The Myth Makers: a review

John Crawley’s The Myth Makers 

reviewed by Sherri Phillips

If you’ve read any of John Crawley’s novels, you know the man can spin a heck of a good yarn.  He made me miss my stop on the subway with his novella Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt.  And now, with his latest novel, The Myth Makers, Crawley owes me several hours of sleep because while reading it I had no choice but to operate at a deficit of shuteye.  The Myth Makers isn’t just a page-turner, although it’s certainly that.  And it’s not just another mystery, although it more than pays off the genre’s requisites.  Intrigue, double-crosses, high stakes?  Check, check, and check.  Plus a protagonist, Jack Lawrence, a journalist for a top newspaper in the country, who is flawed enough to relate to, smart enough to keep readers off-balance, and funny enough to make you laugh out loud more than once.   

Crawley presents the eponymous myth on the very first page, an apparently tall tale relayed by a farmer to the gas station attendant about a guy who drove a car from El Paso to Midland and back “on a thimble of gasoline.”  Or is it a myth?  Imagine for a moment that such a miracle became possible due to the invention of a super-efficient energy converter.  Other than making your summer road trip a lot cheaper, how might that affect the world?  Oil companies would fall like flies overnight.  Entire Middle East economies might collapse.  Shipping magnates would crumble.  And that would just be the beginning.  In other words, while you and your kids might be able to drive to Disneyworld for a dime, a lot of very powerful people wouldn’t be very happy about it.  They might go so far as to try to prevent such a possibility from ever seeing the light of day.  Which is exactly what our not-always-intrepid reporter discovers as he chases down the story, crisscrossing the country in cars, bars, beds, bikes and airplanes.

As any good reporter would, Crawley uncovers the evidence, interview by interview, player by player, so that the fantastical soon begins to sound suspiciously like the truth.  Through a plausible panel of scientists, he explores how such an invention might work, so that when we finally see it in action (“it” is hilariously and improbably named Sally), we’re already believers.  And Crawley uses setting as if it were one more witness.  The whispers of the past can never be ignored in Alamogordo, first the home of the atom bomb and later the birthplace of—you guessed it—Sally.

The Myth Makers is about a reporter’s quest for the truth, but lest that come off as a high-fallutin’ destination, rest assured that the journey along the way includes some steamy encounters with one very hot redhead, a gut-splitting and unlikely goliath of a helpmate in West Virginia, a craggy old editor, and—I kid you not—one very scary encounter with a refrigerator.

What makes a good mystery?  Ask a dozen readers and you’ll get a dozen answers.  But here’s a question that I think readers of The Myth Makers will answer in unison:  Who writes a good mystery? 

For my money, John Crawley.

Sherri Phillips’ non-fiction has been published in two anthologies.  She has a short story coming out this fall in Killing the Angel, a new literary journal, and is currently at work on her first novel.