Flat Crazy Review

FLAT CRAZY
A Blanco County Mystery
BEN REHDER
St. Martin’s Minotaur
$24.95 (308 pages)
Pub. date: September 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32135-X

Blanco County game warden John Marlin has his hands full.

An unidentified wild beast is on the loose in the Texas hill country. Is it a mythical creature called a chupacabra? The residents of Blanco County sure think so. Things get worse when a hunter’s body turns up with a bizarre neck wound and sleazy TV journalists come looking for a hot scoop. Meanwhile, good ol’ boys Billy Don Craddock and Red O’Brien concoct the perfect scheme: catch the chupacabra and make a bundle. Then, as if things weren’t absurd enough, an Asian dwarf porno star with erectile dysfunction is thrown in the mix. And Viagra isn’t the answer to his problem.

Somehow it all comes together in FLAT CRAZY, the hilarious, but overwritten, third installment in Ben Rehder’s Blanco County mystery series.

The plotting is relentless. Rehder is constantly weaving in and out of the various story lines, never allowing a scene to play out in one take. The jump cuts keep the tension high, but their effect weakens through overuse.

The pace is breakneck. Rehder never fails to keep the story turning, but things slow down when his pen goes into overdrive, bloating the story with insignificant details and a ton of plot lines. Nothing liberal editing couldn’t easily cure, though.

But the charm of Blanco County is in its wacky characters and even wackier occurrences, and FLAT CRAZY has plenty of both. You’ll certainly bust a gut, just as long as you have a juvenile sense of humor and an appreciation for the outrageous. If you don’t crack a smile when you hear the phrase “Asian dwarf porno stars,” look elsewhere.

For those who don’t take their mysteries too seriously, FLAT CRAZY is wonderful, light fun. The only problem: Are you laughing at Texas or with it?

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Double Homicide Review

DOUBLE HOMICIDE
JOHNATHAN & FAYE KELLERMAN
Warner Books
$23.95 (256 pages)
Pub. date: October 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53296-7

Johnathan and Faye Kellerman have put their best-selling minds together and come up with DOUBLE HOMICIDE, a new series of short crime books.

The first installment contains two novellas, “In the Land of Giants” and “Still Life,” each co-written by the husband and wife team.

“In the Land of Giants” is set in a frigid Boston, where detectives Dorothy Breton and Michael McCain have a real mystery on their hands. College basketball star Julius Van Beest is gunned down in a downtown nightclub, and all fingers point to a rival hoopster. A slam-dunk case, right? Wrong, says medical examiner John Change.

In “Still Life,” the weaker of the two stories, Santa Fe detectives Darrel Two Moons and Steve Katz spend the holiday season investigating the bludgeoning murder of a wealthy—and despised—art gallery owner.

The tales are straight-up police procedurals ruined by inexpert storytelling.

The plotting is handled ably, but the Kellermans get clumsy when drawing their characters. “Still Life” lapses into a coma on several occasions from long-winded character histories. At one point the plot is interrupted for thirty pages of character sketches. It’s only a 133 page story, for goodness sake.

There’s another big no-no. “In the Land of Giants” opens dramatically with Detective Breton discovering a gun in her son’s backpack. There’s an old theater adage that says, “If there’s gun over the mantel in Act I, then it must go off in Act II.” Neither the gun nor the son ever figures in the story. So why open with this plot device? Does it have something to do with characterization? Theme? Plot? Seems more like a cheap tease.

DOUBLE HOMICIDE isn’t either of the novelists’ best work. Two Kellermans certainly aren’t better than one.

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Double Play Review

Double Play
by Robert B. Parker
Putnam
$24.95 (288 pages)

Robert B. Parker mixes fact with fiction in “Double Play,” a bare-bones, fast-paced baseball fantasy set during Jackie Robinson’s 1947 rookie season.

Parker is best known for his Spenser novels (the basis for the TV series “Spenser for Hire”), but has stepped out of the mystery genre on a few occasions. Over a 30-year career, he’s written a thriller (“Wilderness”), a romance (“Love and Glory”), and a Western (“Gunman’s Rhapsody”).

