Putting the "a-hem" back into mayhem

I'd like to take a moment away from the busy business that has filled my life to have a quick mention of some books that I've cleared off the "to read" pile. Both were reccomended by folks I trust and are by authors that I haven't read before (but will probably read more of).

First up - Gun with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem. This is one of those books where the author decides to conflate two genres, thus eliminating the need for originality by the sheer effort of shoehorning two sets of cliches on top of each other. Except that this time it's really well done. Granted, the idea of blending hardboiled crime with cyberpunk is in itself not a terribly new idea, this one strikes the balance quite well. It's sort of like Jasper Fforde with the beastliest hang-over of all time.

Next is Having Wonderful Crime by Craig Rice. This one is vintage 1943 and seems to be out of print at the moment. Rice seems to have been referred to as "The Dorothy Parker of detective fiction." Meaning there is a lot of drinking - like early Elliot Paul mysteries where swirls of amusing drunkards cascade in and out of the action like tumbleweeds. There is also one of those tricks where two women are decapitated and get their heads swapped, as in about twenty novels by Harry Stephen Keeler. This is better constructed than Paul or Keeler - Rice has three detective-y heroes; a sort of Nick and Nora couple and their gruff drunken lawyer friend, and the three of them are all going off on their own, not telling each other what they are up to. The result is that they all are discovering their own subset of clues and not putting it together until the end, but the reader can see all the information (and where each of them might be going wrong with their assumptions) but the resolution is still clever enough to be a surprise.

As I was reading this, I kept thinking to myself that this would make a really fun movie. So I looked. It was. It starred Carole Landis as Helene Justus (the sort of Nora character). Landis, who the studio publicity department decided was best nicknamed "The Ping Girl," would later commit suicide as a consequence of an affair that she was having with Rex Harrison. This suicide caused enough of a publicity blowback for Harrison that it is credited as the cause of the failure of Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours, the Criterion DVD of which includes an essay by Jonathan Lethem.

Honestly, when I started writing this post the other day, I had yet to make that connection. It's that creaky loom of destiny at work.