Possibilities abound in this meta-noir page-turner.
College grad Willie Tigue, “looking forward to an adventure,” gets one in spades when she is seemingly possessed by a freshly deceased private eye in 1940s Hollywood.
Meegs’ (First Blush, 2017, etc.) supernatural mystery takes a bit to get cooking as two nonconformist college grads contemplate their futures. Betty Moran is headed west to work for her uncle, private eye Skip Ryker. “Lost sheep” Willie Tigue is headed east for graduate school, but her heart isn’t in it. Betty has a better idea, and a dose of knockout drops later, she is off to the Big Apple with Willie’s identity and her treatise, and Willie is on the train to LA. This trading-places scenario might have made for an interesting yarn in its own right. Enter Skip Ryker, your classic hard-boiled Hollywood private detective. He drives a Packard Clipper “with three bullet holes embellishing the coachwork” and expects the worst in people (and “they usually come through for me”). Ryker cleans up messes for the Hollywood studios. But after an explosion separates him from his fingers, legs, and head, his spirit latches on to Willie. “Either I’m going completely dippy or I’ve acquired a narrator!” she writes to Betty. But there’s no rest for the newly empowered Willie. She sets out to solve Ryker’s murder under the guise of Trixie Moran. This apparent series launcher is nothing if not literate, often densely so. Early on, Betty and Willie ponder who was the first literary figure to urinate. Her stabs at Chandler-esqe prose are at times so florid (“I’d just got under the rudder when some fired-up sheba sent her feelers up from behind and gave my cerebellum a phrenological once-over”), one suspects the second coming of S.J. Perelman’s parodic homage, “Somewhere a Roscoe…,” complete with a luger’s ka-chows. But Meegs means business. Once Ryker’s disembodied spirit enters, the pages turn at a machine gun’s pace.
Possibilities abound in this meta-noir page-turner.Pub Date: May 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-938710-32-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Lycophos Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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