David Morrell is no stranger to violent fiction (for instance, he authored the original First Blood, considerably stronger than the movies loosely based on it) and here he reviews Poodle Springs.
Jeff
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40854-2000Aug5.html
Soaking Up Trouble
By David Morrell
Sunday, August 6, 2000; Page X04
HOT SPRINGS
By Stephen Hunter
Simon & Schuster. 478 pp. $25
There's a town in Arkansas called Hot Springs where, for hundreds of years, people needing a tonic went to soak in the 141-degree mineral waters. Set against a picturesque mountain and lake, this American Eden was corrupted when mobsters moved in during World War II. They bribed local law enforcement, introduced casinos and brothels and were so successful that by 1946 the main street was a mile-long glittering array of temptation and hustle. Entertainers as big as Bing Crosby and Perry Como filled showrooms there. Movie stars flocked to party there. Mickey Rooney says that he enjoyed the barbecue.
If this sounds a lot like the early years of Las Vegas, it's not surprising, for "Bugsy" Siegel studied the Hot Springs operation and used it as a model for the gambling oasis that he envisioned in the Nevada desert. That background alone would provide a fascinating basis for a novel. But history supplied even more interesting events. After the war, returning GIs were dismayed to discover what had happened to Hot Springs while they'd been gone. Led by a prosecuting attorney, they organized a veterans' revolt, fought a different kind of war, and ran the mobsters out of town.
That domestic combat is at the heart of Stephen Hunter's new thriller, Hot Springs, a thoroughly engaging action drama that gets the reader's heart racing and adrenalin flowing. The hero is Earl Swagger, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient just back from fighting in the jungles of the South Pacific. Combat has so deadened his soul that he contemplates suicide, but when an Arkansas prosecutor hires him to clean up Hot Springs, Earl finds a goal to keep him moving, partly because his murdered father had dark secrets about Hot Springs and Earl needs desperately to come to terms with his nightmarish memories of his dad.
Earl trains a group of shock troops. As they systematically raid the casinos, the mobsters cleverly and ruthlessly fight back. After an intensifying series of gunfights, Earl is the only man left, forced to set out on a one-man mission of retribution. In a climactic hunter-hunted confrontation (for a thriller writer, the novelist has an enviable name), Earl comes to terms with his private demons.
Several factors make Hot Springs noteworthy. First, it has a distinctive tone, "part Elizabethan border reiver's, part hillbilly's," that results in such colorful dialogue as "If anything ever happens to that good doctor in there, it's you I'll come visit in the night. And Willis Beaudine, don't think you can run and hide. Many a man has thought that and they are now sucking bitter grass from the root end."
Second, the novel establishes the atmosphere of 1946 Hot Springs so palpably that the reader has the illusion of being there. Third, the novel doesn't flinch from its violent subject matter. Rather than comment on the action with politically correct disapproval, Hunter reaches stylistic glory when he describes firearms and the way to handle them. After his lengthy analysis of the intricacies of the Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol, the Browning automatic rifle and the Thompson submachine gun, the weapons seem like the "fabulous old beauties" he likes to call them. "The gun emptied in one spasm, the sound lost in the roar of the plane. He could sense the empties tumbling, feel the liquid, almost hydraulic pressure of the recoil without a sense of the individual shots as it drove into his shoulder, but most of all he could see the tracers flicking out and extending his touch until he was an angry God destroying the world from afar."
In a way, Hot Springs should have been published around Father's Day, for it represents the kind of first-rate, straight-up action novel that traditionally used to be available for male readers at the start of the summer but that a recent lamentable genteel trend in publishing has made rare then or any other time. This is the adult male equivalent of going to a Saturday afternoon matinee--not surprising, given that Hunter is a respected film critic for The Washington Post. Hot Springs, fans should note, is a prequel to Point of Impact and other Hunter thrillers featuring Earl Swagger's son, Bobby Lee, a former Marine sniper.
David Morrell is the author of 19 thrillers, including "First Blood" and, most recently, "Burnt Sienna."
