Lincoln Rhyme
Twenty-five years ago, I saw a film advertised, a thriller with actors Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. I might not have paid a lot of attention, but this was just a few years after The Pelican Brief, a 1993 film that also starred Denzel Washington, along with Julia Roberts. Now, since it is best to be truthful, I really liked Julia Roberts, and hoped to watch as many of the films she appeared in that I could. In The Pelican Brief she was a law student, developing a theory about the murder of two Supreme Court justices. With a trail of murders following her, she meets up with Denzel Washington, who is a Washington Post reporter. There are lots of pulse raising adventures, plot twists and drama, but they manage to survive and eventually solve the murders – at which point (spoiler alert!) Julia Roberts is sent off to a safe location, as part of the US Witness protection program, leaving audiences to wonder if she ever caught up with Denzel Washington again. It was a brilliant film.
With that as background, I decided to watch this 1997 film, The Bone Collector. I didn’t know so much about Angelina Jolie (she was to appear in Mr and Mrs Smith six years later), but as far as I was concerned, she wasn’t Julia Roberts. However, Denzel Washington was clearly an outstanding actor, enough to draw me in. I had no idea as to what The Bone Collector might be about, not even that it was a kind of thriller, but also a murder mystery. Off I went to the cinema, and immediately found myself glued to the screen.
Now I know The Bone Collector may not be considered a ‘great’ film, but it remains one of my favourites. I can still remember the opening scenes. First rookie policewoman Amelia Donaghy (played by Jolie who was only then on the way up to become a ‘superstar’) is seen ferreting around on the rail tracks for evidence related to a murder, just as a train is approaching. That was more than enough to get my adrenaline going. No sooner had I recovered from that bit of drama that I was confronted with Denzel Washington as Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic detective living in an elegant New York townhouse, stuck in a specially designed bed throughout the film. This movie was going to be ‘different’!!
From there it was only a short step to Amelia walking a crime scene, while on a two-radio to Lincoln, down in a dark cellar with the remains of a body hanging off a steam pipe. The Director, Phillip Noyce, knew how to ratchet up (my) tension. It was the perfect combination for me: frightening moments combined with live detective analysis, Lincoln Rhyme in his hospital bed staring at scraps of paper and trying to make sense of what had happened. As it turns out, those scraps of paper eventually lead to Rhyme realising the first and subsequent murders are repeating stories from a crime novel, The Bone Collector. A very clever plot idea. Hey, if I’d become a detective (one of the many careers I’ve imagined at various points in my life), I might be working on scenes like these with Angelina there to assist me. Well, if I’m honest I think I might have hoped that it could be Julia Roberts as my assistant.
Looking back, my response to this film was an unusual one. My more typical approach to novels has been to read the book first, and maybe watch a film or television series later. There’s a good reason for this. Books are always rich, complicated and detailed. Film versions are necessarily simpler, even those that spread the story over a few episodes. It’s not just complexity, of course. Once you’ve seen the characters on screen, your imagination is replaced by knowledge, and one result of seeing the Bone Collector is that Lincoln Rhyme is Denzel Washington, even though I know he was just playing a role. The Bone Collector has given me an image of Rhyme (as well as that of Amelia Sachs as she is called in the books) which I can never abandon.
When I watch Dalgleish or Wimsey, it is easy to write off those playing them off as merely actors, because I read those books first, but I am stuck with very specific images for Deaver’s main characters. Lincoln Rhyme has been in sixteen novels to date, and as I read each one, there is Denzel Washington again. That makes it sound like a problem, but it is more of a fact that intrigues me. As it happens, none of the other books have made their way into a second movie, not yet anyway, and I wonder if that is because a film version of any of the other stories will have to include Denzel Washington in the key role. It’s hard to live with changes. It might have happened with Dalgleish, but the first actor was only replaced for the last two stories. Annoying. Ah, and now we have a new series again, and yet another Dalgleish!
