A Promise to Kill by Erik Storey

Published by Scribner on August 15, 2017

Clyde Barr is a philosophical tough guy. His philosophical musings tend to revolve around what a harsh place the world is and how sad it is that he lives in a world that so often forces him to kill people. Barr tells us that he doesn’t “coexist well with people who like to hurt others,” yet he seems to seek those people out expressly so that he can hurt them. I guess the difference is that he doesn’t like hurting them, although that’s difficult to believe since hurting bad guys seems to be his mission.

In A Promise to Kill, the bad guys are bikers who are terrorizing a town on a reservation. The tribal cop won’t do anything about it so it’s up to Clyde. I’ve known a lot of reservation residents over the years, and they’re pretty good at looking after their own. The idea that heavily-armed residents of the rez would let a biker gang walk all over them and need to be rescued by a tough white guy strikes me as fanciful.

It also struck me as unlikely that biker gangs would ally themselves with Middle Eastern terrorists who are intent on attacking the United States and killing millions of people (presumably including bikers) with weapons the bikers are improbably able to hijack. I mean, bikers might rob a liquor store, although brawling is a more typical biker crime, but enabling a terrorist attack on their own country? Treason isn’t high on the list of crimes that biker gangs commit. But heck, people don’t like biker gangs and they don’t like terrorists, so team them up and we’ve got a thriller, right?

As in the first Barr novel, Barr finds himself rescuing women who have been taken hostage. Last time he rescued his sister. This time the bikers have taken a couple of local women, but that’s secondary to the terrorist plot that they are attempting to carry out. Naturally, Barr also has to rescue himself, but only after surviving some beatings to bolster his tough guy credentials with the reader.

Of course, the simplest thing to do would be to call Homeland Security or the Army after Barr discovers the threat, either of which would move massively to stop the terrorists, but nobody does that because … no cell reception? Ah, drive an hour dudes, it really isn’t hard to make a telephone call, even in Utah. The locals are stymied by a couple of bikers who set up road blocks? Seriously? Barr’s plan takes a lot longer to execute than it would have taken to bypass the bikers and call the cops. But if anyone had done that, Barr wouldn’t get to play hero and we wouldn’t have a thriller.

Barr is the prototypical tough guy, a man of few words but many thoughts, always about himself, typically about the many tough guy battles he’s fought. When he does say something, it’s usually a tough guy cliché (“failure is not an option”). He grunts and sighs quite a bit (tough guy language), but he can ride a horse and drive a semi and take guns apart, so his tough guy credentials are clear.

He’s also good at fighting, as he tells us during a number of lengthy fight scenes, a skill he regrets having to use so often despite devoting his life to putting himself in situations that require him to fight. About a dozen times, Barr is ready to surrender to fatigue, but he sees something or thinks about something that motivates him to keep fighting. When a character draws on inner strength once or twice, it’s fine. When a character reaches deep on every other page, the writer is clearly running out of ideas.

I’ve enjoyed many tough guy novels over the years, but as Erik Storey proved in the first Barr novel, Barr just isn’t a very interesting tough guy. Nor is A Promise to Kill a very interesting book. The prose flows smoothly and the story moves quickly, but the plot isn’t particularly innovative or believable and Barr has no substance beneath his tough guy persona.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Nothing Short of Dying by Erik Storey

Published by Scribner on August 16, 2016

Clyde Barr is a tough guy. After his release from a Mexican prison, he’s trying to lose himself in the Colorado woods when his sister, Jen, calls to tell him that she needs help. Since she’s the only family member with whom Clyde is still on good terms, Clyde feels obliged to respond, but the call is cut off before Clyde can learn where she is. Fortunately, Clyde is resourceful.

Clyde hooks up with a bartender named Allie who knows something about a drug dealing thug named Lance who was Jen’s last known contact. After that, Clyde runs around doing tough guy stuff or reminiscing about all the tough guy stuff he’s done in the past. Clyde also reminisces about his abusive family life as a child, which is too over-the-top to generate the kind of sympathy that must have been intended. Occasionally, he says something like “Damn. Another pointless death that was entirely my fault.” I guess that makes him a tough guy with a conscience.

To prove his manliness, Clyde orders big rare steaks while making fun of Allie’s tofu noodle bowls. Is it even possible to order both of those at the same restaurant? Then, following the tradition of tough guy novels, he gets into bar fights to prove to the reader that he’s the toughest guy in the bar, and maybe the world. When he meets his old prison buddy, they beat each other up for fun because, yes, they are both tough guys. He rides a motorcycle 100 mph in the rain because he’s a fearless tough guy. All of that is such standard fare that it’s just tiresome, not to mention pointless.

Near the end of the novel, Clyde had managed to endanger all of his relatives, but he tells them not to call the police because the police don’t know anything about catching criminals. Only a heavily armed tough guy like Clyde can solve the problem. The most realistic part of the novel is that most of Clyde’s family, for good reason, want nothing to do with him. Of course, he feels bad about that because he’s a tough guy with a heart. The heart also accounts for a surprisingly sappy ending.

Having gotten out of my system all the things about Nothing Short of Dying that annoy me, I need to make clear that the book isn’t all bad. Erik Storey is a capable writer who keeps the plot moving. He tells the story in observant prose. He gives Clyde at least a modest degree of depth, although it’s overshadowed by his tough guy persona. Apart from Clyde’s unerring aim, action scenes are credible and the story doesn’t overreach, which is more than I can say about most modern thrillers. The book is smarter than many tough guy novels and it avoids politics, which I count as plus, since so many fictional tough guys love to pontificate about their tough guy political philosophies.

I've enjoyed many tough guy novels, beginning with Don Pendleton's Executioner books that I devoured when I was a kid. Those novels had elements that this one lacked. On the scale by which I judge books, I fall somewhere between being indifferent to and liking Nothing Short of Dying. I can only recommend it to readers who are willing to tolerate its problems -- in other words, readers who crave tough guy personas and are willing to let other aspects of the novel slide.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS