A High Handed Outrage on Morrissey Boulevard:

There are some indignities that cannot be endured stoically no matter how much Seneca and Marcus Aurelius one might imbibe.
Such is the case with me when I discovered much to my horror, that despite a sporadic series of sniping e-mails, that I was on Brian McGrory's damned e-mailing list.
Clearing I'm doing something wrong.
Shoulda called him a mama's boy , a neocon, or something....I'm just too polite it's my curse.
What is worse, Brian has a novel out that he wants everyone to know about.
It is called "Dead Line".
And predictably Brian is inordinately proud of this tripe, lordy anything to get out from under Mother's skirts!
Herein is McGrory's description from the aforementioned e-mail:

It’s the third in a series narrated by Jack Flynn, the wisecracking newsman who prefers first class to coach and breaking news to just about anything else in life. The story takes him to the heart of the largest unsolved art heist in American history, the theft of 11 priceless treasures from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and entangles him in the secretive relationship between the city’s respected mayor and his criminal son.

Sounds like sheer dreck to Me-eee!
Ghod what is it with these phony baloney two fisted tuff-guy columnists anyway?
They all wanna be Mickey Spillane or something. Never mind the fact that most columnists make dreadful fictioneers.
The Reasons of course are simple, they lack the attention span and concentration to attack serious writing in any way.
Trained to write in one thousand word increments they take a few reasonable ideas beat then to death over the course of a chapter or two and then must fall back on a mighty cataract of cliches to carry them through the next two hundred pages. Drew Pearson the late liberal supercolumnist had the right idea, when it came time for him to write his pair of utterly inoffensive novels he simply bought the manuscript whole from one of his staff members. And so it goes with most columnists with aspirations to write fiction, whether it is their own copy or bought and paid for, it is usually unreadable junk. Well, I suppose Brian is trying to get it out of his system before the urge to fictionalize infects his newspaper copy as was the case with Mike Barnicle.

Frankly though, we could make a pretty bonfire out of all these novels written by city room jetsam and not hurt American letters one damn bit.

Sick
Demented
Typical