Book 9 – “The Great Leader” by Jim Harrison

Detective Sunderson has just retired from the police service in rural Michigan and his wife has recently left him. He needs to work out what he is going to do with his retirement but before that he decides that he is going to carry on pursuing a cult leader who has so far escaped his grasp. In The Great Leader by Jim Harrison Sunderson starts his quest to bring the leader to justice even though he has no authority – the investigation will postpone his need to come to grips with retirement.

Sunderson doesn’t really investigate in the sense that most detectives are required to in police procedural novels. We never really get a feel for what exactly the Great Leader has done or his belief system and the man himself only appears peripherally in the book. Instead, Sunderson follows the cult to their new base in Arizona, spies on them, is beaten up and tries to enlist others in his quest. Most of the book is actually about the detective coming to terms with his new status in life and musing on his marriage, books and fishing.

The book isn’t that exciting and it certainly isn’t “hilarious” irrespective of what it says on the cover of my copy. It is written with a slightly dry humour and I think that you are supposed to find much of it absurd. I think I had expected more plot and definitely more detail about the cults belief system and mode of operation. There’s a slightly unreal aspect to the writing and I am not convinced that you are supposed to treat the book as completely realistic.

Where I came unstuck with the novel, however, was in the way that the author treated Sunderson’s sex life and his way of looking at women. We know that he’s 65 years old and that he wasn’t unfaithful to his wife but at the start of this book he has sex with a younger woman in the car park at his retirement party and we learn that he is also sleeping with his secretary. During the course of the story he sleeps with a couple of other women and also comments in the narrative about the looks and youth of many more (he seems obsessed by the shape of the bottoms of the women especially). Every woman character seems to be described by their looks and how attractive he finds them. One young woman who lives next door is under 18 and he creates a way of spying on her as she undresses – it later transpires that she knows that he is peeping and is putting on a show for him but he doesn’t know this when he starts. I found this aspect of the characterisation and the narrative rather creepy and very distasteful but the author doesn’t make any judgement on this and nor do any of the other characters.

This is one of those books that I find occasionally on my to-be-read pile where I cannot remember why, where or when I bought it. The 20 Books of Summer challenge is designed to help me read and remove at least twenty of those books over three months. This book will now be given to my local charity shop where the next reader may enjoy it more than I did.