6.  REVIEW: THE CASE OF THE COCKAMAMIE KILLER
    reviewed by Ellen Bingham 
    Special to TLE      http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/>     Issue 223

    THE CASE OF THE COCKAMAMIE KILLER, by David Blade
    (Browdix Press, 2003, 202pp.)

This 100-mile-an-hour novel succeeds in entertaining and may even succeed
as art. I thought at first that it might be very bad. But every succeeding
page took me further and further from that hypothesis. And around 2:30 in
the morning and page 135 or so I was sure it must be very good.

_The Case of the Cockamamie Killer_ is, ostensibly, a murder mystery in the
hardboiled-detective tradition (a la Marlowe and Spade). But the hard-boil
is enlisted in the service of a whiplash comic sensibility, sometimes
blunt, sometimes sly and subtle. In one respect the whole book is nothing
but a complex set-up for a minor punch line. To say there's melodrama here
would be understatement. But it soon emerges that the rhodopsin purple of
some passages is viewpoint-character manifestation of an idiosyncratic
sensibility that evolves over time. The voice of the narrative changes to
reflect the changing psyche of the protagonist. So, initial appearances to
the contrary, we do not have here a parody of hard-boiled detective
fiction, although there are elements of parody.

What's it about? The first thing to report, to this audience, is the
libertarian theme. The bad guy is an IRS agent. He is conniving to do
something to screw taxpayers. Our hero, Chak Charon, must thwart him. It's
man-versus-the-state.

The story begins with the murder of a lawyer named Jeff Jagglin. We're not
actually shown who the killer is in Blade's deceptively workmanlike opening
scene, but the killer's identity emerges soon enough.

The hero, Chak Charon, is a temporary employee in the word processing
department of the same law firm that the murder victim worked for. Charon
also happens to be a private detective. Even before he hears about the
murder, he's grilling Jagglin's addled, hapless secretary about a bungled
work order. He is over-the-top in this scene and even somewhat
unlikable--though, to be fair, he is dealing with a bit of a ditz. In any
case, Charon soon learns of the crime and throws himself into one full-tilt
confrontation after another: with a cop on the murder scene, with a
messenger who delivered a package to the victim's office, with a department
supervisor, with a taxi driver, with a mysterious female visitor to his
apartment. (This last episode offering clues that our hero might not like
girls in quite the way Sam Spade does.)

Computers and software have a lot to do with the story, so the numbered
scenes are grouped into uber-chapters labeled like keys on a computer
keyboard: "ENTER," "CONTROL," "ESCAPE,"
"INSERT," etc., the double meanings of which are pretty
transparent. The story hurtles along with few speed bumps (as you can see
for yourself at http://www.webnetlet.net> , where the novel is
excerpted online). Things slow down for a while when Charon recuperates
from various assaults at an improbable Chinatown boardinghouse, where he
plans his next move and engages in revelatory political dialogue with his
fellow boarders. But the respite is short-lived. No rest for the weary--but
don't worry, those two hundred pages will be over before you know it, fast.

Perhaps too fast. While there is something to be said for putting a
literary gun to the reader's head, the danger is that he might miss a
relevant resonance or two. This novel is not so lightweight as it may seem,
and on a second reading I noticed certain things that in the first
narrative rush had skimmed past me, at least on a conscious level.

For instance, the thematic mechanics. A big subject of the story is,
obviously, power. But not just in the political sense of government force
squashing the innocent. It's more broadly about the power to get other
people to do what you want--whether coercion is deployed or not. There can
be legitimate and illegitimate exercises of such power. The villain strives
to bully and crush everyone in his path, and we see whom he can manipulate
and whom he can't manipulate; the threat of coercive power is virtually his
only method of persuasion. We also see how Charon
persuades or fails to persuade others to do his bidding.
To some extent, the two adversaries serve as funhouse-mirror distortions of
each other.

The clashes and accommodations in the household on Grubgeous Street further
illustrate the theme. We all know how vexing it can be to argue politics
with interlocutors of an opposing world view, especially when the
discussion is marred by lack of mutual forbearance; and if you don't know,
well, come to dinner at the Dowbenshire household on Grubgeous Street. Also
touched on in is the relationship between the individual and society and
how even the most self-contained individual needs the society of his
fellows, so long as not coercively imposed--a need treated in part via the
paradoxically banal prattling of the landlady (which will be followed by
the not-so-banal prattling of the bad guy, who also places a great deal of
stress on the importance on society). And then there is the issue of
whether a fast-food clerk should fill your order with something approaching
alacrity--cheerful obedience. The story almost pivots around three scenes
involving fast-food service. Many scenes echo or mirror each other, and no
incident seems purely incidental.

There's more here. Sex. Inside jokes. And other stuff that I can't quite
identify, but that has something to do with style. I don't know whether
Blade's novel is Literature with a capital L. I do know that it is very
nicely done. And fun.
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Aspiring fictioneer Ellen Bingham makes her home in Chicago.

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