(2 of 2)
Why does this pull so strongly at the imagination? Partly (though this is the least of the elements) because the puzzle is good: Is the icebreaker really prepared to bring back something that has been living for centuries in the Greenland ice? Partly because, seen by Smilla under stress, the background texture -- the casino, the sinister ship -- has the grain-by-grain fascination of a prison cell's stone wall. And finally because Smilla is good company. She's interesting, full of odd quirks and skewed perspectives: someone you'd enjoy talking with over a long dinner.
This last element -- the not unreasonable requirement that at least somebody in a thriller be interesting enough to spend an evening with -- is utterly absent from another much whooped crime novel about to reach the bookstores. It doesn't matter that the story comes from Rent-a-Plot in first novelist Scott Smith's A Simple Plan. The idea has worked before and will again: a couple of ordinary guys in northern Ohio stumble over a small plane crashed in the woods. The pilot is dead. The cargo is $3.5 million in used U.S. currency. Should they . . .?
Sure. But don't tell anyone. Naturally, the word spreads, to a drinking buddy, his girlfriend, a wife and so on. There's nothing wrong with the narrative idea here, and the reader should skid amiably into the underbrush of Chapter 2, as the treasure finders turn into thieves and murderers, miring themselves in treachery. But Smith has written a story in which all the characters, not excluding the first-person narrator, are stupid, mean and boring. They are jerks, irredeemable fools, and if one sat down next to you at a bar and started talking, you would pay your tab and move on. The point is not that every crime story needs a hero -- Elmore Leonard writes brilliantly and almost exclusively about career wrongos -- but that at least somebody in a novel should be worth the reader's attention. Not even your friendly neighborhood parole board would be interested in Smith's bozos.