Vinnie’s Head, by Marc Lecard. St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2007

I’ve now read about 225 pages and have 100 to go. Vinnie’s Head by Marc Lecard continues to delight me with its humor and fun. (The first part of this Rolling Review was posted on July 29th.)

Now that I’ve read most of it I realize the book is well-named. Vinnie’s Head is not just a cheap grotesque image thrown away for a laugh: it’s the driving MacGuffin for the whole book. (Of course the original idea of the MacGuffin, courtesy of Hitchcock was that the MacGuffin itself wasn’t important, and I don’t yet know whether that’s true about Vinnie’s poor head or not.)

Lecard has done two difficult and impressive things here.

1) He’s sustaining interest in a loser character for a long time. There are only 100 pages left, and Johnnie still hasn’t had one sensible idea, nor has he done one thing that you or I would do in his position. He doesn’t even stand up for himself.

Early on, Johnnie’s lawyer introduces him as LoDouchebag (instead of LoDuco) One of the people he’s meeting can’t believe it. “That’s what he calls you? … And you let him?” I’m dying to find out whether he still lets people call him that at the end or not.

2) He’s suspending my disbelief in (what seems to be at this time) an unlikely plot. I don’t just mean the unlikely events and fortuitous escapes Johnnie has had already, and there have been a few of those. The whole plot is actually ridiculous, like something from Wodehouse or Westlake. Yet I’m carried along, as if floating on a cloud, giddily refusing to look down at what’s supporting me. And even knowing that and analyzing it, I don’t care. I’m having too much damn fun to worry about it.

How is Lecard doing it? With fresh, rings-true dialogue, lots of action, and many reverses in the plot. That plot, by the way, is extremely complex, without being oppressive. I’m happily confused without being frustrated.

My only quibble so far is with one recently-introduced character who has his own private reasons for wanting the head. This guy, his motives, and Johnnie’s reaction to him, I’m not believing in so much. But it’s a small point, and I may be proven wrong yet.

I can’t wait to see if the final unravelling lives up to the rest of the book.

Something Old: Carolyn Wells
Something New: Carolyn Wheat

Back in 1913 Carolyn Wells (pictured left) produced a manual on how to write detective stories, called The Technique of the Mystery Story. She later released a revised edition. It has practical advice and in particular very good details on clueing. Since it is now out of copyright, you can read it for free (in the original edition) online at

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/ToMmenu.htm

But of course Wells was better known as a writer of mystery stories, most famously for her detective Fleming Stone, who faced locked room mysteries time after time. She was the first writer to specialize in the locked room mystery, and although most of the stories today seem unrealistic and disappointing due to their reliance on secret passageways, those same passageways were wonderful and mysterious to a more naïve reading public a century ago.

Wells also wrote light verse and children’s books, and between those and the locked-room stories, not many people remember what a good mystery manual she wrote. It’s overshadowed by the popularity of her novels, but at the time, it must have seemed like a gold mine to aspiring writers, since there was much less available in the way of writing instruction than there is today.

One person who appreciates that today is Carolyn Wheat, who is herself an outstanding writing instructor in the field of mystery and suspense. She has run many successful seminars and writing classes, and a few years ago she wrote How To Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery and the Roller Coaster of Suspense. Wheat reviewed all the existing manuals first (including Wells’) and then wrote the best book on how to write a mystery ever written. Wheat clearly distinguishes the different techniques for mystery and suspense, and unlike most how-to manuals, which feature generic information about how to write a book with a mystery label stuck on, this one really gives you the inside scoop on the specific ‘tec techniques you need to know.

Wheat also wrote her own mystery series and many award-winning short stories in the ‘90s. Her series was about lawyer Cass Jameson working in the New York City legal system, something Wheat had done for years herself. The series has been over for a while now, and Wheat has said she won’t be continuing it, although she may start a new series. But a new generation of writers has access to a new gold mine of information, written by another Carolyn.

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(Bonus Bookfling: Mike Grost, as usual, has some interesting insights to offer about Wells’ novels at the Classic Mystery and Detection website. And you can read more about Carolyn Wheat here. )

Vinnie’s Head, by Marc Lecard. St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2007

I’ve read the first four chapter’s of Vinnie’s Head, and I could not be more impressed. This is Lecard’s first novel, and if the rest of the book is as good as this, the man is going to be a STAR.

