<<But having an emotional attachment to their career is
only relevant if their career is under threat.>>
How do you reach that conclusion? Just to give one example,
the operatives who work for Dan Kearny love reposessing cars,
yet their careers are not under threat. Their emotional
attachment to repomanhood is indeed relevant to how they
operate, the risks they take, and so on. All of this quite
independently of whether such an attachment helps or hinders
their work and their lives.
For another example, Mario Balzic's emotional attachment to
being a cop is at the very core of Constantine's creation,
but again, there is no threat to Balzic's career -- though he
saw retirement as a personal disaster. The man was invested
in what he did, even if his wife had to rely on Betty Dodson
(aside: and what other crime author has given such a
realistic and fully human portrait of a couple?).
Since I got to generalizin', I have to say (the soapboxer's
favorite cliché© that what does it for me in a crime novel is
interesting characters coupled with interesting situations--
the situation can be anything, from how to deal with a mad
Russian (KCC's Bottom Liner Blues) to how to deal with forced
retirement in a corrupted city (KCC's Cranks and Shadows), to
the world of informants and neurotic cops (Bill James's
Gospel), to the dark doings of Howard Hughes and his cohorts
(James Ellroy's novels). I don't care so much for a mystery,
or even a specific crime, as the central point of a crime
novel. Crime covers a lot of territory, to the point that you
can have an atmosphere of crime when no crime has in fact
been committed, or when such a crime can never be proven, or
when the supposed investigator doesn't even care about
solving it.
It's a broad criminal world out there.
Best,
MrT
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