Christal Cooper
Book
Analysis By Chris Rice Cooper:
Phillip
Margolin: Woman With A Gun
It is 2015, and Stacey Kim is a 28-year-old
dreamer who goes to med school to please her parents only to realize that her
real passion is in writing. When she
inherits a large sum of money from her grandparents she quits med school,
enters into an MFA creative writing program.
excerpt from movie poster of Bridgett Jones' Diary
There she meets her professor, Morris
DeFord, the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Ward for Fiction and a finalist for the
National Book Award. DeFord tells Stacey
that her short
story “A Fragment of the Day” was one of the finest pieces of fiction he had
ever read. This gives her the craving
to write the great American novel, and the courage, after her graduation, to
move to Manhattan where she lands a job with the Wilde, Levin, and Barstow law
firm.
Mixed media by Chris Rice Cooper
She assumes she will be full of
ideas of writing in her Manhattan apartment and her job at the law firm will
give her plenty of inspiration, but she is terribly wrong. Her apartment is so small it practically just
fits her bed, she is bored at her job, and her zest for writing is gone –she
has writer’s block, which other than rejection, is the writer’s greatest fear.
Mixed Media by Chris Rice Cooper
But all that changes when one day during
her lunch break she attends a Salvador Dali exhibit, and completes the Dali
exhibit with time to spare – just enough time to visit the exhibit next
door: the photography exhibit of
Pulitzer Prize winner Kathy Moran.
Salvador Dali November 9, 1939
She is captivated by one photograph titled Woman With A Gun, the photograph that
earned Moran her Pulitzer Prize.
All of a sudden the block disappears and Stacey
has this craving, the urge to write her great novel based on the photograph Woman With A Gun. But that is where Stacey’s story ends – on
page 8, and she doesn’t enter the picture until page 165.
Photograph by Chris Rice Cooper
On page 9 it is now 2005, and we meet a
variety of characters for the next 156 pages and it is in these 156 pages that
we learn the most about Kathy Moran, District Attorney Jack Booth; and the mystery
woman in Woman With A Gun is not a mystery
as of page 15, when the reader learns her name along with other backstory about
her.
Mixed Media By Chris Rice Cooper
The reader also learns everything else in these
156 pages, including three more homicides that occur, jumping from 2005 to 2010
and back to present day 2015. In these pages there really is no mystery, and
even though District Attorney Jack Booth and other officials in these homicide
cases seem to be in the dark, I as a reader found it pretty easy to read
between the lines and figure out the case long before Stacey Kim comes back
into the game on page 165.
Mixed Media By Chris Rice Cooper
Still even after Stacey Kim reenters the
book on page 165 it is not Stacey who solves the great mystery but Jack Booth
who figures it out not by studying the mystery of the Woman In The Gun but by discovering the identity of the bearded man
in another picture taken by Kathy Moran and figuring out the direction the
image Woman With A Gun was taken.
Stock Photo of bearded man photoshopped by Chris Rice Cooper
The things Stacey Kim encounters on page
165 until the very last page of 294 is far fetched from her quick love affair
to a lawyer involved in the cases, to two acts of violence she suffers and
survives; and to her being embraced by the participants in these murder cases. Most novelists, especially those not
published, are not so openly embraced and invited into the center office and
center residences of the people involved in murderer cases, especially those
cases that are still considered unsolved.
Mixed Media By Chris Rice Cooper
On the other side of the coin, Women
With A Gun is a good read and takes place in Philip Margolin’s home
state of Oregon, which in itself is a character beautifully cast in this
novel.
Oregon's Lone Ranch Beach CCBY SA3.0
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