ZERO COOL (1968) by Michael Crichton

This is one of the ‘John Lange’ adventures written by Michael Crichton during his apprenticeship as a purveyor of paperback thrills. Reprinted in paper by Hard Case Crime, it is also available as an e-book from Open Road in what they refer to as the author’s ‘Med School Years’.

“Listen,” he hissed, his voice low and harsh. “If you do the autopsy, we will kill you. Do you understand? Kill you.”

I offer the following review for Patti’s Friday’s Forgotten Books meme at her fab Pattinase blog and Bev’s 2017 Silver Age Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

Set in sunny Spain during the reign of General Franco, it features 26-year-old Peter Ross, an American radiologist and all-round babe magnet who is in town for a conference but really just wants a little recreation. Ross meets a young British woman, Angela Locke, on the beach and the two instantly hit it off – but of course there is more to her than meets the eye … Shortly after they meet, Ross is asked to perform a somewhat unorthodox autopsy, to hide a MacGuffin in the chest cavity of a gangster and it’s not long before our heroes go on the run across Europe. This proves to be a very tall tale (some of it is downright silly, especially a scene involving Angela’s very unlikely body double) but is only meant to take you from one breathless set-piece to another, nothing else. Like so many of Crichton’s male protagonists from this era, Ross is a fairly thinly disguised version of himself and is rather flat and unemotional no matter what the situation (it is Angela who says that he has ‘zero cool’). So although our hero is a bit square, there is always lots going on and this thriller is perfectly entertaining as a light genre piece, as long as you are in the right mood. It would seem though that Crichton may have felt a little embarrassed about it in later years though …

“As long as you’re trying to pick me up,” she said, “you might as well sit down and be comfortable.”

Both the paper and e-book editions that are newly available were substantially revised by the author, who also decided to bring the story up-to-date. To do this he created a new frame, adding opening and closing chapters to book-end the narrative. We now have an aged Ross re-telling his story to one of his grandsons, who is recording the tale on video for a school project. By the end, the young lad decides not to keep the video as he is sure his grandpa has been making it up. One suspects that Crichton was not convinced of this early effort and tried to defuse any guffaws by pre-empting some of the disbelief the plot is lively to engender. Not sure he really needed to do that actually, though it is not as good as either A Case of Need or Binary, the latter remaining probably my favourite of the ‘John Lange’ books.

(PS there is a nice in-joke in the Hard Case cover seen here on the right – the book that Angela has been reading is their edition of another John Lange book, Grave Descend)

The Michael Crichton mysteries & thrillers:

• 1966 – Odds On as by ‘John Lange’
• 1967 – Scratch One as by ‘John Lange’
• 1968 – Easy Go [aka The Last Tomb) as by ‘John Lange’
• 1968 – A Case of Need as by ‘Jeffrey Hudson’ – click here for my review
• 1969 – Zero Cool as by ‘John Lange’
• 1969 – The Venom Business as by ‘John Lange’
• 1970 – Dealing (co-written with Douglas Crichton) as by ‘Michael Douglas’
• 1970 – Drug of Choice [aka Overkill] as by ‘John Lange’
• 1970 – Grave Descend as by ‘John Lange’
• 1972 – Binary as by ‘John Lange’ – click here for my review
• 1975 – The Great Train Robbery – click here for my review
• 1992 – Rising Sun
• 1994 – Disclosure
• 1996 – Airframe
• 2004 – State of Fear

Open Road Media have republished all ten of Crichton’s early potboilers as e-books. For further information about their edition of Zero Cool and his other thrillers, visit their homepage at: https://openroadmedia.com/search/crichton

I submit this review for Bev’s 2017 Silver Age Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt in the ‘brunette’ category:

*****(2 fedora tips out of 5)