Cat and Mouse

Alex Cross, Cat and Mouse, 1997. Hachette Book Group USA – Vision, 1998.

James Patterson is so prolific, that we might forget what a good storyteller he really is.  It is easy to dismiss him as a literary guppy that reproduces book after book after book, in every conceivable genre or media, which books then find their way onto drugstore, airport, and supermarket book racks.

Yet, Patterson is a powerfully successful author, and a riveting story teller, one who generously shares his craft by teaching classes, and by selecting co-authors to travel with him on his amazing literary journeys. (PS; if you read this Mr. Patterson, just Google me to contact me!).

Like Shakespeare, Patterson understands revenge tragedy, history, and passion.  He creates panoply of Everyman characters that appeal to everyone on the globe, which may be why he can boast that he can look out of his taxi window in Morocco and see a woman in the next cab reading one of his novels. The Women’s Murder Club series features law enforcement professionals of every ethnicity and social strata, who happen to be women as well as brilliant practitioners at what they do.  Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas is a brave, sad story of a doomed family, their love for each other, how they live with the devastation of loss, how they move on.  Rather than descend into the kind of saccharine melodrama that I’m ashamed to say makes me laugh, not cry, the book is consolation to anyone whose life has been interrupted by inexplicable and sudden loss.

Finally, we come to the magnificent and brilliant Renaissance man, African American detective, psychologist, sometime profiler, pianist, cop, family man, good friend, and devoted husband, Dr. Alex Cross.

What I find appealing about the Alex Cross series is how the titles borrow and incorporate themes of nursery rhymes, children’s games, and children’s literature. Mary, Mary, Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Four Blind Mice, London Bridges, The Big Bad Wolf, Along came a Spider, Jack and Jill, and Cat and Mouse skillfully incorporate themes of childhood into chilling stories of serial killers and depraved hearts that remind that Grimm’s Fairy Tales and many current children’s classics, did not begin as children’s stories at all.

Cat and Mouse, in particular, takes the reader on a true cat and mouse journey with Dr. Cross.  The already wild ride gets even stranger and wilder when Cross tracks two serial killers, one a cruel psychopath whose violence was triggered by a vintage set of Lionel Trains, and another dual personality killer who on the one hand, is a doctor detective tracking a vicious killer on two continents for the FBI, but on the other hand, is a murderous monster who performs autopsies on his still living victims. The second killer is also a curious allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was being performed as a play during the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.  At one time, the actor in the starring role was a suspect.

Something particularly interesting in Cat and Mouse is that Patterson gives us a portrait, albeit a brief one, of at least one of the murderers’’ victims.  Many suspense/slasher mysteries  like this only tell us enough about the victim to reinvent him or her as piece of evidence crucial to solving the case.  What struck me as I read this novel was that Dr. Abel Sante, one of the victims brutally killed, is allowed to introduce himself to us.  We learn of his regrets, of his remorse for not marrying his long time girl friend, of his likes and dislikes, of his fear, of how he tries to give himself hope as he awaits slaughter at the hands of his killer.

So, once Dr. Sante [a pun on “health” and “saint”] reveals himself to us and becomes a real character, why is he killed off anyway?  His death seems abrupt to me, as if it were literally a loose end in the aftermath of sewing up after an autopsy. I’d like to read the novel of Dr. Sante’s life, and what in his life journey set him on the path of a collision with the derailed mind of a serial killer, one who is also a doctor.

Of course I understand that mystery writers cannot always develop their victims’ personalities as we might like.  They are there, as I said, to be evidence, and to give us enough information to rouse our emotions and outrage.  If people we like, who are like us, can die this horribly, why not us?   That fear, along with the gore and violence, help to move the story along.

Yet, it is a sad comment on the judicial system that in the real world, victims are nothing more than a piece of evidence, or a witness to the crime against the people.  In fact, it is the People of the State, or of the United States, who are the plaintiff’s in a criminal action.  The offense is against them as a society, not against the individual.  I have been on both sides of the bench in these matters, as someone working on criminal trial gathering evidence, and as a victim, barred from her attacker’s trial in the name of justice.

                                                                                                                

This is why victims’ rights advocates exist, if the victim can find one.  They aren’t much help to homicide victims, who are perhaps the ultimate collection of evidence there is.

So, without digressing further and giving the story completely away, read Patterson for the master storytelling, for his amazing portrayal of Dr. Alex Cross, for his literary allusions, and if you can admit it to yourself, for the thrill of the violence and the gore.  If nothing else, Patterson will make you want to reread you collections of children’s literature, young adult novels, Shakespeare, and even as I did, reread your copy of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil.  Yes, that book, too, makes its appearance in Cat and Mouse.  It jumped out at me from my own bookshelf shortly after I began Patterson’s book.

One more thing, read Cat and Mouse in a well-lit room, preferably with other people present or a very big dog standing sentinel, and schedule your doctor’s appointments several months after you finish the book.