The Drunken Buddies of Heroes

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe created the American detective story, the genre has been beset by trends. Effete masters of ratiocination. Existential hard-boiled heroes. Roman Empire sleuths. Gourmet crime-solvers more interested in cake recipes than clues. This month, however, signals a very different sort of trend, one that sounds like a leftover from the “Phil Donahue” show: drunken buddies of heroes who feel they are in danger from extraterrestrials.

This certainly odd plot point kicks off the latest additions to two well-established series--Earl Emerson’s The Million Dollar Tattoo and Kinky Friedman’s The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover. The Emerson novel, which is not quite a match for the Kinkster’s tome when it comes to quips and one-liners, is by far the better-crafted work. In it, private detective Thomas Black finds his good old buddy-reprobate, Snake, sharing an apartment with a recent corpse and jabbering incoherently about Martian clone fertilization.

The early scene in which the corpse is discovered, which includes witty and brittle banter between Black and his new wife, Kathy, and, eventually, the snide comments of the world’s most annoying homicide detective, is so perfectly woozy it produces a nearly euphoric effect. It also sets our expectation level so high that not even the combined talents of Raymond Chandler, Craig Rice and Donald Westlake could keep the mood from flagging. Even so, Emerson makes an admirable stab at it. He smartly stacks the deck against Black by giving him more than enough reasons to doubt his crusty crony’s sanity. At the same time he distracts his hero with a lucrative offer of permanent employment. And if that weren’t enough to befuddle the private eye, there is also the giddiness of his newly married status.

For most of the novel, Emerson keeps his hero, and us, bemused by all the intrigue and spinning merrily onward. It’s only near the end, when the piper must be paid, and the wacky elements must be whipped into some sort of shape, that the pace falters. The author provides us with explanations that are more or less convincing, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been happier if Snake had been right all along about that Martian clone fertilization.

In The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, Kinky Friedman, the private eye (as opposed to the Kinky Friedman who goes on tour and writes the mysteries), is pulled in two directions. His drinking buddy, McGovern, thinks that little green men are following him and that the ghost of Al Capone’s chef, Leaning Jesus (“He certainly wouldn’t have been called Wolfgang Puck,” the Kinkster cracks), is trying to contact him. That situation is interfering with Kinky’s new case, the search for a beautiful client’s missing husband. As is demanded by private eye tradition, the two cases are linked. But the linkage is rather haphazard, as is the book’s plot in general. Kinky the novelist uses it as an excuse to provide Kinky the shamus with a stage for an endless string of observations, one-liners and wisecracks, many of which are quite funny. Here’s the Kinkster’s description of the information superhighway: “Where they spent 20 billion dollars so millions of people could wind up endlessly debating who was the better ‘Star Trek’ captain.” Entertaining, but very soft on the mystery angle.

That puts “Love Song” one up on George C. Chesbro’s Dream of a Falling Eagle, the latest in the long-running series about dwarf-criminologist Dr. Robert Frederickson (a.k.a. Mongo the Magnificent, a reminder of his circus days). I’ve missed the last few of the 13 previous Mongo adventures, so I was quite surprised to discover that a highly original series that had successfully mixed deduction and fantasy in the past had drifted so far afield. Just as Kinky uses his slight story line to support another agenda--in that case, a stand-up comic turn--Chesbro’s shockingly flat and incredibly gory yarn about voodoo sacrifice seems designed solely to allow the author to rant on about the evils perpetrated by the CIA, primarily in Haiti. That subject may well fit within the purview of a mystery novel, but it should not be used as in this case, in lieu of the mystery.

Those familiar with Alan Russell’s comic thrillers about hotel sleuth Am Caulfield (“The Hotel Detective,” “The Fat Innkeeper”) may be a bit surprised to learn that his newest novel, Multiple Wounds, is no laughing matter. It is a fairly grim three-character study, the personnel slack being taken up by one of the characters, a disturbed young woman named Helen Troy, who is convinced she’s inhabited by a forum variety of Greek deities. The tale alternates primarily between her addled point of view and that of a depressed but dogged San Diego cop, Orson Cheever, who is investigating the brutal murder of the gallery owner who displayed Helen’s work. Later in the novel, when Cheever and Helen’s therapist, Rachel Stern, find themselves falling in love, Russell allows us to observe the psychologist’s thought processes, too, particularly the professional and personal turmoil prompted by their relationship.

As you might imagine, this is not your ordinary police procedural. The element of detection--the sifting through clues, the identification and arrest of the gallery owner’s killer--is pushed to the background while Cheever focuses on his main concern, the mystery of Helen’s mental state and his own confusing emotions regarding her and her therapist. Those expecting a John Sandford-like cat-and-mouse thrill-ride will probably be disappointed. Others should be impressed by Russell’s ambitious attempt to push the boundaries of the crime novel.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s Return to the Same City, smoothly translated from the Spanish by Laura Dail, begins with a note in which, among other matters, the author thanks me for the use of my name for one of its characters. I’d like to think that this friendly gesture, made originally a few years back when the novel was first published by Editoria Planeta de Mexico, has not influenced my thorough enjoyment of Taibo’s darkly amusing yet disturbingly haunting tale. Even if the dedicated, incorruptible (albeit alcoholic) journalist who is probably the second most important person in the novel had been named for Roger Simon or Martin Charyn, I still would have unbridled admiration for Taibo’s uncanny ability to mix reality and mysticism.

The especially good news is that he has resuscitated Hector Belascoaran Shayne, the world-weary philosopher-detective whom he sent on the big sleep at the finale of “No Happy Ending.” No explanation is provided. Shayne is as perplexed by his remarkable reawakening as the rest of us. But his brief death seems not to have deprived him of any of his strong suits. With his one good eye he sees more than most men. And with his brave heart, he continues to strive for justice in an unjust world. In this instance, his goal is to get the goods on a seemingly genial rumba dancer named Estrella who peddled pornography in Cuba, cut off the hands of Che Guevara and is now involved with the CIA in some smarmy new venture. Nothing to do with Haitian voodoo, I’m happy to report.

Finally, let me call your attention to a novelty item, Private Eye, a computer game based on Raymond Chandler’s novel, “The Little Sister.” Ordinarily, I go along with Sir Laurence Olivier’s admonition (reputedly prompted by Barbra Streisand’s desire to make a musical version of “The Merchant of Venice”) that you don’t screw around with the classics. But this smartly animated, full-color game is even more fun than Robert Altman’s film adaptation of “The Long Goodbye.” You get two options--to play a version of the game that follows the original story or, like Altman, to deviate from the original and put the detective in an entirely different set of situations. I’ve only tried the alternate version a couple of times, but I should warn you that, unless you’re careful, Philip Marlowe may wind up in need of Paco Taibo’s recuperative powers.

****

THE MILLION-DOLLAR TATTOO. By Earl Emerson (Ballantine: $22, 272 pp.)

THE LOVE SONG OF J. EDGAR HOOVER. By Kinky Friedman (Simon & Schuster: $23, 238 pp.)

DREAM OF A FALLING EAGLE. By George C. Chesbro (Simon & Schuster: $21, 224 pp.)

MULTIPLE WOUNDS. By Alan Russell (Simon & Schuster: $22, 288 pp.)

RETURN TO THE SAME CITY. By Paco Ignacio Taibo II (Mysterious Press: $19.95, 192 pp.)

PRIVATE EYE: THE ULTIMATE MURDER MYSTERY CD-ROM GAME BASED ON “THE LITTLE SISTER”. By Raymond Chandler (Byron Press Multimedia, Brooklyn Multimedia Simon & Schuster Interactive: $39.95)