[REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #45 - September 2007 [spoilers]

[Martin Phipps]

On Dec 9, 6:29 am, Tom Russell <milos_par... at yahoo.com> wrote:

<snip>

In the end, Tom, I think you probably plot your stories out too far in
advance and are then forced to have your characters behave a certain
way and do certain things in order to advance the plot.  Time and time
again, I've felt that Martin's actions didn't make sense or that he
made a tremendous leap of logic to solve a case or that his reactions
didn't seem genuine.  Everything about Speak seemed more genuine,
although you have to admit you did cheat by skipping over the bank
robbery scene.  I grant you that because you were focusing on one
single character for eleven issues (plus the annual) that readers got
to know this character very well and were starting to anticipate his
behaviour and this might have worked against you in that readers may
have felt they knew Martin Rock as well as you did and, every once in
a while, maybe a bit better than you seemed to. :)

Oh and, yeah, come to think of it, having Martin have a lawyer screw
up and have him sent to (or remanded to, if you prefer) jail would be
much, much better because I would have ended up feeling sorry for him
and I wouldn't have felt that the situation Martin got himself in was
due to his own overconfidence.  You could even through in a line where
Martin tells the public defender about Fisk but the public defender
doesn't believe him and so he doesn't bring it up at the bail hearing.

Martin