John Katzenbach’s tense psychological thriller
The Traveller was published in 1987. He
has published a number of crime novels since.
Detective Mercedes Barren is a widow of several years and a
cop. She learns of the brutal murder of her niece Susan by a serial killer.
Fellow cops eventually track down the culprit and he’s sentenced, though they
can’t produce adequate evidence to charge him for Susan’s murder. The murderer
is a nut, hearing voices from Allah in his head. A couple of clues,
insignificant of themselves, nag at her and she becomes convinced that the nut
hadn’t killed Susan; her niece’s death was a copycat.
Douglas Jeffers is a highly successful photographer; he
travels all the time, getting scoops with his images of disaster, war and
death. This isn’t a whodunit, so we soon realise that Douglas is a nut, too;
driven to kill. He kills the kind of girl who’s easily convinced she’s posing
for a Playboy centrefold.
Like many sociopaths, Doug wants notoriety, though his kills
are usually copycats of other serial murderers. He kidnaps Anne Hampton, an
English Lit major. In an unsettling sequence, he tortures and brainwashes her
to the point where she will obey him and not seek escape. She becomes his
diarist, his Boswell.
Martin is Doug’s younger brother, a psychiatrist. His
patients are sex offenders and killers. Martin’s unaware of his brother’s
predilection.
As Merce connects the links and finds Martin, the light
begins to dawn. The pair hunt Doug; he in the hope of stopping his brother
committing any more murders, she to exact vengeance.
There are many tense scenes involving Doug and Anne as his
odyssey takes him to old haunts, to the places where he began his
extra-curricular career. And there are glimpses of clever prose and
characterisation.
Merce enjoyed watching football games. “But why football?”
her niece had queried once. And Barren had replied, “Because we all need victories
in our lives.” And this is what drives her to track down Susan’s killer –
victory over evil personified.
Merce attends the trial of a Colombian immigrant, an accused
killer for the illegal drugs industry. ‘Killers were the Kleenex of the drug
industry; they were used a few times and then discarded unceremoniously.’ (p42)
Nice touch, that.
Despite a tendency to distance the reader from his
characters, Katzenbach can tug you in: ‘… she gave in to her sorrow,
capitulating to all the resonances of her heart that she’d suppressed so
successfully and was suddenly, completely, utterly taken over by tears.’ (p66)
Martin likens his patients to the piano. ‘We keep pushing at
the keys, hoping to find a melody, usually discovering dissonance.’ (p137)
Merce has a tragic past; her young brother drowned. ‘She
thought for an instant of the potency of fear, undiminished even as it
travelled over the decades of memory.’ (p170) There’s quite a bit of fear in
these pages, notably experienced by Anne.
There’s a modern obsession, strongly characterised by
political correctness, which is not new; definitely imported from America: ‘We
live in an enlightened age which is dependent upon euphemism… prisons are
correctional facilities, manned not by guards but by correction officers, and
prisoners are subjects. If we change the designation, somehow we believe the reality
to be less evil and distasteful, though in actuality nothing ever changes.’
(p174) This is one step removed from the knee-jerk need to be offended by
terminology.
The trail leads to the place where Doug’s childhood was
tainted by adoptive parents. Young lives damaged, which can evoke sympathy, but
cannot excuse the multiple murders. Here, it gets a little tense, though the
denouement develops into a damp squib. The ending is satisfactory, but only
just.
Perhaps the title is not the most appropriate, either. So
Doug travels round the country,
taking photos and lives. Born to kill
might have worked, as this is a quotation from Doug: “She was born to die. I
was born to kill. It was simply a matter of finding one another.”
The cover image is a detail from an ‘untitled’ photo-montage
for an Australian paperback (Pan). It does the book no favours.
Throughout, I was rooting for both Mercedes and Anne, and I
dearly wanted Doug to get his comeuppance, so I kept turning the pages. That’s
a good sign.
Editor viewpoint:
There were some annoying writing habits that sometimes
detracted from smooth story-telling.
Frequently, Katzenbach persisted in referring to his heroine
and other characters with full names:
Detective Barren did this, Detective Barren thought etc etc.
She had a first name, so this should have been used consistently, or even ‘she’
which is unobtrusive and preserves the point of view.
When Martin and Doug are together talking, we read Douglas
Jeffers said, and Martin Jeffers laughed; in short, we’re in neither character’s
head. Thus we’re not involved.
Head-jumping occurs in scenes, particularly when Anne and
Doug are together; it’s never confusing or distracting, and is probably
necessary to convey their thought processes as they verbally fence. But the
head-jumping does bring us out of the scene, and that’s why it isn’t
recommended.
Word misuse; we all do it, I guess. ‘… turned his eyes away
suddenly, averting his glance.’ A glance is for a moment, a second or so, not a
study or stare, so probably it should have been ‘gaze’ here instead of ‘glance’.
My pet hates are the following: He wondered to himself… She
thought to herself… Well, as they’re
thought processes, they must be generated within oneself – unless you’re an
adept psychic perhaps! He wondered, she thought is adequate.
But these are quibbles and I could dismiss them to
appreciate the story.
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