ahhh: you can hear that boozy jazz already.
All of which is fair enough if you love that sort of thing. Unfortunately I have a pretty low tolerance for it. (Half of two novels was plenty, thanks.) More significantly, it’s not as if Mean Streets adds anything to the realm of cheesy noir that Terrance Dicks – not to mention the stuff he’s riffing on – hasn’t already done. (Literally, when it comes to sending our heroes undercover as criminals. See Blood Harvest.) He even makes efforts to rein in the futuristic elements that would otherwise make this different from yer average Raymond Chandler pisstake. Sure, there are aliens everywhere and there’s a sci-fi plot, but then Bernice goes shopping (in Megacity, on another planet, in the future) at a still thriving branch of Nieman-Marcus. One of the many crime syndicates in Megacity is noted for having “clung to the old Mafia terminology.” (Of course it has.) A resident of Megacity still refers to drugging people as a “Mickey Finn.” It’s all just a bit too comfortably Earth-like. We get it, Megacity is like old Earth Chicago. It doesn’t have to be old Earth Chicago, albeit with hovercars.
Take Garshak. He was an interesting character in Shakedown: an Ogron who thanks to genetic modification is not only not a brute but a genius. That’s basically Rocket Raccoon! Loads you could do with that! Last time he was an amusingly high cultured police captain in a lawless town; this time, long since out of the job, he’s a private eye. Okay, fair enough. But he’s only a private eye because he came across some old Earth pop culture and thought, why not. Really? He can’t arrive at that idea without some nudge-wink connection to the materials Terry based this on? It makes him consciously part of the pastiche; worse, now he’s like an idea in search of a personality. Still, it gets us to chapters written in first person as Garshak investigates, but they’re not really elevated by the fact that he’s an Ogron with a high IQ and not Humphrey Bogart. The only really notable thing about him is that he tends to win all his fights. I’m not sure that’s more interesting, especially after a while.
It’s not as if I spent the book rolling my eyes and soldiering on. After all, it’s Terrance Dicks, so the prose clicks along like a metronome. But this is not his sparkling best. Terry’s famously concise powers of description are a little lacking here: Chris is “big”; Bernice is “medium-sized” (!); Roz, who only appears in the prologue but is mentioned a lot, is “dark” – several times on a page at one point. I know he’s just being expedient but after a while that last one starts to feel a bit, really? That’s her defining feature, if you had to pick one out of a hat, on an alien planet full of random animal-shaped whatevers? (And about them: there is a crime boss called Lucifer who happens to be a tall, horned chap with wings and a tail. His species is “Demoniac”; apparently the name came from lazy Earth people and it stuck. Lampshading the obviousness of an idea doesn’t elevate it above obviousness.)
Bernice doesn’t come out of this brilliantly. I’ve got my issues with the setup – I think you could have her snap back to academia after those earlier books but this feels more like introducing a fake norm – but through the rest of the book, she doesn’t quite click like she usually does. She’s often a step behind Chris, such as not being able to guess how criminals at large could get to you in prison; worse, when they’re both posing as crime lords and a guy arrives who previously met Chris as an Adjudicator, Bernice says “Why does it matter if he knows who you are?” Gee, maybe because it would blow his cover? She normally has more imagination than that.
She at least enjoys herself posing as the “Dragon Lady,” complete with killer laser-lipstick, but plot-wise the whole “blend in” schtick is a bit of a dead end, and only serves to delay the meaning of the “Project” until the last fifth of the book – which does little to keep up the stakes earlier on. In terms of usefulness, she does get to storm into the proverbial accusing parlour at the end, but not because she has a particular stake in this: it’s because “as an academic, she was used to lecturing people.” Oh. (You would think Chris would want that job since it’s his quest, but I should probably just shut up and be grateful when Bernice has something to do.)
Her dialogue seems a little muted as well, which is a pity as it’s often the best thing about her, but that’s a common malaise in Mean Streets. Funny lines are all too often punctuated with exclamation marks, making characters sound like they’re in the Famous Five. It seems rather gauche for Bernice my-middle-name-might-as-well-be-Sarcasm Summerfield. It’s positively bizarre when Garshak does it.
I’ve done almost nothing but complain about Mean Streets, but I didn’t hate it. It’s as cheerily readable as anything by Terry, and the whole pastiche bit will be some folks’ bread and butter. I just found the story itself so thunderingly uninteresting and irrelevant to Benny that all I’m left with for a review is the ways in which it didn’t take advantage of this range of books so much as force them into a comfortable shape that the author likes.
5/10
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