I almost didn’t crack the book open. They got the cover exactly right. Bright aquamarine cover – a closer looks shows that it’s an underwater scene, with bubbles, dancing fishing lures, and a head, presumably Vinnie’s.

I assumed it was another New Jersey-based story of a lovable screwup making bad decisions on the fringes of the Mafia, just getting by and getting into trouble over his head, with a dash of humor and pinch of the grotesque, and I thought, “I don’t want to read this.”

Then I scanned the blurbs, and it looked like more bad news: on the front a single blurb from a writer, and on the back four more blurbs by other writers at the top of the page. Now you never know with blurbs from other writers: they could be legitimate praise, or they could be from writers afraid to say no. I was on the verge of tossing the book back on the This Will Never Be Read pile, when I read the last two blurbs: strong praise from Library Journal, and a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Of course reviewers aren’t always right, but LJ and PW are pretty darn good, and when they agree it almost always means something.

So I picked it up and started reading, and after what seemed like about three minutes I’d read 75 pages. I had to force myself to stop reading so I could make this a Rolling Review.

I was right about everything, except two things: it’s in Long Island, not New Jersey, and I really do want to read it.

So far it’s funny as hell, and our hero Johnnie LoDuco really is a lovable loser. What makes it beautiful is he knows he’s a loser, and every time he makes a decision it’s with a sort of helpless acquiescence, as if he knows he’s doing the wrong thing but still can’t imagine doing anything else.

I wonder why they waited till the bottom of the back cover to put the LJ and PW quotes. I was going to say that it was a bad decision, but I picked it up and started reading it, didn’t I? On the strength of what I’ve read so far, so should you. More to come.

Something Old: The Purple Parrot, by Clyde B. Clason 1937
Something New: Running Blind, by Lee Child 2000

At first glance you wouldn’t expect to find many similarities between these two books. Clason wrote formal detective stories about Theocritus Lucius Westborough, a small, fussy professor of antiquities who helps the police solve baffling murders. Child writes thrillers about Jack Reacher, a gigantic former military policeman who wanders the United States helping people with his detective smarts and his ability to beat the hell out of just about anybody. But there is a connection.

Clason’s The Purple Parrot was a detective story about an impossible murder. The victim was found dead in a room with only one door and one window. Outside access to the window seemed impossible, and the only door was guarded by a butler, who swears that no one went in or out at the time of the murder. If you read it for the first time today, you wouldn’t believe it, for it uses one of the hoariest devices in fiction, and is almost certainly not practical. But at the time it was a relatively new and fun idea.

In Running Blind a serial killer is knocking off ex-military women in their own homes in a grotesque and seemingly impossible fashion. The women are found dead of suffocation in their own bathtubs, which are filled with green paint. There is no apparent cause of the suffocation. Reacher gets involved when the FBI decides that he fits the profile of the killer, and he ends up joining the investigation on a we’re-watching-you-carefully basis.

Now I’m not going to give away the solution of either of these books. But I am going to tell you something in the next paragraph that will be a big clue, especially if you’ve already read one of them. So don’t read on if you don’t want to know.

The thing is that both books have the same solution! Yes, Lee Child reached back into detective fiction history and re-used an old, almost stereotypical plot device from the 30’s. For those of you who really want to know the solution, I’m typing the next sentence in hidden text, so it’s invisible unless you select it with your mouse. Spoiler: In Clason’s book, the murderer hypnotized a key witness so that the witness would deny seeing the murderer enter and leave the room. In Child’s book, the murderer hypnotizes the victims into letting him kill them! End of spoiler.

I have to say that Clason’s solution is slighlty more believable, and as a bonus he includes a very plausible and more practical false solution to the mystery. And this book, like all the Westborough mysteries, is full of interesting information about antiquities. Meanwhile, the Child book is a faster-paced, modern story with Jack Reacher beating a lot of people up in the most satisfying manner. And both books feature great old-fashioned detecting by a brilliant detective. How can you beat that?

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Bonus Bookfling: Select the text for the answer to yesterday’s trivia question: Lawrence Block provided a blurb for Westlake’s One of Us is Wrong, which was written under the pseudonym Samuel Holt. The blurb included the phrase “God save the Mark,” as a pointer to Westlake’s seminal 1967 novel.

