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Revolution #9
Blake Wrightman died during the Vietnam War. Not on a Southeast Asian battlefield, but on an American college campus. He died the day the bomb he planted at an anti-war protest claimed a small boy’s life—and forced Blake Wrightman to vanish. Now, after twenty-years as “Charlie Ochs,” Cape Cod lobsterman, Blake finds out that the feds are closing in. But a vengeful G-man gives Charlie a face the music or help smoke out the beautiful hardcore radical who seduced him into the anti-war movement back in the ’60s. So begins a long, strange trip for the former Blake Wrightman, as he revisits the scene of a deadly revolution that didn’t end with the Vietnam War—and is about to claim a few more casualties. . . .
302 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
20 people are currently reading
745 people want to read
About the author
Peter Abrahams
117 books419 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Peter Abrahams is an American author of crime fiction for both adults and children.
His book Lights Out (1994) was nominated for an Edgar Award for best novel. Reality Check won the best young adult Edgar Award in 2011. Down the Rabbit Hole, first in the Echo Falls series, won the best children's/young adult Agatha Award in 2005. The Fan was adapted into a film starring Robert De Niro and directed by Tony Scott (1996).
His literary influences are Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Ross Macdonald. Stephen King has referred to him as "my favorite American suspense novelist".
Born in Boston, Abrahams lives in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. He is married and has four children including Rosie Gray. He graduated from Williams College in 1968.
Peter Abrahams is also writing under the pseudonym Spencer Quinn (Chet and Bernie Mysteries).
Peter Abrahams is an American author of crime fiction for both adults and children.
His book Lights Out (1994) was nominated for an Edgar Award for best novel. Reality Check won the best young adult Edgar Award in 2011. Down the Rabbit Hole, first in the Echo Falls series, won the best children's/young adult Agatha Award in 2005. The Fan was adapted into a film starring Robert De Niro and directed by Tony Scott (1996).
His literary influences are Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Ross Macdonald. Stephen King has referred to him as "my favorite American suspense novelist".
Born in Boston, Abrahams lives in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. He is married and has four children including Rosie Gray. He graduated from Williams College in 1968.
Peter Abrahams is also writing under the pseudonym Spencer Quinn (Chet and Bernie Mysteries).
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 3, 2016
Thank you to SK for that selection from your reading list on the back of "On Writing".
Could not put it down! Time for my novel. I love the way Peter Abrahams writes keeping it going clearing up doubts about characters you might have displaced a dead guy being a hero and selfish woman loved her father enough to kill a little boy and convincing enough to blame it on the others then gets here in the end.
Could not put it down! Time for my novel. I love the way Peter Abrahams writes keeping it going clearing up doubts about characters you might have displaced a dead guy being a hero and selfish woman loved her father enough to kill a little boy and convincing enough to blame it on the others then gets here in the end.
August 2, 2012
Such a deeply depressing book in which everyone loses in the end... everyone!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 10, 2018
"Blurting the answer to twenty-six across in the Sunday New York Times crossword was the first big mistake Charlie Ochs had made in twenty years. Playing Ben Webster was the second."
Peter Abrahams' Revolution #9 (1992) provides a black and white, textbook example of a mystery/thriller novel that is great at the beginning and absolutely unreadable at the end. From the wonderful first chapter - about a boy baseball player who accidentally leaves his mitt in his father's office - through captivating three chapters that introduce the main characters in the plot, to the outstandingly well written scenes of Charlie meeting Emily and falling in love with her, a most discriminating reader will have a feeling that the author is a "serious," accomplished writer. People seem to come alive from the pages of the novel.
The plot carries on fast. On the wedding day the young couple looking forward to a long and happy life meet an unexpected guest. A man, dressed in a gorilla suit, hands Charlie a magnum bottle of champagne decorated with a black ribbon around the neck and with a congratulations card from Uncle Sam addressed to a Mr. Wrightman. The next day Uncle Sam himself shows up and Charlie suddenly leaves Emily for a few days to straighten out some complicated inheritance business in his family. We now learn that Charlie Ochs might not be who he seems he is.
