Heat Wave & Naked Heat

Author: Richard Castle
Publisher: Hyperion
Price: £6.99 each

Seeing two books on the shelf by acclaimed crime author Richard Castle is a mixed experience. While there’s no doubt that Castle is up there with the literary talents of Connelly, Shakespeare and Dickens, one is overcome by the sheer majestic power of his use of the written word and you feel unworthy to be …. no, wait, sorry, I can’t do this. 

Let’s begin again. Seeing two books on the shelf by ‘acclaimed’ crime author Richard Castle is a mixed experience because… there’s no such guy - unless, of course, you are one of the faithful millions who tune in regularly to the hit ABC comedy crime action series ‘Castle’ in which Nathan Fillion plays the ‘ruggedly handsome’ author of the title.  In the show Rick Castle is able to parlay his close friendship with the major and senior city figures (read: poker buddies) into permission to shadow savvy police detective Kate Beckett to help research and inspire his next (and late manuscript). He’s  fully aware of his boyish charm and unfeasibly big ego, and while he wouldn’t hurt a fly, he often underestimates how annoying he can be  - or revels in it depending on his mood. But his success in writing crime fiction does give him a useful creative insight into detective-work and even Beckett and her team might admit he can occasionally be helpful when they hit an investigative dead-end. Of course, there’s an almost ‘Moonlighting-esque’ quality to the Castle/Beckett working relationship, sparking so often with one-liners and sardonic quips among the gunfire that their mutual attraction is obvious to everyone but the two of them.

Which leads us to the strength and weakness of the two books now on sale in the ‘real world’ - because these are supposed to be the books that Rick Castle penned inspired by that partnership with Beckett. So readers picking up the book will actually see Rick’s creations: Nikki Heat and an annoying journalist called  Jameson Rook (geddit?) - their adventures mirroring and exaggerating the Castle-Beckett variation. For that reason the book walks a very thin line… knowing that real-life readers are actually wanting more Castle-ness  but giving them something subtlety different  with constant reminders of that little meta-twist.

In many ways this is a one-joke outing/marketing exercise by US broadcaster ABC and one that can wear thin if you’re not in the right mood. However the source material, as it were, is punchy and quippy enough that you cut the novel versions a  great deal of slack and on the level of an entertainingly flippant romp, taking a knowing sideswipe at elements of the genre and show, they are  perfectly fun. In the first book, Heat Wave, Heat and Rook trace the murderer of a broken multi-millionaire who plummeted out/through of a skyscraper window and lost an argument with the sidewalk. It’s full of familiar archetypes and enough derring-do to keep you turning the pages on a long-haul flight or car-ride. The ‘fiction’ allows some physical character play that we’re unlikely  to see in the series for a while, but that may attract the fans as well.   The second outing, Naked Heat, reads a little longer and more complicated - the victim is a sharp-tongued gossip columnist and the scope a little bigger, but doesn’t stray too far away from the expected format.

No-one is admitting who the real author of the books actually is (rumour suggested that it could be the late Stephen J Cannell who guested as himself in the show but he always denied it). Forgetting the TV connection and judging them solely as works of crime fiction, the Heat novels are a microwave meal of a book, hardly cutting-edge or top-flight literature milestones (sorry, Shakespeare, Dickens etc) , but they are not meant to be. They will however completely hit the spot if you’re happy to go along with the joke and need a quick guilt-free action fix.