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The Next Great Crime Writer?

Edward Montague and Jean-Claude Legard are medical students, amateur detectives, and most importantly grave-robbers. They need fresh bodies to practice on. You wouldn’t want a sawbones without any hands on training would you?

Along the way to becoming doctors the duo discover the body of man buried in place of a local woman. They determine he was murdered and that someone used the grave to hide his body. From this interesting premise springs Hal McDonald’sThe Anatomists, a competent if not compelling mystery.

The Anatomists (not to be confused with The Anatomist: A True Story Of Gray’s Anatomy) comes from something called truTV and their 2007 Search for the Next Great Crime Writer.

It’s a good thing that a television show is promoting literature. However, in order to be fair to Mr. McDonald I tired to purge his book’s link to reality television from my mind. I’m old enough to remember the the brilliance of the first REAL WORLD. But in general, reality based shows (unless they are on PBS) are garbage. Just think, the person who first said “TV rots your brain”  never saw The O.C..

The Anatomists is told in the first person by Montague, the Watson to Jean-Claude’s Holmes.  My review is based on the idea that McDonald made a specific choice concerning the prose style of his narrator.  Montague comes across heavy handed. He goes adverb crazy and repeats phrases over and over like someone trying to write smarter than they are.  It’s tedious at first but if you buy into it as part of the victorian trappings you’ll have fun.

The story holds no great surprises. Even the novice mystery reader will have the broad outline figured out early. McDonald, a professor of English at Mars Hill College,  doesn’t fall back on the Jack The Ripper conventions of dark alleys and shadowy figures. Instead, he presents a plausibly simple tale.

Unfortunately, The Anatomists ends with a long super-villian like monologue that lays out the entire nefarious plot. I loved that part but only because I’m a sucker for that sort of thing. Other readers might find it a cheap out and they would be right.

At the end you might say, “is that all there is?”  The narrative device doesn’t pay off and lacks any real tension. Still, given the opportunity, McDonald could turn Montague and Legard into a classic mismatched pair of detectives. Their relationship highlights the book and I hope we see them again.

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