The story rewinds 22 years to 1970 and we get acquainted with anti-government activists of The Committee of the American Resistance grouping students opposed to Vietnam War. They are involved in armed resistance against the government policies. That part of the plot is well-written and truly captivating. The contemporary thread on the other hand begins to deteriorate. Charlie discovers a clue that totally changes the basic algebra of the story and things begin to break down on the plausibility front. Then comes page 275 of the hardback edition that I was reading when events lose any relationship to reality and the reader is served literary garbage.
I was not strong-willed enough to read the last fifth of the book, I just flipped through the pages, and - being Polish-born - I noticed a tiny yet funny fragment mentioning the leader of the Polish pro-Soviet government in the 1960s.
After the first hundred or so pages of the book I was contemplating a possible four-star rating. Now I am even hesitant to assign a two-star one. Yet I have to, since the author of the first part of the book is a good writer. Whoever - instead of Peter Abrahams - wrote the last part should be ashamed. I highly recommend the novel to all readers who love experiencing massive disappointment.
Two stars.
Peter Abrahams' Revolution #9 (1992) provides a black and white, textbook example of a mystery/thriller novel that is great at the beginning and absolutely unreadable at the end. From the wonderful first chapter - about a boy baseball player who accidentally leaves his mitt in his father's office - through captivating three chapters that introduce the main characters in the plot, to the outstandingly well written scenes of Charlie meeting Emily and falling in love with her, a most discriminating reader will have a feeling that the author is a "serious," accomplished writer. People seem to come alive from the pages of the novel.
The plot carries on fast. On the wedding day the young couple looking forward to a long and happy life meet an unexpected guest. A man, dressed in a gorilla suit, hands Charlie a magnum bottle of champagne decorated with a black ribbon around the neck and with a congratulations card from Uncle Sam addressed to a Mr. Wrightman. The next day Uncle Sam himself shows up and Charlie suddenly leaves Emily for a few days to straighten out some complicated inheritance business in his family. We now learn that Charlie Ochs might not be who he seems he is.
The story rewinds 22 years to 1970 and we get acquainted with anti-government activists of The Committee of the American Resistance grouping students opposed to Vietnam War. They are involved in armed resistance against the government policies. That part of the plot is well-written and truly captivating. The contemporary thread on the other hand begins to deteriorate. Charlie discovers a clue that totally changes the basic algebra of the story and things begin to break down on the plausibility front. Then comes page 275 of the hardback edition that I was reading when events lose any relationship to reality and the reader is served literary garbage.
I was not strong-willed enough to read the last fifth of the book, I just flipped through the pages, and - being Polish-born - I noticed a tiny yet funny fragment mentioning the leader of the Polish pro-Soviet government in the 1960s.
After the first hundred or so pages of the book I was contemplating a possible four-star rating. Now I am even hesitant to assign a two-star one. Yet I have to, since the author of the first part of the book is a good writer. Whoever - instead of Peter Abrahams - wrote the last part should be ashamed. I highly recommend the novel to all readers who love experiencing massive disappointment.
Two stars.
October 16, 2020
"He saw the two men in uniform—not baseball, but military—standing at the end of the bench. They looked at him with grave faces. It hit Blake almost at once.
“'No,' he said, feeling absurdly strong and helpless, hands hanging at his sides. No. But he came from a military family, and he knew from the sight of these men that it was yes. The rest—the quiet words about firefights, heroism, recommendations for this medal or that, the condolences, hackneyed in form although there was real sorrow behind them, however briefly felt—was as nothing beside that awful yes.
“'Does my mother know?' Blake asked.
"'We haven’t been able to reach her yet.'
"The army found Mrs. Wrightman that night. She’d gone to Freeport for a couple of days with Ollie. Blake’s team played for the division championship the next day. Blake started in center field. It wasn’t that he felt like playing, but neither did he not feel like playing. He felt nothing—or so much that it had the same effect as feeling nothing."
