Lou Cameron’s 1962 novel The Sky Divers is yet another book we didn’t seek, but which came in a bundle with other novels we wanted. It happens all the time, and often these books we take in like orphans are good. In this one Cameron tells the tale of skydive club instructor Lou Hovik, glamorous rich girl and club treasurer Amber McCall, and newbie jumper Cyrus Hall, a man with secrets. They juggle interpersonal drama in and around San Francisco while dealing with the mystery of who sabotaged the chutes of all the female club members.
The previous Cameron books we’ve read—his debut Angel’s Flight and his second effort The Empty Quarter—were both entertaining, but the first was far better than the second, and the second is far better than this one. Cameron would go on to publish many novels, but in these first three he’s on a steep downward trajectory. His ear for dialogue is diminished compared to earlier work. His characters speak in a stilted, self-conscious manner:
“Kisses are fun, and you’re pretty, but don’t let’s start the old Victrola. [snip] I mean, don’t let’s start the moon-June-croon-swoon bit.”
Huh? Moon-June-croon-swoon? Who talks like that?
In general, Cameron has traded in the relatively normal dialogue of earlier work for something that stylistically comes across as John D. MacDonald without the precision and acerbity. We’d let it pass if it were one character, but Cameron saddles all of them with this sort of language. The goal, we suppose, was to make them sound smart. Instead, they sound pretentious, exactly the type of people we avoid in real life.
Cameron’s writing also has a second important dialogue flaw, foundational more than stylistic, but something that could have been repaired easily with better editing. We consider constant name usage to be a negative skill indicator because, again, people don’t talk like that. Way back in the 1920s Ernest Hemingway and others pioneered long dialogue passages with no names at all. So there’s simply no point, in 1962, in doing this:
“That girl may be just the thing for you, Steve. You’ll never have to struggle for eating money, anyway. But don’t give up too much for security, Steve.”
A simple strikethrough of fifty percent of the name usage within the novel’s dialogue would have helped. Seventy percent, even better. Another quibble—and this, admittedly, is nitpicking—are the many typos. Dozens of “its/it’s” errors made it to print, along with a few heinous misspellings, and amazingly, occasional bits of dialogue left outside quotation marks. Whether editorial or proofing failures have a bearing on your assessment of fiction depends on how exacting you are. We found the sloppiness distracting.
But how about some positives? On the plus side, The Sky Divers illuminates an interesting (if self-satisfied) subculture and generally moves at a decent clip to its tidy conclusion. We can’t say it was bad. Maybe it’s even better than most popular fiction. But it certainly underachieved based on the author’s previously demonstrated skill. We expect the book to be our last Cameron. This Gold Medal edition has Bill Johnson cover art we imagine he had fun painting. Even his skydiver is grinning from ear to ear.
