LAMAAR RANSOME, PRIVATE EYE

by David Galloway ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1981

Why would a talented, serious novelist like Galloway (A Family Album, Melody Jones) want to devote so much energy to this gimmick-parody--a 1940s hard-boiled-detective mystery, homosexual style? His seedy, tough-talking shamusnarrator is gorgeous lesbian Lamaar; Lamaar's flirty, naughty secretary is black homosexual Lavender; and so it goes--with joke names, tiresome puns, and giggly innuendoes along the way. The Los Angeles-based plot, on the other hand, is routine rather than wacky: Lamaar is hired by the director of an actress/model training school to find missing pupil Yvette LaFlamme; Yvette's dismembered body turns up in a bus station locker: another murder is connected, with leads to pornofilms and kinky prostitution (the training school is really a hooker-supplier); Lamaar's Hispanic girlfriend goes undercover at the school and is kidnapped: etc. Neither funny enough to score as parody nor real enough to take seriously, this hardly seems worth the effort.

Pub Date: May 1, 1981

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Riverrun Press (175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010)

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1981

Categories: FICTION