Robert Crais

Post-Vietnam, Hollywood sold out. Gone were the operators in the gray area of life, instead life was portrayed as black and white - or in the case of crime stories, blue and everyone else had to be bad. A reflection of the new 'us versus them' mentality that grew from the government having the crap scared out of it by the counterculture of the 1960's and 70's. With poor James Garner bearing the torch alone with the Rockford Files, the rest of TV were all cops if they were heroes.

In American literature, there had always been the man in the middle who could solve the case and didn't have to wear a badge. From Dashiell Hamett, and the American westerns before him, through the 'film noir' days, there was a strong vein of how things really worked and thank heavens it stayed true to life and didn't become government propaganda too.

In high school, I enjoyed anti-hero as protagonist novels immensely, and one of the new writers that I quickly became enamored with was Robert Crais with his Elvis Cole detective novels. Beginning with the Monkeys Raincoat, I was hooked and have read every one at least twice.

As a Marine in Southern California, I got to see the LAPD implode past the point of their PR machine's ability to save them as the video beat-down of Rodney King looped, then came the riots and LA was on fire. Suddenly Hollywood had to notice the shift and they came back to reality, but the literary world never left and produced some amazing works from that time and place.

Robert Crais, a native of Louisiana, who had moved to LA in the 1980's and became a journalist on the police beat was well poised to ride the wave and is still surfing it. His most famous stand-alone novel is Hostage which was made into a successful movie with Bruce Willis. That book's full catalog of characters brings humanity to everyone across the social spectrum except the actual really bad characters who deserve what they get. In our mass incarceration nation, where one in three American adults has a criminal record and one in six is a felon, there is a lot of gray.