Women's Murder Club

Here is a life-saving tip: The bleak, grey, flat middle of winter is no time for serious endeavour. And certainly no time for serious literature.

One year at about this time I embarked upon What is the What, a terrific book on the right day but a killer at this time of year. The world described therein seemed so relentlessly awful I thought I might as well hang myself. Another year, or maybe it was the same year, I took this time to de-tox, extruding the excesses of holiday spirit, and learned that life without tox is barely worth living.

This is a time of year to eat up Cosmo magazine and any Rom-Com you can find -- does a movie have Meg Ryan in it? Julia Roberts? Cameron Diaz in a pinch? Great! Bring it on!! I am addicted now to W-network, or the "women's" network (the word "pathetic" is silent) and have seen every single episode of Sex and the City and Friends at least a dozen times, have watched Hugh Grant pull his forelock fetchingly over and over again, and have seen so many happy endings I am coming to believe there is no other kind. Desperate measures are required in order to overcome the bloody weather.

The newest entry for the Friday night attentions of single women everywhere is a TV series based on James Patterson's Women's Murder Club books, which I had never heard of until television did them over. I have never been drawn to Patterson and always thought of him as a super-jock in the murder mystery arena. So this chick-lit thing of his intrigued me.

In the TV version, Angie Harmon has the role of the lead woman, Lindsay Boxer, a San Fran homicide detective who takes time out from her intense murder investigations to drink margaritas with her girlfriends at a bar called Susie's or something. Angie has learned a lot about policing from her time at Law&Order; she's good in this role but nonetheless she looks a bit like a man in drag and it makes no sense that we are to believe she's the hot one. Doesn't matter. This is Chick-TV and I'm all over it.

The oddness of James Patterson doing something along the lines of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency series led me to the bookstore, and for reasons of bookstore inventory I have started the series at No. 2, cleverly called 2nd Chance.

It is drek. Funny enough, it doesn't matter. Like bad junk food you just can't stop eating it up, and though the premise falls apart a bit and the big Kaboom of the "reveal" tends to whimper, it does take your mind off the drizzle.

Patterson is a best-selling author and there's no accounting for it really, except that the pages turn effortlessly which is, I suppose, what it takes to sell that many books. He is no writer. For example, he doesn't dally with explaining much -- we learn that the four women of the "club" (Boxer, a detective; a medical examiner; an assistant DA; a crime reporter) are "like sisters" because they keep saying so. So much for character development.

Patterson is such a clumsy writer it sort of makes writing look super-easy, in the way an abstract painting can look like something your kid could do. Except your kid didn't do it, and if given the chance to try you would discover that actually, your kid can't do it. I thought briefly, before I became engrossed in it, that really, I should just write one of these things myself. I know I can't.

Patterson is doing what I could not do myself. His dopey Murder Club is capable of being entertaining when it is darn hard to think of a good reason to get out of bed and put your boots on for another slog in the slush. For that he deserves every penny he has earned.