Two stories about the much less amusing private eye Melville Fairr show how completely Rice’s seemingly effortless best work...
In her day (1908–57), Georgiana Craig Rice was known as the doyenne of the comic mystery. She also had a well-earned reputation for opening her novels with baffling puzzles whose solutions she hadn’t yet worked out. Both tendencies are on display in these dozen stories from the author’s last decade. True, they lack the florid inventiveness of her novels; the cast of stock characters—rye-swilling Chicago criminal attorney John J. Malone, his long-suffering secretary Maggie, his bartender Joe the Angel, his friend and nemesis, Homicide Capt. Daniel von Flanagan, and an interchangeable succession of ineffectual clients and sultry blonds with a mysterious interest in the impecunious little lawyer—and their frantic interactions and jokey conversational gambits are as stylized as Kabuki. But Rice has an unexcelled eye for the arresting opening: the lawyer’s date with dazzling Dolly Dove that’s interrupted by the discovery of a corpse; the death of an undertaker under Malone’s nose during a funeral parade; the locked-room killing of a true-crime writer; the murder of a philanthropist in exactly the way Malone had jokingly suggested. Interestingly, the longer stories here are no more complex than the shorter, and it’s two of the shortest—the psychiatric patient whose homicidal nightmares come true in “Beyond the Shadow of a Dream” and the arsenic-laced anecdote “Wry Highball”—that have endured as minor classics.
Two stories about the much less amusing private eye Melville Fairr show how completely Rice’s seemingly effortless best work depended on the shenanigans of the Malone menagerie.Pub Date: May 30, 2002
ISBN: 1-885941-70-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Crippen & Landru
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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