Jeffrey Deaver had written nine murder mysteries before The Bone Collector. Some were standalone, and some were in short series. However, the appearance of Lincoln Rhyme marked a turning point. His unusual character, (not many detectives are quadriplegics!) seemed spark an interest in Deaver as much as in his readers. Since that first book, there have been fifteen others in the series, together with four others with Kathryn Dance as the central character, a spin off from the Rhyme series following her appearance when assisting Rhyme in The Cold Moon in 2006, and yet another couple of books with Parker Kincaid, also connected to Rhyme (he appeared in two Rhyme stories in 2003 and 2005.). Well, spin-offs are spin-offs, and the serious stuff with Lincoln Rhyme keeps appearing: the latest book in the series was published in 2023. I doubt that’s the end of him.
The style of the Lincoln Rhyme books is clever, seductive even. In order to solve each mystery, Rhyme is forced to summarise what Amelia Sachs and the other characters learn. This means material is written up on whiteboards, and other pieces of data projected on a screen. These images are then reproduced as tables of evidence in the book as you read along, and they get updated on later pages from time to time. It’s as if you’re in the room as he mulls over what has been discovered, and, almost without thinking, you find you are working with him, trying to make sense of what’s in front of you.
I guess this is the logical step from an Agatha Christie novel. In her books, the key information is there, to be picked out of conversations and discoveries. With Jeffrey Deaver, we have all the data summarised in front of us. You want to be a detective? Feel free to see if you can get there first! Christies’ approach is the conventional one. Can you identify in the course of the unfolding story that events and evidence that matter. She would often allow Poirot to make a remark which offers a hint at what is critical but done in such a way you would have to be very astute – or lucky – to put it together with what else you’d read.
Deaver’s technique is quite different. Those pages of summarised information mean we have the evidence, as it gets collated, but, like real evidence, it is complex, often contradictory, and it feels like you are in a game, trying to sort it out using logic and sound analysis. If this was the case (item on whiteboard #3, half-way down), then how could that have occurred (that piece of paper currently on the screen)? It’s a challenge that draws you in: can you go through what’s there with a logical mind, can you see what is more important? The good news is that there’s nothing hidden in an earlier part of the story. It’s all there, so you can solve it – but only if you can separate the red herrings from the real stuff!
This style, which many other writers have used since, is both enjoyable and frustrating. Enjoyable, because you have the chance to play detective, without the author having hidden key information away. It’s all in plain sight. Frustrating, because it is easy to miss the relevance of scattered bits of data, with the result it can be difficult to find a way to put it all together into a compelling story, especially as there seem to be a number of stories that could be woven out of what has been collected!
Perhaps I should add I am almost always hopeless: I can’t work out who’d done what! As it happens, the very few times I have identified a killer in a novel before the final denouement has been using another kind of logic: this is when I decide to choose the one who is ‘the person who seems least likely or least able to commit the murder’!
It also makes the nature of the murder mystery rather different. Perhaps this is closer to real life detective work. There is always evidence, often heaps of evidence. Most fictional detectives seem to have an unerring eye to spot the one key fact. In television series, that clue if often hinted at if you’re watching carefully. Why did he focus on that cup on the sink, that cushion beside the chair? However, Deaver is unrelentingly ‘fair’. Here is all the stuff for you to look at, and now you just have to do what Lincoln Rhyme does: look, think, analyse, and construct possible scenarios until you find the one that makes sense of what happened (bearing in mind that a lot of the evidence is evidence from the crime scene, but not necessarily evidence relevant to the issue of how and why the actual crime was committed).
Do you get the impression I like Deaver’s approach! Let me contrast it with just one other writer whose books I enjoy (one of many, as it happens). Fiona MacIntosh is another prolific writer, with children’s as well as adult titles, including a series of detective stories with Superintendent Jack Hawsworth as the key character. Jack Hawsworth is another Lincoln Rhyme (but no, he’s not a quadriplegic). He’s a thinker, and he has a team of detectives who go out to seek for evidence, interview suspects, and study crime scenes. He doesn’t have a series of white boards we can study, although he does have regular briefing sessions where summaries are given and task allocated. There are other writers like this, of course. I could have used Cara Hunter as another example, centred around DI Fawley.
