There’s a great deal to be said about slipping into the world of a comfortable, well-worn literary or film franchise. And this, more or less, is why so many mindless forms of entertainment exist.
Old-school action movies. Modern superhero movies. Cosy mystery novels. Murder-of-the-week police procedurals. Slasher flicks. The Kardashians. The list goes on and on.
I know the august pages of a publication such as the Mail & Guardian are not the best place to admit this, but I am a dedicated PC gamer in my downtime.
I have been since 1988, when my parents invested the then-astronomical sum of R10 000 in a metal box made by Olivetti that beeped and booped and made the shittiest images you’ve ever seen, which completely captured my imagination and changed my life.
The above is relevant because, in PC gaming, we talk about something called the “power fantasy”. Many games exist to allow people to fulfil their power fantasies first-hand.
You wanna be the big, strong guy who headbutts walls into dust? No problem. You want to be the small, lithe woman who never misses a shot and can throw knives around corners? Sure, why not?
You want to be the ancient sorcerer with the wisdom of generations who can change destiny with a single thought? We got you, fam.
And there are many books and movies that cater to power fantasies too. Centuries-old vampire. Police officer with a chip on their shoulder and nothing to lose. Scholar whose discovery is about to change the world. Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. You want to put yourself in the shoes of any conceivable character, and I promise you there’s an intellectual property that caters to it.
So when you combine the spacious and warm feeling of being within an escapist genre with the feeling of fulfilment that comes with indulging a power fantasy, you have a heady mix indeed.
I’m going to use an example that betrays my age, but please bear with me here.
You remember Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote? (Everyone aged 30 and under just exchanged glances with their partner and stood up to leave.) In case you don’t, she was this character on a weekly TV show, a retired English teacher turned mystery writer, who always seemed to find herself in the middle of a murder investigation.
The show ran for 12 seasons and 264 episodes, according to Wikipedia, and so Mrs Fletcher solved a whole bunch of murders.
She always seemed to know the right people and be privy to the correct information to make sure this week’s murderer didn’t get away with their deplorable act.
I had an English teacher in high school who hated this show. Positively detested it. She said it was so devoid of content as to be hollow. You could watch the first 15 minutes of the hour-long show and the last five minutes of it and not miss a single plot point.
She was right, of course, but that was the appeal. You were never flummoxed. You always knew whodunit well before the deductive genius Jessica Fletcher did, and that made you feel smart and, by extension, powerful.
And you were always comfortable in the knowledge that Jessica was going to get the perpetrator.
This is a very long way of saying JD Robb’s latest offering, Passions in Death, is a new form of the comfy franchise/power fantasy blend.
The book is subtitled “An Eve Dallas thriller”, and it’s the subtitle that is the crux.
The Eve Dallas books, also known as the “[insert evocative word] in Death” series, has run to 59 books, which makes me wonder what the author does with the remaining five seconds of her day.
It’s also interesting to note that this series is somewhat of a side hustle for author Nora Roberts, who writes under the pseudonym JD Robb specifically for the Eve Dallas books. Roberts, mainly known for writing romance under her own name, has published more than 225 novels, and also writes under the pseudonyms of Jill March and Sarah Hardesty.
The Eve Dallas books are a blend of sci-fi and police procedural and are exactly the type of escapism that people who exist at the intersection of the Venn diagram of those two genres would enjoy.
You’ve got hard-nosed, down-and-dirty policewoman Eve Dallas, whose gut never fails her and who can spot the tiniest details on a case from 50m away, even without her amazing technological gadgetry.
You’ve got her husband, the mononymous Roarke, the devastatingly handsome, clean-cut billionaire who seems to only exist to look good, be rich, ferry Dallas around and pleasure her sexually as no man has before.
And, of course, for her to have someone to talk to, so she’s not spouting her unbelievably brilliant theories to the walls.
You’ve got grimy New York in the near future. You’ve got people turning up dead in all sorts of exciting ways. What’s not to like?
Well, a couple things, actually.
First, because the series is so well established and little is done to explain the backstory, reading this book felt like walking into the middle of a conversation that was already in progress. I found my mind wandering because I wasn’t emotionally invested in why Detective Peabody was picking out specific wallpaper for the room for the baby about to arrive in the lives of her and her wife.
Second, if this particular power fantasy is not your bag, then you really aren’t going to care.
This book is very well written, and the whodunit part genuinely perplexed me, but I’m more of a Jack Reacher than an Eve Dallas guy, which meant I felt detached from the various goings-on in the story.
So, in summary, if you’re a fan of the genre/s, and you are up to date with the Eve Dallas books, you’ll love this one.
And that’s kind of the point.