Along the dark city cliche

Press, 2 November 1985, Page 20

Along the dark city cliche

Herbert Lierberman.

Night-Bloom. By J

Arrow, 1985. 438 pp. $8.95 (paperback). Normally, the term cliche is applied to a phrase that has become hackneyed in its use. Once in a while, the phrase can expand a thousandfold and the result is a cliched novel. When this happens it is

almost always the plot which is overwrought; such it is with “NightBloom.” There must be dozens of “In the still, dark city streets the psychopath stalks his unsuspecting prey” books. They are frequently set in New York, which seems to have more than its fair share of crazed killers. They frequently involve a frazzled police detective, a lonely misplaced maverick, who becomes so obsessed with hunting the killer that he comes to feel an afinity for him. They are both men alone and misunderstood in a sordid and alien world. Recognise it? Like it? Then read “Night-Bloom.” It is no worse than several other books which tell the same story, in spite of some trickery on the reader. The detective, Francis 'X. Mooney (how’s that for dipping in the pocket of Lawrence Sanders’ Edward X. Delaney?) is convincingly unpleasant and the remaining characters, other than the occasional pyschopath, are instantly forgotten. This plot probably appeals to writers because it allows them to have apparently random killings that are only explicable by vague allusions to weird upbringings. All the more usual motives of sex, money or status are irrelevant. Still, at least you know where you are with a cliche — in. this case, standing on top of a tenement building ready to drop a block of concrete on someone, or, actually, anyone. — Ken Strongman.