Superhero For The Week of November 11 — John Sandford

This is the fifth in what will hopefully, through the winter, be a series of posts on people who, IMHO, quality for superhero status in our culture. You can find the rest on my beBee.com publisher page:
https://www.bebee.com/@jim-murray

These posts are not awards or rewards or anything like that. They are just mini profiles about some of the people I have come to admire, who are working to change the world for the better.

Now there are probably going to be a lot of you out there wondering who the hell this John Sandford guys is. Let me briefly explain.

At one time in my life I wanted to be a novelist. I even wrote a novel but, on my sisters advice, never pursued the arduous road to getting it published.

But at that time, and after having digested up to that point in my life, all of the ‘literary’ novels I could handle, I switched over to the thriller genre.

Now for me this genre breaks into many parts, but I was primarily interested in stuff to do with law and order and with international espionage and war.

I have a rather long list of people that I read in these areas, which includes: John Le Carre, Grahame Green, Frederick Forsythe and, more recently, Alex Berenson, among others.

On the law and order side the folks I read most are Michael Connelly, Dashiell Hammett, Lee Child and David Baldacci, among others.

But my preferred category is the law and order one, and my all time favourite author in this genre is, hands down, John Sandford.

Among people who read this stuff, he is most famous for his series that features Minneapolis cop, and slightly psychotic rich guy, Lucas Davenport. The series which is known as the “Prey” series currently includes 29 ‘Prey’ novels, There are also 4 novels in a series known as the ‘Kidd’ series which is about a computer hacker named, you know, Kidd and 13 novels in the Virgil Flowers series, Virgil being a detective who works for Lucas, but out in the southern part of the state. There are also some works of non-fiction and one-off novels, which you can see on his Wiki Page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sandford_(novelist)

What’s So Great About John Sandford?

IMHO, I believe his novels all capture the perfect balance between character and plot. It’s very easy for law and order type novels to get carried away with procedure and skimp on character development, which is what I see in a lot writers’ first novel in this area.

But Mr Sandford, does not suffer from that shortcoming. His books are a great blend of character and plotting and full of the kind of idiosyncratic language that I imagine real smart-ass cops would use when talking to each other. In other words, there is a lot of wit in his work, both in the dialogue between characters and the narrative.

This is not to say that he is the best writer of all those I have mentioned above, but simply IMHO, the most entertaining. And the fact that he has been doing this for the past 30 years, hitting one bullseye after another, is as impressive as it gets in the scribe business.

I am currently in the process of scouring all the second hand books stores around here and collecting as many books in this series as I can find for the express purpose of reading them again. And I am not someone, who likes to read or watch things more than once.

With the explosion of big time streaming sites, it will not be long before you will likely see both a Lucas Davenport and a Virgil Flowers series and if they are done right, they could easily become some of the more entertaining series of their kind out there.

There have been two TV movies made from Mr Sandford’s books, one which starred Erique LaSalle, which was a terrible casting error, since he is African American, and the Lucas Davenport character is so white he played hockey in college. The other starred starred Mark Harmon, who played Davenport about as boringly as it could be possible to play a character.

I’m pretty sure that Mr Sandford learned a lot from those experiences and will participate actively in the development of his future series.

It worked out well for Michael Connelly, who has been guiding his Bosch series on Amazon Prime for the past five years, and it is outstanding.

Jim Murray is an experienced advertising and marketing professional and amateur photographer. He has run his own strategic and creative consulting business (Onwords & Upwords), since 1989 after a 20 year career in Toronto as a senior creative person in major Canadian & international advertising agencies. He is a communication strategist, writer, art director, broadcast producer, prolific marketing & op/ed blogger & beBee Brand Ambassador.

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