The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

A phantasmagorical medley of paranoia, conspiracy and latent psychodelia, Pynchon's second novel appeared in 1966. It is of its time in that it references the West Coast music scene, specifically of San Francisco, that was to erupt in 1967 and the widespread use of hallucinogens. At its core it has a much deeper timeline, dating all the way back to Thirteenth Century Europe where the German princelings of Thurn und Taxis built a staggering fortune on the back of the first transnational postal service. This went underground after the Thirty Years War and now services only syndicalists and anarchists. It's that peculiarly American obsession, postal fraud, and Oedipa, trying to observe her duties as executor of the will of her onetime lover Pierce Inverarity, sees its symbol of a muted post horn everywhere. Ingeniously the Tristero post boxes are marked W.A.S.T.E.

For such a short novel, only 142 pages in this edition, there's an awful lot of story and ideas. The ending is awkward. We find out what W.A.S.T.E. stands , what Lot 47 is and how come it is crying or cried, but really you get the impression that Pynchon has simply run out of steam. It's a lot of fun, though, and I'm really pleased I finally got round to reading it.

Razor Girl - Carl Hiaasen

It's been a while - five years, unbelievably - since I last read a Hiassen. That was Bad Monkey. This is Razor Girl. The hero is the same, Andrew Yancy, busted ex-cop turned roach inspector, but other than that, all is new.


The razor girl is Merry Mansfield, who specialises in tail-ending other vehicles while she's purportedly shaving her pubic hair. She and Yancy team up to solve the case of the missing reality TV redneck, Buck Nance, who has gone AWOL after an ill-judged homophobic/racist rant in the wrong bar in the wrong part of Florida.


Along the way we and they encounter Mafioso 'Big Noogie' Aeola, replacement beach specialist Marty Trebeaux, class action lawyer Brock Richardson and his fiancée Deb, Buck's biggest fan 'Blister' Krill and a pair of giant Gambian pouch rats. So it's all business as usual, brilliantly plotted and laugh-out loud funny. Pure Hiaassen on top form.

Dreaming of Babylon - Richard Brautigan

Dreaming of Babylon, subtitled "A Private Eye Novel, 1942", is Brautigan's skewed take on a hard-boiled private eye thriller.  C Card (no first name given) wanted to be a cop but failed the exam.  He is now a completely failed gumshoe, in hock to family and friends, reduced to bumping into blind beggars and purloining some of the spilled coins for himself.  Now, inexplicably, he is offered a paying job by a glamorous femme fatale who puts away beer like there's no tomorrow without ever needing to go to the lavatory.

Card's problem is that he spends his life dreaming of Babylon.  OK, it's not an entirely accurate dream of the historical empire - sometimes he's a band leader on Babylonian radio - but it's a rich source of escapism for a private dick down on his luck.  Even now his luck seems to be changing, his first resort is always to slip into a Babylonian daydream.  This naturally gets in the way of his efforts to borrow a gun with bullets in it.  And even when he's hired, why is everyone else trying to steal the same corpse.

Wild, wacky, brimful of typical Brautigan diversions.  Great fun from a forgotten master.

Don't Point That Thing At Me - Kyril Bonfiglioli

I confess I had never heard of Bonfiglioli, but there has been press lately because Johnny Depp is making a film and Penguin have therefore republished his Mortdecai trilogy, of which this is the first, originally published in the UK in 1972.

Despite the splendiferous name, Bonfigioli was English and his main influence was clearly Wodehouse, with a strong dash of Derek Raymond.  Charlie Mortdecai is the second son of a baronet and relies heavily on his manservant.  The valet or 'thug' is called Jock Strapp, which gives you a flavour of what follows.  Charlie is an art dealer and therefore dodgy.  There is a stolen Goya involved in things somewhere, and that gets him to America on a diplomatic passport but results in him being stalked across the mudflats of Morecambe Bay.

The plot is neither here nor there - though I love the final flourish by which Charlie leaves his fate up in the air.  What matters is the tone, which is maintained throughout, seemingly without effort.  Some of Charlie's observations and one-liners are laugh-out-loud funny.  Every para is read with a smile or a grin.  The good news is, there are two more volumes to acquire and read.  The bad news, it's only two, plus what seems like a prequel and one novel left unfinished when Bonfiglioli died in 1985.  It was finished by Craig Brown and I vaguely recall it now.  I'm not sure I'll bother with it, though.

Unknown Man No. 89 - Elmore Leonard

This dates from 1977, the beginning of one of several golden periods for the late Leonard.  It is, as usual, a caper novel featuring assorted grifters and lowlifes.  This being a relatively early novel, it is set in Detroit where Leonard did most of his growing-up.

It scarcely needs saying, but it reads like a dream.  The premise is flimsy, inconsequential, but who cares?  The Elmore Leonard experience is totally immersive and credible for exactly as long as it takes to finish reading.  On reflection, I don't find the key characters sufficiently beguiling.  Jack Ryan, process server, is a returnee from an early (and rare) Leonard failure, 1969's The Big Bounce.  His antagonist, Mr Perez, is a super-smooth dodgy businessman whose practice was probably sneered at back in 1977 but which in Twenty-First Century Britain is celebrated in BBC1's daytime dross Heir Hunters.  The lucky legatee Denise is winning enough in her way, but it is the secondary characters who really catch the imagination: superfly Virgil Royal and his hapless brother-in-law Tunafish; Mr Perez's downhome hitman Raymond Gidre.  Technically, this is a fault that relatively early Leonard often has, but somehow it never dulls the enjoyment.

Bad Monkey - Carl Hiaasen

The brand new caper from the king of comedy crime.  Recent Hiaasen's might have fallen slightly short but not this. Busted from detective to roach inspector after having sodomised his girlfriend's husband with a dustbuster, Yancey sets out to solve the mystery of the left arm which turns up where it shouldn't be.  What can go wrong?

One of Hiaasen's recent shortcomings has been recycling old characters.  The governor gone renegade was great fun but surfaced once too often for my liking.  These, so far as I am aware, are all new characters, thus fresh and engaging.  You even empathise with a low-rent thug like Egg after the titular monkey has set about him.

In fact, that's my one criticism.  Not enough monkey and not enough monkey being really, really bad.