Easy Go by Michael Crichton (as John Lange).

Michael Crichton began writing novels under the pseudonym John Lange for getting money to acquire “furniture and groceries,” as he said about his first novel Odds On. It was the second half of the sixties, a time when he was studying at Harvard Medical School, which began to hate after two weeks of being there, but he still believed that will become a doctor in the next three years. He chose to pen under a nom de guerre because didn’t want that patients to worry that the writer uses their stories. The look of these books and their depictions are associative with pulp fiction, potboiler and airport novels. A premise of one of these writing, Easy Go, had a magnetizing conception about a group of people who found out and decided to steal a tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh. Nevertheless, no other than expect a poor story was in my feelings. I did reading of it because I wanted to see Michael Crichton of that time.

Stylistically, Easy Go is more advanced than usual for that kind of literature. Somewhere can see a potential of a good writer, but Crichton didn’t care about making sentences beautiful, as that expected. His strokes are simple and sometimes only informative. You usually don’t believe in wonderful from what was written in one week.

No depth, but Crichton in his third novel discloses his intrusive wish to show his knowledge, which Egyptology in this case. He can insert that accurately, but usually the author is careless, and these places shining themselves oddly. A main hero, who is a writer, has a conversation with a Negro taxi driver in Paris, which in their business talk he makes that move about giving a fact from where an Egyptian’s obelisk came.

Nothing tantalizing about a storyline. A novel’s lead character collects a stereotypical international and slightly multicolored team with eccentric tastes, biographies, and escapades. Certainly, it wasn’t hackneyed in the year 1968, but it was a bottom stage. Crichton uses the most dime variants for dramatizing. The main hero receives from his friend a contact that will agree to join his venture. He asks for the address of this man, but gets a response that this person has only a name. It makes for the sake of effect, but doesn’t explain how the protagonist found that man. The next scene, he sits in that taxi whose chauffer already shows his liking to swearing in French at the bad driving of locals. All meetings with characters include drinking variable alcohol beverages, and there was sex a couple of times, but it was only in insinuations. Paging the book further, because I couldn’t read it at whole to that place, the preference for substances with high degrees will carry on.

I don’t criticize an incoherent reasoning about sharing of earned money, especially for the tomb whose appearance and containment are unknown, but I can’t accept from these unnatural dialogs, as you usually read in this kind of books, that two Western men, who hadn’t seen each other before, after a few sentences, are already speaking about stealing a tomb. Or the lead hero arrives in Beirut and has a phone call from his searching man that they should meet in an Istanbul’s mosque in one hour. I didn’t want to test more.

In the next year after Easy Go, Michael Crichton writes three more books, and the latter was published under his real name. It was The Andromeda Strain, about which he said that anybody could write this because it is a short book, while itself, if make a common depiction from that Crichton’s interview, it doesn’t contain anything artistic, and the novel’s success was only a luck.