Crooke and Loch, a series review
The summer of 71 - A Crooke and Loch Story (1/4)
Runners and Riders: A Crooke and Loch story (2/4)
The Summer of 76 - The third Crooke and Loch Story (3/4)
A Line of Death - A Crooke and Loch Story (4/4)Ted Bun wrote the four-book series Crooke and Loch and reading it took me by surprise. What to expect and why should you read them?
When I began reading Crooke and Loch part 1, there was a point in the story at which I stopped reading and contacted Ted to tell him that I was giving up on the series.
He reassured me, and later, I returned to it and began seeing a pattern.
The reason I stopped was simple. There is a rule of thumb in literature that coincidences cannot be used to help the hero. It can be used to hinder the hero, but when those coincidences help the hero move forward, it is seen as lazy and incompetent.
This was not my first Ted Bun, and I knew he was an effective storyteller, so how could he let such a massive coincidence stand in his story?
To make it clear, Mick Crooke is a computer database student (and in later books, expert) while Sam Loch, his girlfriend, is a police officer. In the first book, they are looking for a criminal on the run, and they decide to run away to a naturist resort in another country to hide from criminals.., and the first people they run into included is the runaway master criminal?
Ted? Give me a break?
But I kept reading. And I began thinking about some other artists who created paintings that broke all the rules and are still considered masterpieces, not despite that but because of that. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is one such example. It abandons the classical perspective for paintings and looks distorted, and yet, that rupture with the convention is what created the painting's energy.
In the same way, the Crooke and Lock series isn't lazily run by coincidences, but rather, carefully stitched together in a tapestry of fast pacing run by serendipity which make really occur in real life, but which are normally frowned upon in fiction, but work in this series.
For Crooke and Loch, it's Ted's professional hand that makes it work. The stories are fun, not despite those accidents, but because those happenstances are not the story. They help the story find its rhythm with the long tedious investigations and exposition sequences in classic mysteries.
Indeed, In a normal police story, especially one in the 70s and the early 80s, criminals are found either through those tedious investigations or by being lazily linked to the crime. "It's always the husband".
Here, Ted proposes a third option. What if the protagonists have a rich social life and manage to find criminals in their daily ordinary life, after a glimpse of their criminal life, not out of laziness, but simply because often, this is our life works!
One of my male adult friends married one of my wife's colleagues. That can't be a coincidence, they both know us, right? Wrong, they met on a dating site and only realized the connection well into their relationship.
In Crooke and Loch, Ted connects a tapestry of people who each have a social life, even outside their police job or their criminal life which makes it seem like a coincidence.
Instead, he manages to make London in the 1970s feel like a small town. And that only serves the story, as the pacing is perfect.
The emotional core of the books isn't even affected, as the the relationship between the biker/database guy with dark creatures running in his mind and the delicate but rugged police owoman tugs as your heart string, especially when they sit on their rug and have some of the more genuinse heart to heart.
Ted admitted to me his secret for running a thigh pace: when he feels he might get bored with writing something, he thinks the reader might too, so he moves on to the next arc, skipping any tedious chapters. And well, Crooke and Loch books are never boring. Each time it begins to enter a new segment that appears to on a little too long, the book hits you in the back of your head and throws you into the next segment. Many of which send a character to the hospital.
Seriously, I am halfway through the 4th book while writing this, and I both can't wait to see how it ends, and I am afraid of when I will reach it. Because after it, there isn't a 5th one yet.