Harrison, Jamie. The Edge of the Crazies. New York: Hyperion, 1995.
Reason read: November is the month Montana became a state.
As an aside, I love it when a book introduces me to new music. “If Love was a Train” by Michelle Shocked is an example.
Be prepared to meet a lot of people. Jamie Harrison likes to introduce her readers to a bunch of people (kind of reminded me of Batya Gur). Jules Clement (sheriff) of Blue Deer is the main character but you’ll meet his family (sister and father). You’ll even meet an old girlfriend and her family. Don’t forget current girlfriends and arch enemies. Then there’s attempted murder victim George Blackwater and his entire entourage of family and friends (brother, wife, son, housekeeper, assistant – past and present. Don’t forget his love life, too). The introductions continue with a bunch of reporters, police officers, lawyers, doctors, coroners, personal assistants, paramedics, even the principal, a librarian, a caterer, and a banker.
But, back to the plot. Someone has tried to kill George. He has plenty of enemies but it’s up to Jules Clement to figure out who hates him the most. Is it his wife? His girlfriend? His brother? His agent? But, there is a bigger mystery at play. Who hates Jules Clement even more?
Confessional: I had a hard time pinning down in what decade Edge of the Crazies was supposed to happen. Even though it was published in 1995 the story seems to take place much earlier. An hourly wage was $4.50, you could buy a truck for $700 and a house for $30,000 and yet a couch was $1,000 “back in the eighties.” Harrison quotes a Lucinda Williams tune from 1992….
Another observation: I was surprised Jules wasn’t used to seeing his father’s name in print, especially since he is sheriff of the same town as his father. As sheriff of Blue Deer in 1972, wouldn’t Jules’s father’s signature be on a lot of things at the station?
Lines worth mentioning, “they both mulled over the educational properties of cheap fiction in silence” (p 104),
Author fact: Harrison definitely puts a little of herself in a few of her characters. In her former life she was a caterer and script reader. In Edge of the Crazies there is a caterer and script writer.
Book trivia: There was a section of timeline that didn’t sit well with me at all. Around pages 279-281 Jules goes to the Baird Hotel for lunch. The meal lasts two hours. When he returns to the station Grace fills him in on what happened while he was at lunch. After the conversation he “grabbed his coat and eyed the clock. It was 11, and he had plenty of time” (p 281). 11 in the morning? That would make lunch sometime between 8:30 and 8:45am depending on how long it took him to have his conversation with Grace. Further muddying the waters is that when Jules goes back to the hotel he sees the waitress who served him “an hour earlier.” Obviously, Harrison meant to say Jules had breakfast that lasted two hours. Although I still found it odd that the meal took two hours but he was only served his meal an hour earlier. Does that mean he sat around for an hour before the waitress served him?
Nancy said: Nancy called Edge of the Crazies a “good police procedural” (p 121).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust twice. First, in the easy chapter called “I Love a Mystery” (p 117) and again the chapter called “Montana: In Big Sky Country” (p 156).
