“When the choice of the tried and true is limited, the result is a trite or mass-produced film, or simply kitsch. But when the tried and true repertoire is used wholesale, the result is an architecture like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. There is a sense of dizziness, a stroke of brilliance.”
-Umberto Ecco – from Casablanca, or, The Clichés are Having a Ball
Word round the campfire (no, not that campfire. This one over here. Geez, pay attention) is that there was a secret deal brokered between Donna Moore, Allan Guthrie and Pointblank Press in order for this book to be published. Various sources have stated that a complete collection of Garbagepail Kids, a bootleg of a rare Neil Diamond concert, the deleted sex scene from ‘Some Like it Hot’ and a first draft copy of the as of yet unpublished collaborative romance novel that Duane Swierczynski & Charlie Huston are rumored to have written entitled ‘Me Love You Long Time’ all traded hands in order for this book to have seen the light of day. There is also a whole separate rumor that Donna Moore isn’t even a real person, but that’s just plain ridiculous.
“Of all the run-down, flea bitten Private Investigator offices in all the UK, he had to walk into mine. I was sitting at the battered antique desk I’d won from a feisty old broad in a Poker tournament. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t so much antique as just plain old; and, since we’re fostering a spirit of honesty and openness here, it wasn’t so much a Poker tournament as a game of Monopoly, and the feisty old broad was my mother.”
Apparently Ms. Moore (if that’s your real name) conducted a survey to compile a master list of clichés in mystery books that people hated. She then set out to pile all of them into one single story. As a satire of the mystery genre it leaves no clichéd stone unturned.
“I needed to find out everything I could about Evan Stubezzi. I took my address book out of the only drawer that didn’t contain alcohol (it was a very small drawer) and turned to the entries under ‘F’: ‘Friend who works for the Council’, ‘Friend who works for the hospital’, ‘Friend who works for the Department of Vehicle Licensing’, ‘Friend who works for the local newspaper’, ‘Friend who’s a psychiatrist’, ‘Friend in the Hospital Admissions Department’, ‘Friend who’s a dentist’, ‘Friend who works at Pizza Express,’etc. I was lucky to have such a lot of useful friends in high places. I ran my finger down the page until I found ‘Friend who is a computer geek’, and picked up the phone, dialing the number of my best friend, computer geek Heidi Salami.”
What do you get when you take a giant blender and mix in Groucho Marx, The Last Action Hero, Airplane, Police Squad!, Abbott & Costello, all of the aforementioned clichés & brilliant writing? The single greatest spoof of the PI since “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” by The Firesign Theatre on their classic album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All. But all of those obscure pop culture references aside its just damn funny.
“Across the road from where I’d parked was a dive called The Broken Bottle Covered In Blood. People had always told me to steer clear of the place, saying it was the worst bar in town. OK, so it had barbed wire on the windows, graffiti on the walls, piles of vomit in the car park and a neon sign above the door that said ‘Keep Out, Nosey Bitches’ but really, how bad could it be?”
Here Moore (still doubtful) shows a love of language that Groucho Marx would be envious of.
“The chipped black lettering in my frosted glass door read SNOITAGITSEVNI TEKSABDNAH ANELEH. Initially, I’d worried that I’d only get Czech clients, but then I realised I was sitting on the wrong side of the door and prospective clients would see the words HELENA HANDBASKET INVESTIGATIONS.”
This book maintains a machine guns pace of jokes that we quite frankly haven’t seen since the Airplane movies. There are so many jokes and funny asides here that you can’t even appreciate them all with one reading. You can flip randomly to ANY page in the book and find at least a dozen jokes.
“He was untouchable. It was said that he had the cops in his pocket, although I couldn’t figure out how, unless he wore enormous coats made of some superstregnth material.”
So all of this begs the question: “Did you really just use an excerpt from an Umberto Ecco essay to talk about a satirical PI novel that compares favorably to the movie Airplane!”? Yer damn right I did.
“Yes, indeed-time to conduct some random interviews with some random bad guys in some random bars in the seediest part of town.”
I originally reviewed Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore on March 6th 2007.