Something Old: Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture, by Victor L. Whitechurch.
Something New: Too Many Crooks, by Donald Westlake

Victor L. Whitechurch was a canon whose hobby was railroads and trains. He was an amateur expert on the subject, and when he started writing detective stories in the 1890’s, he made his character a railways expert too.

That character, Thorpe Hazell, was a train-loving vegetarian exercise fanatic, nearly always stopping in the middle of an investigation to eat boiled rice and perform aerobics, which made for a very eccentric character in the 19th Century. The mysteries he solves are all intriguing, with genuine clues and interesting detection. But one stands out as his supreme achievement.

“Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture” is the story of the aftermath of a caper crime. In this case, thieves have stolen a valuable painting from a train — by stealing not just the picture but the railway car it was on too. No problem, you may be thinking to yourself. They probably decoupled the last car and shunted it off the line. But the car they took was in the middle of the train, fifth from the front and back. And the train never stopped moving between stations! At one station there were nine cars on the train, at the next there were only eight, and no one was any wiser until they went looking for the painting.

Hazell is called in to find out how it could have been done, and it’s one of the finest problems ever posed in detective fiction, with a fiendishly inventive solution. You can get it in the collection Thrilling Stories of the Railway, or in Sayers’ Omnibus of Crime. Both are readily available on www.abebooks.com.

Donald Westlake is one of the greatest living mystery writers. He’s won three Edgars, written several bestsellers, and he revitalized the comic mystery back in the 1960’s with his con man stories. He writes a bunch of different series, but my favorites are his Dortmunder caper novels and short stories.

Dortmunder, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, is a crook. In each of the books he’s in, he somehow gets the idea for a grand theft, such as stealing an entire classic car collection, or recovering money from someone else’s bank heist that had been buried and then submerged under a lake when a new reservoir was created. At first the ideas seem slightly outlandish, but still feasible, and then Westlake adroitly adds layers of lunacy to the larceny until the whole thing is bursting with outrageousness. They are among the very few crime novels that are laugh-out-loud funny.

Westlake had a collection out last year, called Thieves’ Dozen. All but one feature Fred Dortmunder in a variety of capers. All but a few are outstanding. One of those few is “Too Many Thieves”, which goes beyond outstanding. In this story Dortmunder decides to rob a bank by tunneling directly into the bank vault. To say that things go wrong from the moment they break the surface would be accurate, but wouldn’t prepare you for the joy you’ll get from the ingenuity, humor, and reverses along the way. Buy it, get it, read it.

It’s the finest caper story ever written by Westlake, which makes it the finest caper story ever written — a certain story by Victor L. Whitechurch notwithstanding.

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(Bonus Bookfling: Westlake Trivia question: for which Westlake novel – published pseudonymously — did Lawrence Block provide a back-cover blurb that let the savvy reader know it was actually a Westlake book? Answer tomorrow.)

What you can expect from the Bookflings blog:

Something Old, Something New

A lot of readers only read contemporary books, and don’t want to try something old-fashioned or out-of-date. And a lot of other readers are mired in the Golden Age, reading only tried-and-true books by their favorite writers. The contemporary group is missing out on some of the best books ever written, and the classic group is running out of things to read.

In Something Old, Something New, Bookflings will link one old and one new mystery novel in some way, and may spark some crossover interest.

What’s old? What’s new? It’s all relative, isn’t it?

Rolling Reviews

Most reviews are written after the reviewer has finished the book, and can contemplate it as a whole. Opinions and emotions that the book raised partway may be forgotten. In Rolling Reviews you’ll get three or more reviews of the same book as it is read.

Is this better? No, just different.

(You can get more regular reviews than you can possibly read at the Mystery Scene reviews page.)

Plain Old Posts

Here is where the uncategorized posts go to live. You might see anything of interest to the mystery reader here.

Bookflings does have a special fondness for puzzle mysteries and thrillers, so you might see some bias in those directions. But we’ll cover noir, cat mysteries, mysteries with puns in the title, science fiction mysteries, procedurals, and anything else that’s worth a Fling.

Announcements

If there’s anything worth announcing about Bookflings itself, it will be in this category.

Why Bookflings?

Well, some books are worth having a Fling with, aren’t they? We can get pretty involved with them.

And some you want to Fling across the room.

Plus it sounds good.