THE WISEMANN ORIGINALS

A heavy-handed spoof of the wise-guy mystery from hard-boiled aficionado Goulart, who's been cranking out anthologies for years. Here, snippy, prissy, impeccable dandy Navarro--an operative of the Ajax Novelty Company (a coyly named investigative agency) --is sent to a Florida comics-convention to discover whether the three Wisemann originals that were sold (a) were really by Wisemann, (b) were part of a cache of Wisemanns that was sneaked out of Nazi Germany in a steamer trunk, and (c) really belonged to collector Coulthard, who originally purchased that trunk but had it disappear from a shipping truck before it reached him. Navarro hires Jack Briggs--an old friend, a drunk, a slob, a misfit but, above all, a graphic artist who is an expert on Wisemann's work--to assist him. The two bumble their way from Florida to New Paltz, N.Y., from woman to woman, from suspect to suspect, with a leaden wisecrack at each stop--until they finally recover the Wisemanns and earn bonuses for Ajax and themselves. Repartee and lighthearted wit are clearly not Goulart's forte. Still, the storyline here is perfectly adequate--and if you can sort of skim over the dialogue, the plot is not without its little pleasures.