Peter Abrahams is a master literary practitioner of sfumato, a technique most often applied to painting. It's defined as "the technique in which colors or tones are blended in such a subtle manner that they melt into one another without perceptible transitions, lines or edges." The above quote from his 1992 novel, REVOLUTION #9, illustrates this. Here, his primary character, Blake Wrightman — who became a federal fugitive, and later Massachusetts lobsterman Charlie Ochs, following a 1969 college-campus protest bombing that unintentionally killed a child — learns while playing a college baseball game that his father was killed in action in Vietnam, But Abrahams is one of the few authors I've read who's capable of showing without telling; he's so off-the-nose that he's almost cubist, but he's too controlled and too tethered to the conventions of the crime genre for that. The result is a novel, like all of Abrahams' other novels, that manages to be both literary and light on its feet, and that creates a rereading experience that lends itself to pleasurable repeated readings because of the hypnotic quality of its blurrings. There's always something new to discover in them, the same way you see something new in a great painting if you look long enough or from a different angle or in different light. And some of the best parts of Abrahams' works are the things you can't quite see straight on.
REVOLUTION #9 is another what I call Abrahams' "For Some, The War Never Ended, and Neither Did Its Body Count" novels. In may ways seems like a spinoff, or maybe a twin absorbed in utero, of Abrahams' previous novel, HARD RAIN. In this one, as that one, a circle of student radicals is broken when fracture lines form among degrees of commitment when the time comes to turn talk into action. The conspirators, along with the circumstantially guilty, scatter far and wide. Blake settles in a Massachusetts fishing village, and after twenty-two years, gets a bit sloppy about protecting his profile, and the next thing he knows, government agents knock on the door with an off-the-books operation and a proposal: find the head conspirator, aka his former lover, and use her to take down her high-profile liberal lawyer, and maybe he'll get off the hook.
The pleasures in Abrahams' novels have as much to do with language, flow and character, and the pleasure of deep engagement with same, and REVOLUTION #9 succeeds on all scores. Here, he used dark humor to better effect than ever, and it's easy to see how REVOLUTION #9 sets the stage for more savagely satiric crime novels like THE FAN and THE TUTOR and CRYING WOLF and THE LAST OF THE DIXIE HEROES. Even with its robust use of similes that only sometimes stick their landings, REVOLUTION #9 makes you work but not so hard as to render essential information and nuance inscrutable. Some standout examples of his masterly technique:
— "She was young, probably a student with a summer job in the library, except that Charlie didn’t remember students reading books like How to Make a Bear Market Work for You."
— "He felt Rebecca’s admiring gaze; knew without having to look the radiance on her face; marveled at its range, from this supernova all the way across the spectrum to Torquemada."
— "From somewhere in the house came once more the sound of The White Album, as though it were pervasive on campus, a feature of the local climate, like one of those winds that have a name."
— "She was the first woman I ever balled, as we used to say. A nice crunchy granola word for it, made it so natural and pure—unlike the sex I have now, the semiannual time I have it.”
— "Yvonne, for political reasons, had tried to love her back. But Yvonne had been unable to alter the shape of her sexual urges for political reasons, although she had altered almost everything else in her life for them."
— "Baseball was romantic, especially to journalists who had never hit a curve, hit a cutoff man, hit behind a runner. Or been hit with a high rider in the face. It wasn’t as romantic at field level.
— "He took out a handkerchief with the initials RSB embroidered on one corner and blew his nose into it: loudly, violently, disturbingly, like some savage form of punctuation."
— "Tears began to flow freely, over the planes of her perfect face. It was almost like one of those religious miracles that backward European villages live on, the kind where statues bleed."
— "His right hand came off the wheel, rounding into a fist. But that was silly. He couldn’t bring himself to hit a woman, and no amount of living in late twentieth-century America could change that. He didn’t say a word. He just drove."
