Review: A crime thriller rife with subtext
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 3, 2012
"You have to do it before you can write about it. You have to write from experience." - from THE BESTESELLER, and which poses the reasonable question: Is Stephen Leather a psychopathic killer?"... anyone can publish an eBook. You don't need an agent or a publisher, all you need is a laptop and you can put your work out to the worldwide market ... now it's the buyers who decide what sells and what doesn't. So the idea of producing quality work has gone out of the window. Now all that matters is how many you sell." - from THE BESTESELLER, and which indicates that Stephen Leather, like Saul of Tarsus, has experienced his own Revelation on the road to the proverbial Damascus"The battery lasts for weeks and I can buy any book I want within seconds ... It's like having the biggest library in the world at my fingertips ... Once you've tried a Kindle it's hard to go back to dead tree books." - from THE BESTESELLER, and which is one of several barefaced plugsAuthor Stephen Leather has embraced the self-published eBook format as the way to escape the tyranny of agents and publishers. Though he may still use a brick and mortar publishing house for his Spider Shepherd series, he's now a True Believer in the electronic format, or at least to the extent that the new medium contributes to his income - currently 50/50, and growing, vs. the traditional print medium, according to a personal communication from the author. Indeed, THE BESTSELLER eBook can perhaps be gleefully imagined as Leather nose-thumbing the traditional publishing establishment by creating a "bestseller" without its help. Dude!To illustrate his stance vis-à-vis the ePublishing of eBooks, Stephen creates in THE BESTSELLER a conflict between a hidebound author resistant to change, Dudley Grose, and a young upstart novelist, Adrian Slater, who argues for the new technology with a cold-hearted practicality that verges on cynicism:"EBooks are published. All published really means is being offered for sale. I don't care who buys my book or how they buy it so long as I get their money."Who wins this particular battle is pretty much the conflict required for the plot. But, remember, a single battle is not the entire war, and maneuvering room is left for a surprise ending.Leather pads his view of the emerging electronic medium by contextually touting a specific brand of eReader with particular relish, much as the camera might lovingly focus on a particular brand of soft drink or beer in an entertainment film's product-placement shot. I was a little surprised by this, thinking that a more generic endorsement might have been a more balanced approach and one less likely to offend users of other devices.The author playfully weaves his own accomplishments into the plot by ascribing an evolving title, "The Bestseller", to Slater, with reference to the plot of a crime novel Slater has already written, "The Basement" - another of Leather's previous releases, as it so happens. This literary product placement of the latter (The Basement) was perhaps a little too self-serving but, hey, if you're going without a book agent, how else does one blow the fanfare?THE BESTSELLER is, ultimately, a better than average psychological crime thriller with an ending the reader won't see coming. It's also rampant with subtext that may or may not be cause for distraction. For me, it was a bit of the former as the novel struck me as more of the position statement on ePublishing that, oh by the way, also had a conventional subplot attached. Actually, I was more struck by the way the former was handled as an intellectual and marketing exercise.