GET GRIBNITZ

A short-tempered New York adman finds himself in hot water in Gimple’s novel.

New York City, 1988: Stew Gribnitz, a recently divorced copywriter for a middling Madison Avenue ad agency, has a problem with authority. When his new creative director, James G. Persons, trashes some of his work—literally throws it into the garbage bin—Stew reacts by grabbing Persons’ necktie. “I scrunch it up in my hand, blow my nose in it, rub my armpits with it and stick it down the back of my pants,” narrates Stew. “Then I take the tie and throw it in his face.” By some miracle, Stew doesn’t get fired…but in a horrible coincidence, Persons is murdered shortly thereafter, strangled to death with the same necktie. The police suspect Stew, obviously, and even though he has an ironclad alibi, the New York papers label him the “Madison Avenue Murderer,” causing him to lose his job anyway. While the sudden infamy makes his father proud (“You finally made a name for yourself,” swoons Moish Gribnitz, with whom Stew is temporarily staying), it also makes him a persona non grata across his industry. Luckily, a new opportunity soon presents itself: working as a consultant for Edward Rivette, a dilettante billionaire launching a vanity campaign to become governor of Connecticut. It would be a fairly straightforward job if Rivette’s opponent weren’t a mob-connected former FBI agent willing to kill in order to win—and potentially frame the Madison Avenue Murderer with the crime. Gimple’s prose, as narrated by the chatty Stew, is littered with pop-culture references and puns, and the text is often clever and amusing (Stew describes his “pal Levine, who was one of Brooklyn’s bigger quaalude dealers and used his pill-gotten gains to buy himself a deli in Sheepshead Bay”). Some of the jokes feel very 1980s—Stew repeatedly refers to his ex-wife as the “Orthodox Jewish Vampire Bride from Hell”—but the voice and the material combine to form an effective old-school comedic thriller with a heavy dose of Outer Boroughs attitude.

A colorful and entertaining crime story with a memorable protagonist.