51 pages • 1 hour read
Harlan CobenTell No One
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Disguise
Sartorial disguises are key motifs in the novel because they conceal David and Elizabeth’s identities and enable them to go about their illicit activities unharmed. Elizabeth’s disguise—her nuanced wig, “blond with dark roots,” wire-rim glasses, and “implants” (207) that change the shape of her face— give her the illusion that she will be able to pass through the streets of New York City, unmet by Scope’s people. Using another disguise, the alias Lisa Sherman, Elizabeth hopes to retrieve David and pass for a completely different person when she travels with him out of the country. She does not count on the fact that David Beck, the name she uses for his ticket, will also need to be in disguise.
David’s first disguise after he has run from the police is in Tyrese’s outfit: “a pair of black jeans with a waist the approximate circumference of a truck tire,” a black White Sox baseball uniform that hangs like a dress, a black baseball cap with “some logo on it [he] didn’t recognize” (200), and sunglasses. Unlike Elizabeth, who is a “practiced” (207) hand at disguise, David feels unfamiliar and strange in his ill-fitting new uniform. Rather than protecting him, David’s disguise makes him conspicuous. Gandle and Wu find him exactly “where he was supposed to be” (210), briefly marveling at how he managed to pull off the outfit as they follow him out of the park. A better disguise for David is Tyrese’s BMW with tinted windows, which serves as a foil for his movements and enables him to visit Peter Flannery and Helio Gonzalez undisturbed.
The Scopes also wear a disguise of respectability, both on a reputational and sartorial level. Both the Scope sons, Brandon and Randall, appeared to be model citizens, whilst they engaged in pursuits such as pornography-viewing, drug dealing, and prostitution. Griffin Scope’s “silk button-down from his tailor in Hong Kong” (262) gives him the allure of high class and smoothness. Griffin’s refined, luxurious appearance hides his primitive, tribal instinct, which is to avenge his son’s murder and protect his family’s reputation to the death.
New York City
New York City is an important motif in the novel. Its diverse locales are backdrops to the action and each place resonates with the specific scene located there. For example, Washington Square, where “rich, poor, white, black, homeless, high-rised, rental, co-oped” (209) meet to play chess, is the locale where David appears in his “street punk” (210) disguise to meet Elizabeth, who previously lived there in her student years with Rebecca Schayes. The Square, presented as a melting pot of several cultures, including subcultures, is an appropriate place for David and Elizabeth to meet in disguise and also for David’s collision with Wu and Gandle, in a less harmonious meeting of people of different classes.
Conversely, the high-rises of mid-town Manhattan—for example, the Park Avenue skyscraper where Shauna exposes David to the wonders of digital photography, or hot-shot defense lawyer Hester Crimstein’s office—are protected, rarified environments. High in the sky in the “rat maze” (121) of a mid-town office, high-status characters have access to privileged information and services. These places are invitation-only, and characters need to have the right connections to enter them. In Coben’s novel where the cooperation of diverse peoples is the catalyst for the action, these high-status, mid-town locales are proven to be more show than utility.
Finally, the storage units, where much of the archival material pertaining to the case is stored, are located outside of the city, off long stretches of motorway. For example, Elizabeth’s fake autopsy files are kept in a standardized U-Store-‘Em in Layton, New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border. It is a “garagelike facility” (225) whose modest appearance is a perfect foil for the controversial contents within. The fact that these files are kept in such an obscure location away from the city is not merely a naturalistic detail on Coben’s part—reflecting the fact that storage units are often based outside of the city, where real estate is cheaper and there is more space. The locale feeds into the secrecy regarding Elizabeth’s alleged death. Hoyt took every measure to ensure that the files would be difficult to access.
Technology
Technology is another crucial motif in Coben’s novel. Published in 2001, Coben’s novel was likely written a few years earlier, when email, web cameras, and digital photography were still relatively new phenomena. Coben describes in detail how David witnesses random visual data after he sees Elizabeth on the webcam. He sees an urban scene where people are carrying shopping bags, although he cannot read and thereby identify the city because the passersby are “moving too fast” (46). Almost bargaining with the on-screen world, he wills the people to slow down, as though he might have some power over the spectacle. He puts his face “so close to the screen, [he] could feel the heat” (46). David has just seen Elizabeth through that screen and demonstrates a subjective human fight with the objective eye of the camera when the camera goes white and he loses the scene. Technology is unreliable in offering a tantalizing window onto alive Elizabeth, but not a legible picture that David can use as a map to where she is. Rather than the detailed webcam picture, David does better to rely on the Morse-like code of cue words that Elizabeth feeds him in her emails, which is based on their shared past. The last cue, “Dolphin” (298), is delivered to David via word of mouth, as Elizabeth tells Shauna in person.
David is also forced to outwit technological advances when he goes to Kinko’s Internet cafe in order to escape using his personal server and being witnessed by Elizabeth. However, David is followed and witnessed in person by Wu and Gandle’s operative, a “curly-haired man who’d worn sweatpants” (198), who David noticed, but did not regard suspiciously. Once again, non-technological methods accompany the high-tech ones as Coben’s plotting reflects the watershed period of the novel’s turn-of-the-millennium context, where the world was entering the digital age but not yet wholly subsumed by it.
The most reliable technological advance in the novel is the Integrated Ballistic Identification System, run by Donna at the National Tracing Centre and accessed by Carlson over the telephone. The machine—which only requires the scanned images that can be digitized and matched on screen and not the original bullet—finds Carlson the “match” (280) he is looking for. When Carlson’s next inquiry is to find David, the reader is let into the clue that the latter killed Brandon Scope, though the actual truth is not spoken until the end. Given that Coben’s reference to how the latest tracing technology has aided Carlson in the investigation is shown on Page 280, rather than on Page 346 where the novel ends, the reader might regard it more as a detail confirming that David killed Scope. Or, alternatively, the crux of the novel may not be that the latest technology has helped to discover David as the culprit, but his method of getting away from paying for his crime, both in the eyes of the law and with his wife. Once again, Coben shows technology to be an ancillary motif rather than the solution to a crime.
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