Sleuth’s 14th Outing Relies on Old Jokes, Kooky Characters

STEPPIN’ ON A RAINBOW

By Kinky Friedman

Simon & Schuster

$23, 208 Pages

*

This is the 14th mystery written by Kinky Friedman, Texas-based country musician, starring his namesake and alter ego, Kinky Friedman, “the world’s greatest amateur detective.” These novels have the appeal of a long-running TV sitcom: We know who’s going to show up and what they’re going to say, and the laughter starts even before they open their mouths.

Friedman the detective lives in a shabby New York loft and pines for a seemingly unattainable woman, Stephanie DuPont, who enjoys reminding him that she’s half his age, taller, smarter, wittier, better looking and totally out of his league. Like Friedman the author, however, he has high-powered show-biz pals, from Don Imus to Willie Nelson. “Steppin’ on a Rainbow” is set in Hawaii, so legendary entertainer Don Ho is brought in to instruct “the Kinkster” in island lore.

Sherlock Holmes’ “Baker Street Irregulars” were faceless street boys who ran errands for the detective. Friedman’s “Village Irregulars,” however, are really regulars: the recurring sitcom characters whose raunchy banter often threatens to overwhelm the plot.

They include Stephanie and her pampered, yappy little dogs; Steve Rambam, a private investigator who wears a satellite dish on his head; Willis Hoover, a beekeeper turned Honolulu reporter; “centimillionaire” John McCall, the “Shampoo King of Dripping Springs, Texas”; and Mike McGovern, a brawny but childlike poet of Irish and Native American extraction whose resemblance to a 600-year-old statue of a Hawaiian high chief figures prominently in the story.

All these people are out of town--that is, Manhattan--when the story opens. Friedman the detective is lonely. “Whenever a detective is not busy solving a mystery he often discovers his own life becoming one,” he tells his cat, who, of course, says nothing. One-sided conversation with the cat takes up much of the first two chapters. A reader new to Friedman the author might observe that Raymond Chandler never began a mystery this way and, by golly, he’d be right.

But Friedman isn’t trying to imitate the likes of Chandler. His mysteries follow a syncopated, inebriated drummer all their own. The plot--McGovern, visiting Hoover, is kidnapped on Waikiki Beach next to the statue of surfer Duke Kahanamoku--is a spindly armature on which Friedman hangs slapstick, lyrical interludes, philosophical asides and jokes too dirty even for today’s TV.

The Irregulars insult Friedman and one another unmercifully, and don’t even spare McGovern. But their behavior, except for eating and drinking too much, is faultless.

At the first word that McGovern might be in trouble, they drop whatever they’re doing and fly (in McCall’s private jet) to help, and later they brave the jungles and ghosts of a canyon on the Big Island in an attempt to rescue him.

This sweetness, in a hard-boiled genre, comes as a surprise, and so does Friedman’s intermittent seriousness. The Kinkster, listening to a group of elderly Hawaiian musicians, “friendly, fragile, joyful and sad, like the history of Hawaii itself,” broods on how “the missionaries, the Americans, the Japanese, the sugar barons, the pineapple kings, leprosy, measles, smallpox, influenza, and that most cruel and relentless disease of them all--time--had either decimated or assimilated the children of the rainbow, and only God knows which fate is worse.”

It’s the aspects of “Steppin’ on a Rainbow” that aren’t surprising--the sitcom stuff, the stock characters, the connections to those previous 13 novels--that wear thin, as if Friedman had exhausted the comic possibilities of Rambam’s satellite dish and Stephanie’s put-downs long before this story began.

Yet he knows what his fans expect--that he dance with the muse who brought him--and he keeps the old jokes going, and going, no matter how much his partner sags and complains of sore feet.