The Hanged Man's Song

Berglund Authority Level 3

by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>
Editor, Interface

Sandford, John. The Hanged Man's Song
New York: 2003

We have over the past very pleasant years at the Berglund Center for Internet Studies been able to indulge our penchant for reading fiction that is, at best, on the fringes---the distant fringes---of literature. Encouraged by occasional emails from similarly afflicted readers, we have continually searched for fictional works that tell us something about the impact of the Internet.

The work currently under review, John Sandford's The Hanged Man's Song, comes closest to our ideal of Internet-related fiction; much closer say, than previous works reviewed here, including those of William Gibson, Neil Stephenson, Dan Brown, or R. J. Pineiro. [1] We find Gibson and Stephenson too speculative to tell us much about the current impact of the Internet, though fascinating when thinking about possible futures. Brown too often produces uni-dimensional characters, and Pineiro seeks a less literate audience than our own. Doubtless there is something in these, our opinions, to offend most of the millions of readers of these authors, each of who has found his audience.

But The Hanged Man's Song, which recently went into mass-market paperback, shows a very experienced writer at the height of his craft. Although we refer to the author here as John Sanford, this is actually the nom de plume of John Camp, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist. Camp/Sanford is probably best noted for his "Prey" series, featuring Lucas Davenport, a policeman who has made sufficient money writing video games to drive a Porsche and investigate whatever quirky crime catches his interest. And while these have clearly found a wide audience---there are fifteen books in the series as of May 2004---it is the much shorter (four books) "Kidd" series that interests us here. [2]

Kidd, the protagonist of the series, is essentially a White Hat hacker who finances himself through industrial and political hacking, often of a rather questionable nature, so perhaps his hat is off-white. He works with a sometime-lover, LuEllen, a skilled cat burglar who is no better than she need be.

Kidd has also, through the four novels, had ties to a wider world of skilled hackers who have made brief appearances in most of the works. In The Hanged Man's Song, they become the center of the plot as the legendary "Bobby," a hacker so skilled and reclusive that even his closest friends have not met him, is somehow tracked down and killed. Bobby's heavily encrypted laptop, carrying sufficient information to get all the members of the ring imprisoned for forever or worse, is lost. The search for the violent perpetrator leads Kidd and LuEllen through a labyrinth of violent criminals and politicians.

The advantage of writing a character-driven series like the Kidd novel is that the author can develop great depth to the fictional world the character inhabits. The disadvantage is that such books easily become so self-referential as to exclude new readers. Even worse, the writer can take his or her audience's enthusiasm so for granted that the series becomes a sort of parody, like the once-scintillating Spencer series of Robert Parker.

Sandford himself has come close to writing Kidd to death (I felt his last work, The Devil's Code, rather weak.), but with The Hanged Man's Song he brings the series back on track and gives us entirely believable and always entertaining glimpses into the criminal underworld of the hacker, his prey, and those who prey upon him or her.

For those who like a lot of computer-related detail in their fiction, The Hanged Man's Song is a delight. Most of the Kidd novels can be found used at Amazon.com, and if you haven't read them yet, start at the beginning and watch both the character and computer-related crime develop steadily with the Internet itself.

Footnotes:

[1] For reviews, see: William Gibson, Pattern Recognition found at:
http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/02/gibson.php;
For Brown, see our review Digital Fortress, found at:
http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2004/01/brown.php;
for Stephenson see: Cryptonomicron, found at:
http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2003/02/stephenson.php;
For Pineiro see:
http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2004/03/pineiro.php.

[2] See Sanford's website at: http://www.johnsandford.org/ Both the Prey and Kidd series are listed chronologically at: http://www.johnsandford.org/listofbooks.html