My grandfather's bookshelf has a whole bunch of James Hadley Chase titles, and I'd never picked one up before. When I visited this time, I randomly picked this one out of the lot and decided to give it a shot.I can see why James Hadley Chase is popular: his novels are the book-equivalent of one of those action movies full car chases and explosions, which constitute a couple of hours of mindless entertainment.The book is fast-paced, never slowing down to describe the setting in detail or anything like that. Basically, a detective working for the nation's best detective agency is hired to find out why and by whom a client's daughter is being blackmailed. He makes queries, unearths various intriguing details. Suddenly in the middle, someone close to him is killed, and he goes ballistic in his quest for revenge. This is a book that most people will finish in one setting -- it lasts between two and three hours.There are many things I disliked though, and I don't think I'm going to read another Chase. I guess most of these were conscious choices by the author, and a lot of readers might like them -- I personally didn't, is all. Characters are developed very poorly, and the way they're affected by events, and the things they do in response, are all very unconvincing. I couldn't really connect with any of them -- they felt more like agents to move the plot forward, rather than actual people dealing with circumstances. Also, the way the protagonist unearths new leads and goes about solving the crime is so formulaic -- I can tell that when the author wants to introduce a new detail, there is, magically, a phone call from one of the detective's informants, with a random new piece of info. It's putting off when it's that obviously done -- Agatha Christie was so much better at this.Also -- and this is probably more reflective of the times the author was from more than anything else -- I was frequently shocked by how sexist and racist the book was. Female characters are shallow, and none of the paragraphs they're introduced in are complete without a description of their figure/breasts and the detective's (it's a first-person narrative) opinion on their body. And black people are always introduced as "black man" or "black woman", as if it is understood that they are a different, slightly lesser, race. The racism is so imbibed and taken for granted that, by today's standards, it's pretty hard to get used to.
