Order POINT & SHOOT here
(also reviewed)
Order FUN & GAMES here
Order HELL & GONE here
Nothing Charlie Hardie did made sense.
The safest assumption one can make about Duane Swierczynski, is that one can never guess what Duane Swierczynski is about to write. I have learned to know him through the Charlie Hardie trilogy and damn it, that is quite a feat to have written three novels are nothing like one another, yet who follow the same storyline. FUN & GAMES was the most original conspiracy novel I've ever read. It read like the beer-fueled dream of a sixteen years old, parallel universe, communist Vince Flynn. HELL & GONE followed the same conspiracy premise, but it was an all-out prison novel that borderlined on dystopian fiction. So what is POINT & SHOOT ? More Charlie Hardie yeah, but more Charlie Hardie in...
...FREAKIN' SPACE !!! You heard me. The novel opens with our boy stuck in a spaceship, hovering in low-earth orbit, "protecting" God knows what. As if it wasn't bonkers enough, Hardie's body double comes in crashing into the ship, begging him to get in, claiming he can help him take his life back from "the cabal" (the bad guys finally have a name in this novel). So POINT & SHOOT doesn't have one, but two point of views. Hardie and Hardie's double, looking upon himself and thinking he's a major leagues dick. So they come down with one thing in mind, end that long-running farce for good. If you're familiar with Swierczynski's writing, you know where this goes from here.
Warning for new readers : in case you wondered, YES you should be starting with FUN & GAMES, the first volume. No, you won't understand a damned thing if you start with POINT & SHOOT. Basically, what it is, is a series of chaotic actions scenes and loose ends wrappings. The conventional thriller structure wants character development and setup for the first half, so the story can unravel in the second, but there is nothing conventional about Duane Swierczynski. All the possible story and character development has been stocked up in the first two volumes, making POINT & SHOOT basically a 250 pages long final showdown. It will turn some readers away, because it's not really a self-sustaining novel story-wise, but rather a spectacular conclusion to the other two.
A cylindrical metal tube, lined with high-powered machine guns, hanging 166 miles above the surface of the earth.
Charlies Hardie could now add this exciting new entry to the long list of crazy places he'd ever had a fistfight.
One of the many fascinating aspects of the Charlie Hardie trilogy is the idiosyncratic vernacular in which Duane Swierczynski writes. He doesn't aim to "write beautifully" like most of his predecessors and contemporaries do. He doesn't just aim to tell the story either. No, Swierczynski is making his prose deliberately conversational. It's expertly cut into bits, piece, incomplete sentences, streetwise colloquialisms that gives the omniscient narrator this booming, transcendent voice. In POINT & SHOOT, he add a layer of difficulty to the stunt as there is a second narrator that speaks to the second person (the "you"), but Swierczynski keeps the tongue-in-cheek prose routine intact.
You can't pick up POINT & SHOOT, think you'll have a complete narrative arc and enjoy the novel. It's impossible. But if you read it as the conclusion of FUN & GAMES and HELL & GONE, it will make a whole lot of sense and it will bring a proper and grandiose closure for the fans. I don't think this novel was meant to live up to the other two, but rather to wrap up the loose ends and send Charlie Hardie packing into the happily ever after (a very "Hardie" ever after that is) . Mission accomplished, Duane Swierczynski. Mission accomplished.
You can't pick up POINT & SHOOT, think you'll have a complete narrative arc and enjoy the novel. It's impossible. But if you read it as the conclusion of FUN & GAMES and HELL & GONE, it will make a whole lot of sense and it will bring a proper and grandiose closure for the fans. I don't think this novel was meant to live up to the other two, but rather to wrap up the loose ends and send Charlie Hardie packing into the happily ever after (a very "Hardie" ever after that is) . Mission accomplished, Duane Swierczynski. Mission accomplished.