When a popular author passes away, his/her estate seeks a replacement to keep generating income. Hopefully, one who can step into the shoes with nary a squeak. Alas, there have been more than a few squeaks and the replacement -- a competent scribe for the stories he's accustomed to writing -- is unable to make the change. The estate may try others with the same result.
Now and again, however, they get it right the first time. A case in point is Marc Cameron, a deputy US marshal-turned-author. The estate tapped him when Tom Clancy bit the dust in 2013. With The Hunt for Red October, Clancy had captured the public's imagination. And held it in his subsequent Cold War thrillers. Technology-minded, he described arms and armament in layman's language.
To his credit, Cameron can do the same. The problem is that with the USSR no longer the mortal enemy, who is? North Korea fits the bill. And China. And Middle Eastern terrorists. And those in the Philippines. He can take his choice or combine them. Which he does in Power And Empire.
Jack Ryan is the carry-over US president in all these novels. His son, Jack Jr, assisting the Secret Service watching his back. In virtually every book, dad barely escapes assassination attempts, doing so again here. Venues keep changing with dirty work afoot in each: the South Seas, the US the South China Sea, Argentina, the penultimate chapter climax in Japan.
Hundreds of exciting pages on, we learn that the rogues are high-ranking Beijing officers and officials planning a coup to assassinate the paramount leader and blame it on America, with Ryan to be killed in the process. The FBI has its hands full amid the shootings and bombings.
The scrivener throws in Indonesians, Pakistanis, Taiwanese, Mexicans. Crowded Tokyo is given the most space, a sardine-packed rush-hour subway ride described in detail. Jack Jr is smart enough not to engage in single combat with his Japanese girlfriend. Cameron appears to be privy to all the ins and outs of how the People's Republic of China is run. How much is imagination and how much is accurate, I wonder. Tom Clancy fans need look no further for more of the same.
The Wild West
That God created the cosmos -- the suns, the stars, the moons -- there can be no doubt. If He/She/It/They didn't do it, who did? Questions pile up. Among them, why the dinosaurs? Had they evolved from amoeba over billions of years? Filling the planet, why did they disappear as if in one day?
That there were varieties of them, we know because they left fossils behind. Palaeontologists have yet to find a skeleton, so they connect the bones they did locate into a more imaginary than real jigsaw puzzle. Displayed in a museum of natural history, we have an approximation of the actual beasts.
Fame, if not fortune, is the spur that drives palaeontologists to the four corners of the Earth to find and gather and put the fossils together. Among the finished, albeit not polished, stories of the late Michael Crichton, penned in 1974, was Dragon Teeth. His estate thinks it good enough to publish now.
A work of historical fiction, it focuses on the competition between two actual 19th century Yank palaeontologists -- Yale professors Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh -- seeking fossils out West. They weren't above using dirty tricks to keep each other from succeeding.
Crichton regarded 1876 a decisive year in the Wild West. Silver was discovered in the Black Hills and a flood of would-be miners flooded into North Dakota, Wyoming, the Badlands. The Sioux and Crow Indians went on the warpath. Deadwood, not Dodge City, was the centre of action.
Robbers, gunfighters and the law converged there. Crichton brings in those whose notoriety are known to this day. Among them wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Custer, Wyatt Earp. There are also fictitious characters. The most important is William Johnson, a Yale student, who is instrumental in getting the located fossils back East. For your information, it is Cope who makes the great find: the tooth of a Brontosaurus. According to the author's research, the Indians aren't from Siberia who crossed over the Ice Age bridge to inhabit the Americas, but native Aborigines forever there. The Indian Wars are timeless.
His Jurassic Park is smoother than Dragon Teeth but lacks its nostalgia. Those who knew him -- he died 2008 -- admired his creativity, bringing new ideas to his books, movies, television. Michael Crichton is sorely missed.
Dragon Teeth
by Michael Crichton
Harper Collins
328pp
Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops
325 baht
Power And Empire
by Tom Clancy/Marc Cameron
Michael Joseph
582pp
Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops
850 baht
