Cheesy Adventure

When I gave up cable television, one of the big challenges to emerge was that of mental down time. There are times when I would like to just set the grey matter on idle, and heaven only knows that television can always fill that bill.

But without it, how does one settle one's brain into neutral? Turns out that one handy solution is that time-honored literary genre, cheesy, pulpy adventure novels.

There are, of course, the classic pulps. I think I have a bunch of Edgar Rice Burroughs lying about somewhere, and I spent many fine hours in my youth working my way through a relative's Doc Savage books (Savage deserves a whole entry some day-- Robeson's trick of making his hero a supporting character in a series that bore his name but really featured his band of side-kicks-- well, it was a brilliant way to make the series sustainable over sixty gazillion books).

But what of modern cheese? What contemporary greats are there out there? This is no easy choice. Cheese that is too well-written rises above the level of cheese, and before you know it, your brain is fully engaged and unrelaxed again. But cheese that is too badly written comes become painful, like biting down on a twinkie and hitting a shred of aluminum foil hidden within (yes, Dan Brown, I'm looking at you).

For two fisted adventure cheese, here are three of the big names.

Clive Cussler:

Cussler is one of the few such authors to fit comfortably as a character in his own books. Like each of these authors, he writes particularly well about the parts that he knows; in his case, that's all the underwater stuff.

Cussler works with hero Dirk Pitt, nominally an underwater search, salvage and research guy. Women can't resist him (his main squeeze through many of the books is a hot Congresswoman) and men want to be him. The movie Sahara stars Matthew McConaughy as Pitt, which pretty well gives you the character.

Cussler is good at stringing intriguing plot elements together, and he keeps things moving. His writing chops are, well, limited. He's very helpful about telling us when a character has just made a clever quip, but the elbow-in-the-ribs school of writing isn't as disorienting as his habit of repeatedly and rapidly shifting point-of-view, sometimes several times in just one paragraph.

The Pitt novels don't involve any particular chronology, so you can grab them in any order. Oh, and it doesn't hurt to read them somewhere where you have a good view of an American flag.

Cheesy, adventurous, fast-moving, and technically plausible-- start with either of these:





James Rollins

What Rollins knows is spelunking, and most of his earlier adventures involve going somewhere underneath.

Rollins likes large casts, with lots of characters to develop (a little) and bump up against each other. He's pretty good at filling these folks in with broad strokes so that we know enough to care, but not so much that the characters distract from story.

And when it comes to story, Rollins is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink guy. You can get lost civilizations, alien visitors, mystically imbued gold, traitors, spies, and the key to immortality all in one novel. Rollins wrote the novelization for the latest Indiana Jones flick, and he was the perfect man for the job, even though that plot was less busy than what he usually handles. And with the exception of Deep Fathom, he plays fair about wrapping things up.

His earlier books are stand-alones, but more recently he's started a series of books centered around a super-secret global trouble-shooting association. There's some book-to-book continuity there, but not enough to swamp anyone who encounters the books out of order.

Rollins is a pretty good craftsman and can string together a good tale. Try either of these:





Preston and Child

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child broke into the biz with Relic, a good little creepy monster adventure thriller set in a museum.

Museums and archaeology is what these guys know, and their scientists and science are very believable. Their cops and reporters, on the other hand, seem to have leapt straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. But, as with the best adventure cheese, they can string together a good plot.

They can also balance a good-sized cast in a way that maintains some suspense about the good guys and the bad guys motives and identities (despite the above-mentioned weaknesses). They use a good heap of mystery in their plotting, often hinting at the supernatural but landing on a scientific explanation. And they've usually done some interesting research about something to give each book a little quirky educational value.

They pull off the interesting trick of shuffling and reshuffling characters from book to book, creating some interlocking narratives. You don't have to read their books in order (at least not the early ones) to enjoy them, but doing so does make it more interesting. The character who eventually emerges as their heavy hitter is Pendergast, a southern, rich FBI agent whose back story becomes increasingly bizarre.

NB: Pendergast appears as the main hero of Relic, but when the book was filmized, some genius wrote him out of it. Think Hound of the Baskervilles without Sherlock Holmes. So if you've seen the movie, put it out of your head and start with the book.





A long post, I know, but I owed you.