RARA-AVIS: Padding a book
Mark Sullivan (ANONYMEINC@webtv.net)
Thu, 10 Sep 1998 12:41:12 -0400 (EDT)
As far as padding books goes, that was my main problem with
Absolute
Power (I know, not really hardboiled, but it illustrates my
point).
Baldacci had a pretty interesting, not to mention timely, plot
there.
So he set up the premise to get you hooked, then bored the
reader with
about a 100 pages of character development before getting back
to the
plot. His characters were all types and I thought the whole
reason to
use types was as shorthand character development--you don't
need to fill
in the cliche back-stories. If the book had been edited by
about
100-150 pages it would have been a tight plot-driven thriller;
as it was
I found it mostly boring.
Mark
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