Lest I be accused of overpraising Abrahams to the point of being unable to view him with a critical eye, I'll point out his one moderate weakness: a fondness for over-tidy stage-managing, with characters entering or exiting with the farcical precision of indiscreet servants in a British stage farce. Too much of his third acts depend on the piling on of implausible coincidence or precision-timed epiphanies. REVOLUTION #9 is no exception. But these things never ruin Abrahams' novels; they just turn great novels into merely really, really good ones. And that's plenty good enough for me. Imperfect Peter Abrahams novels are stratospheres beyond the widgety products of crime writers who pay slavish fealty to genre formula, or literary loftarians who deign to dabble in the genre through minor-key noodling and malignant ruminations. Peter Abrahams has never written a bum novel, and I suspect he's intestinally incapable of it.
“'No,' he said, feeling absurdly strong and helpless, hands hanging at his sides. No. But he came from a military family, and he knew from the sight of these men that it was yes. The rest—the quiet words about firefights, heroism, recommendations for this medal or that, the condolences, hackneyed in form although there was real sorrow behind them, however briefly felt—was as nothing beside that awful yes.
“'Does my mother know?' Blake asked.
"'We haven’t been able to reach her yet.'
"The army found Mrs. Wrightman that night. She’d gone to Freeport for a couple of days with Ollie. Blake’s team played for the division championship the next day. Blake started in center field. It wasn’t that he felt like playing, but neither did he not feel like playing. He felt nothing—or so much that it had the same effect as feeling nothing."
Peter Abrahams is a master literary practitioner of sfumato, a technique most often applied to painting. It's defined as "the technique in which colors or tones are blended in such a subtle manner that they melt into one another without perceptible transitions, lines or edges." The above quote from his 1992 novel, REVOLUTION #9, illustrates this. Here, his primary character, Blake Wrightman — who became a federal fugitive, and later Massachusetts lobsterman Charlie Ochs, following a 1969 college-campus protest bombing that unintentionally killed a child — learns while playing a college baseball game that his father was killed in action in Vietnam, But Abrahams is one of the few authors I've read who's capable of showing without telling; he's so off-the-nose that he's almost cubist, but he's too controlled and too tethered to the conventions of the crime genre for that. The result is a novel, like all of Abrahams' other novels, that manages to be both literary and light on its feet, and that creates a rereading experience that lends itself to pleasurable repeated readings because of the hypnotic quality of its blurrings. There's always something new to discover in them, the same way you see something new in a great painting if you look long enough or from a different angle or in different light. And some of the best parts of Abrahams' works are the things you can't quite see straight on.
REVOLUTION #9 is another what I call Abrahams' "For Some, The War Never Ended, and Neither Did Its Body Count" novels. In may ways seems like a spinoff, or maybe a twin absorbed in utero, of Abrahams' previous novel, HARD RAIN. In this one, as that one, a circle of student radicals is broken when fracture lines form among degrees of commitment when the time comes to turn talk into action. The conspirators, along with the circumstantially guilty, scatter far and wide. Blake settles in a Massachusetts fishing village, and after twenty-two years, gets a bit sloppy about protecting his profile, and the next thing he knows, government agents knock on the door with an off-the-books operation and a proposal: find the head conspirator, aka his former lover, and use her to take down her high-profile liberal lawyer, and maybe he'll get off the hook.
The pleasures in Abrahams' novels have as much to do with language, flow and character, and the pleasure of deep engagement with same, and REVOLUTION #9 succeeds on all scores. Here, he used dark humor to better effect than ever, and it's easy to see how REVOLUTION #9 sets the stage for more savagely satiric crime novels like THE FAN and THE TUTOR and CRYING WOLF and THE LAST OF THE DIXIE HEROES. Even with its robust use of similes that only sometimes stick their landings, REVOLUTION #9 makes you work but not so hard as to render essential information and nuance inscrutable. Some standout examples of his masterly technique:
— "She was young, probably a student with a summer job in the library, except that Charlie didn’t remember students reading books like How to Make a Bear Market Work for You."
— "He felt Rebecca’s admiring gaze; knew without having to look the radiance on her face; marveled at its range, from this supernova all the way across the spectrum to Torquemada."
