Bill Davis is a perfectly delightful fellow. Now, that's the kind of thing I'd usually mention in passing, as a disclaimer—usually in a sentence beginning "I'm sure Bill Davis is a perfectly delightful fellow, but…"—but a good writer never buries the lead.

And one cannot discuss Davis’ memoir, Where There's Smoke: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, without noting the man's delightfulness. He is perfectly, utterly goddamned delightful throughout. Relentlessly, bloody-mindedly, punishingly delightful.

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Davis, of course, is the actor, theater director and teacher best known (for a while, anyway) for his portrayal of the lead villain—variously known as Cancer Man or the Smoking Man—on The X-Files. That his memoir comes about 15 years after anyone might still care about The X-Files concerns him not a whit. Indeed, he points out the near-instant disappearance of the show from our pop-culture discourse: “[T]he popularity of the show in the nineties was huge; it was a global phenomenon. But as time went on…its impact certainly receded,” he writes—adding, in a characteristic aside,  “Not to diminish [show runner] Chris Carter’s talent, but none of his other television ventures had similar success."

But this isn’t really a book about The X-Files, which, to be fair, took up only a few years in Davis’ long and checkered career, which includes a stint as a child radio actor, the founding of several theater troupes, a fistful of marriages, gigs in academia and a waterskiing championship title. What the determinedly breezy tone of this CV works hard to obfuscate is its litany of failure. Theater companies fold due to mismanagement. Promotions are sought and lost. Marriages dissolve as the temptation to infidelity is fought without success.

Davis is expert at placing the blame elsewhere. His radio acting career, he tells us, faltered when a producer took a dislike to him. He was undercut in his position as artistic director for Scotland’s Dundee Rep by his general manager—who, he insinuates, went so far as to burn down the theater to spite him. Mm-hm. His tenure at the National Theatre School of Canada was cut short because a higher-up had it in for him. Of course.

About the only thing for which he does accept responsibility is the breakup of his various marriages—although even that comes off as half-hearted: “I just wasn’t ready to be married,” he says of his first wife. (Oh, and he was boning his then-current leading actress, did he neglect to mention?) Of his second marriage, he says, “[W]e both seemed to be looking for something more, feeling some quiet dissatisfaction.” (And, he mentions almost in passing, he was sleeping with one of his students at the time.) The third is much the same. That Bill Davis. Such an unlucky fellow! Why is everybody always out to get him?

So, having failed at pretty much everything he ever tried, having proved himself a terrible businessman and a faithless husband, having abused his position as an educator, Davis finds himself an actor once more, jobbing around in TV and movies while continuing to direct live theater, eventually backing into fame and fortune with a breakout role in a hit TV show—a show which he clearly thinks is beneath him, and about the stars and creators of which he speaks in the most condescending terms.

That passive-aggressive, half-apologetic (but not really) mode gets a workout when he talks about The X-Files. Chris Carter’s writing, the professionalism of his co-stars, and the anti-rationalist worldview of the show are all dismissed in weary tones, more in sorrow than in anger. A typical assessment: “Gillian [Anderson] is certainly aloof, but it may be that she is more shy than arrogant, that she only seems arrogant.” To which I would add that Mr. Davis is most assuredly eating his cake, but he is perhaps more having it than eating it, though he certainly seems to find it delicious.

The devil of it is that there is a lot of fascinating stuff in this book. The vanished worlds of CBC radio drama and Canadian regional theater are splendidly evoked, and Davis brings home the wonder and free-floating possibilities that charged the UK theatrical scene of the early 1960s (and also charged, in a more lurid and unpleasant way, the academic circles of the early 1970s). One longs to explore these lost worlds in greater detail, and in the company of an interlocutor less self-serving, or at least less given to god-awful purple prose (Davis will never confess himself moved to unexpected tears when can instead say, “My moribund tear ducts were revivified”).

Where There’s Smoke is ultimately an exhausting read, so desperate is it to charm, cajole and delight, and its catalog of rationalizations and excuses leaves a bad taste. The Cancer Man may be long gone, but Bill Davis is still blowing plenty of smoke.

Jack Feerick is a critic-at-large for Popdose.