Janet Maslin reviews John Leake’s Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer in today’s New York Times. It’s a pretty critical review and since I haven’t read the book, I can’t agree or disagree with Maslin’s complaints.
But what caught my eye was her insinuation that a lack of a blurb equates to an indictment of the book. Here’s the paragraph in question.
“Only the toughest and smartest cops could police a city like Los Angeles, with its giant size, ethnic complexity, large amount of crime and chronic shortage of police manpower,” Mr. Leake continues robotically. (Michael Connelly, the Los Angeles police-work aficionado, writes admiring blurbs for many crime stories. Entering Hades is not one of them.)
So, the fact that Michael Connelly didn’t give the book a blurb is further proof that it’s no good? That’s like saying, “Mr. Smith is the easiest, most friendly teacher in school. He always praises students when they apply to colleges. The fact that he didn’t write you a letter of recommendation must mean you’re dumb.”
Maybe Leake and his people at Farrar, Straus & Giroux didn’t want a Connelly blurb. Maybe Connelly didn’t have time to read the book. Who knows what the situation was. But it’s unfair for a critic to insinuate that the lack of a blurb is somehow a revealing fact about the quality of a book.
I tend to agree with Maslin that if a book doesn’t have blurbs–particularly a mass market genre book–that that in itself makes it’s quality suspect. Michael Connelly is a hack and he hands out book blurbs like sticks of gum to strangers. He’s like the Underwriters Laboratories stamp of approval for airport fiction. I think her theory that if you can’t get a book blurb from Connelly, you must really suck, holds a lot more water than you may wish to acknowledge.
My publisher did not ask Michael Connelly to write a blurb for “Entering Hades.” Terri Jentz, the author of “Strange Piece of Paradise,” wrote a blurb for it.