What the reader of books like those of Hunter and MacIntosh have to do is to follow the teams as they go out, note what they discover and then, like Hawksworth or Fawley, try to put it all together. However, the chapters of these novels don’t include a comprehensive whiteboard summary from time to time. You are expected to ignore the extraneous stuff (of which, naturally, there is plenty), and focus on identifying what has been found, then sort it out, work out the priorities, abandon misleading data, while remaining alert to the possibility that something that didn’t seem to fit or make sense might turn out to be critical later.
Both writers pull off another trick, which is to make you feel you really understand what each person is doing. It is all about attention to specifics. You don’t just see the crime scene, but you observe each member of the team at work. In Fiona MacIntosh’s case, she is willing to shift the reader’s perspective as the story moves from one detective’s activities to another’s. You know that Jack Hawksworth is at the centre, but you are allowed to enjoy the details of the investigation, observations and interviews being undertaken by others, their moments of triumph in tracking something down, their occasional frustrations when another member of the team has worked out something just before you got to the same conclusion.
They have a further key attribute. Both Fawley and Hawksworth follow a purposeful process, each finding adding to a better understanding of what has happened, each stage moving us closer to a conclusion. Fiona MacIntosh and Cara Hunter both have a good sense of how real cases work, incremental but effective progress, a step-by-step advance. Morning or evening team briefings give the reader the sense of how the case is going, and you begin to feel, maybe two-thirds of the way through a book, you can see this is going to be resolved.
In contrast, Jeffrey Deaver follows a more complex approach, perhaps a reflection of the fact that he’s a key detective stuck inside, seeing almost everything second or even third hand, trying to tie bits of data back to the sources he uses. Lincoln Rhyme can’t get out much (he is occasionally put into a specially designed van and driven to key locations), so he has to relies on history books about an area, geological surveys, builders’ reports and an astonishing variety of other secondary sources to complement his teams observations: “Show me that soil sample again, please” (I don’t think he often says ‘please’). As he studies a photograph, or even a physical sample in a plastic evidence case, his mind is sifting through dozens, even hundreds of items he’s seen before, hoping to link the evidence back to a source that will be helpful (as long as he can remember the details of the source on which he’s drawing).
In the film version of The Bone Collector, in that early scene where Amelia ‘walks the crime scene’, we see the way in which she observes the squares of ground she covers, and at the same time how Rhyme hears and visualises her account, checking on what she has described as if he is rebuilding her experience in his mind. It is a compelling cinematic episode, all the more so because Rhyme is unrelentingly objective, and ignores Amelia’s natural revulsion as he asks her to describe, in detail, the remains of the body hanging off the steam pipe. As it happens, this is a pivotal moment in their relationship, which we don’t see in the film, but which is subtly addressed in the book. He has ‘used’ her, but she doesn’t want to walk away. She has become his crime scene partner, and you sense that bond will grow (as it does in the next few books, even if this outcome was only possibly likely in this first story).
There have been very few films based on Deaver’s books. There might be a number of reasons for this. The Lincoln Rhyme books on film would be hard to continue as a series without Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and I doubt it would be easy to get them back together in the years after The Bone Collector to take part in a series, given the ways their careers have continued to develop. Perhaps more to the point, the series would face two obstacles. First of all, this wouldn’t be like a Batman series, with spectacular effects and universal appeal. Deaver’s stories are always likely to attract a smaller audience, albeit a dedicated group. More important, the books aren’t especially cinematic.
Deaver’s books are for readers. The pages summarising data collected on a case are there for the reader to consider, allowing time to check out what’s there and what it might mean. This is a technique for thinkers, for crime solvers, and the entertainment is in the brain work, not in dramatic moments. As it happens The Bone Collector does open with a vivid scene as the express bears down on the policewoman, and it ends with another dramatic denouement. However, they are merely the ‘top and tail’ of the story, and the real substance is in the processes of detective work. Sadly, a lot of detective work is boring, an illustration of diligence rather than drama.
Having said that, I hope I am wrong. If excellent television can be made using the Commander Dalgleish stories, so the same must be true of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme books. Are they likely to be made into films that bring in hundreds of millions of dollars? I rather doubt it. If the future of television and cinema is largely concerned with blockbusters, they don’t stand much of a chance. However, I cling on to the hope that there is still room for television series and movies that have more limited appeal, addressed to an audience that wants to enjoy battling with mind stretching puzzles.