“Double Play” focuses on Joseph Burke, a World War II veteran who was severely wounded at Guadalcanal. Burke returns home after a long, difficult rehabilitation to find that his wife has betrayed and abandoned him, leaving him bitter and hardened. But the fearless, tough-as-nails former Marine gets a chance for redemption when he stumbles into baseball history. Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey needs someone to protect Jackie Robinson as he attempts to break baseball’s color barrier. No doubt the baddies will be coming out of the woodwork looking to make life difficult for the pioneering black man. And Burke is just the man to keep them at bay.

Things heat up when a Harlem wiseguy named Paglia takes aim at Jackie. Burke must weave his way through the New York underworld, pitting gangster against gangster, to protect Jackie, and himself. Along the way Burke comes to admire and respect the baseball legend, and falls for a wild socialite named Lauren. Then, after a bloody showdown at Ebbets Field, Burke finds what he was running away from all along: love and meaning. Heart warming. But don’t expect much depth in “Double Play.”

The characters are tight-lipped, the detail sparse, emotions non-existent. The only reaction you’ll get out of Burke is a shrug—and he shrugs a lot.

Parker tries to add depth with his “Bobby” chapters, in which the author offers his reminiscences on the era. But that only highlights what is lacking in the main story. What makes minimalists good is that they do more with less. Here you just get less.

Parker fans might enjoy “Double Play,” but others should sit this one out.

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Brooklyn Noir Review

BROOLYN NOIR
Edited by Tim McLoughlin
Akashic Books
$15.95 (366 pages)
Release date: July 2004

Brooklyn’s reputation as a gangland full of loudmouth goombas and cold-blooded wiseguys is deeply etched in the American imagination. It is, after all, the birthplace of such lowlifes as Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, and Salvatore “Sammy The Bull” Gravano. Mention Brooklyn today and people still think of Murder Incorporated or John Travolta strutting down 86th Street in “Saturday Night Fever.” Yeah, Brooklyn has a lot more to offer – a museum, botanical gardens, that bridge – but for those romantics who remember a time when men proudly displayed chest hair and real cars were equipped with curb feelers, the borough will always be about the criminal underworld and tough-guy swagger. So a collection of 20 new crime tales, each set in a different Brooklyn neighborhood, seems like a great idea, right? Well, the idea is good. It’s the book that sucks.

“Brooklyn Noir,” edited by Tim McLoughlin, takes the reader on an often bizarre, seldom entertaining trek through the borough’s dark and murderous streets – but you might want to wait for the next ride.

The first stop is Park Slope, the setting of Pete Hamill’s “The Book Signing.” In the pensive tale, a writer who abandoned Brooklyn for sunny California along with the Dodgers returns to the old neighborhood and confronts the past he thought he buried back in 1957. McLoughlin’s “When All This Was Bay Ridge” also reaches into the past to conjure up demons. In the story, a young man discovers his dead father’s darkest sins after a conversation in a Sunset Park bar. Several of the anthology’s other writers also build their stories on this tension between the past and present, but not to equal effect.

However, in the collection’s two best, and most gripping, tales the tension is very much in the here and now. The first, Arthur Nersesian’s “Hunter/Trapper,” is a creepy thriller about an obsessive Internet correspondence that leads to vivisection. And in the subtle suspense tale “Dumped” by Nicole Blackman, a trio of inconsiderate boyfriends are repaid for their bad behavior.

The rest of the ride, unfortunately, is full of dead-ends. Too many stories run like a bad Joe Pesci movie, idly exploiting the borough’s tough-guy image and employing wooden characters who talk as if they just took a Berlitz course in Brooklynese.. Or, the stories ignore Brooklyn altogether and instead offer bland cops-and-robbers fare. Brooklyn, with its rich history of shady characters, deserves better.

If you mind slogging through the muck to stumble upon the occasional good story, then fuhgedaboutit…. but for the curiosity seeker the odd cast of characters might be worth the fare. Not many mystery anthologies can boast such dramatis personae as a Hasidic private eye (“Hasidic Noir”), an East New York horse thief (“Triple Harrison”), a white Rastafarian drug dealer (“Crown Heist”), and a hardcore rapper seduced by a shemale (“The Code”). Diversity has always been among Brooklyn’s many charms.

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