— "From somewhere in the house came once more the sound of The White Album, as though it were pervasive on campus, a feature of the local climate, like one of those winds that have a name."
— "She was the first woman I ever balled, as we used to say. A nice crunchy granola word for it, made it so natural and pure—unlike the sex I have now, the semiannual time I have it.”
— "Yvonne, for political reasons, had tried to love her back. But Yvonne had been unable to alter the shape of her sexual urges for political reasons, although she had altered almost everything else in her life for them."
— "Baseball was romantic, especially to journalists who had never hit a curve, hit a cutoff man, hit behind a runner. Or been hit with a high rider in the face. It wasn’t as romantic at field level.
— "He took out a handkerchief with the initials RSB embroidered on one corner and blew his nose into it: loudly, violently, disturbingly, like some savage form of punctuation."
— "Tears began to flow freely, over the planes of her perfect face. It was almost like one of those religious miracles that backward European villages live on, the kind where statues bleed."
— "His right hand came off the wheel, rounding into a fist. But that was silly. He couldn’t bring himself to hit a woman, and no amount of living in late twentieth-century America could change that. He didn’t say a word. He just drove."
Lest I be accused of overpraising Abrahams to the point of being unable to view him with a critical eye, I'll point out his one moderate weakness: a fondness for over-tidy stage-managing, with characters entering or exiting with the farcical precision of indiscreet servants in a British stage farce. Too much of his third acts depend on the piling on of implausible coincidence or precision-timed epiphanies. REVOLUTION #9 is no exception. But these things never ruin Abrahams' novels; they just turn great novels into merely really, really good ones. And that's plenty good enough for me. Imperfect Peter Abrahams novels are stratospheres beyond the widgety products of crime writers who pay slavish fealty to genre formula, or literary loftarians who deign to dabble in the genre through minor-key noodling and malignant ruminations. Peter Abrahams has never written a bum novel, and I suspect he's intestinally incapable of it.
Want to read
September 7, 2011Stephen King recommended author and book. He says: “Peter Abrahams is my favorite American suspense novelist.”
In his book On Writing, published 2000, King says on pages 285-286: "These are the best books I've read over the last three or four years, the period during which I wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, Hearts in Atlantis, On Writing, and the as-yet-unpublished From a Buick 8. In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote."
He continues to say "...a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work. Even if they don't, they're apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me."
Please click here to check out my group:
Books Stephen King Recommends
In his book On Writing, published 2000, King says on pages 285-286: "These are the best books I've read over the last three or four years, the period during which I wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, Hearts in Atlantis, On Writing, and the as-yet-unpublished From a Buick 8. In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote."
He continues to say "...a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work. Even if they don't, they're apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me."
Please click here to check out my group:
Books Stephen King Recommends
October 12, 2016
Peter Abrahams writes thrillers: some are better than others. Revolution #9 has all the right elements: bad guys, good guys, good guys who go bad, bad guys who go good, a love story, a hero, CIA, FBI, etc. The dialog is well written, the action scenes are well written, so are the love scenes. And yet somehow the suspense is never there. We meet Charlie Ochs who, 22 years previously was involved in a protest bombing in which a child was hurt. Guilt ridden, Charlie assumes a new name and goes undercover living as a lobster trapper for 22 years until three groups of men come for him. Why then? Who are each group? All is explained at the end, but it's a slightly boring trip.
August 4, 2021
Despite the rather convoluted kick-off, it's a cute thriller with fun fast-paced scenes and very well-written dialogues. Solid literary entertainment.
October 22, 2025
Peter Abrahams [or Spencer Quinn, if you prefer] is an excellent writer, with a style that is very evocative of time and place. But this is not the kind of story that I can enjoy reading. It is easier for me to read about serial killers that it is for me to read about victimization and psychological torture. He has a lot of other books; I'm sure I'll enjoy most of them more.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Want to read
April 9, 2024ملاحظة لي: لم اقرا الكتاب بعد
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews