Review at new Harrogate festival blog You're Booked

The Deputy – Victor Gischler

BY ANN, ON NOVEMBER 18TH, 2010

Reviewer: David Speer

The Deputy by Victor Gischler, Tyrus Books

I’m tempted to call Victor Gischler a Renaissance man. In at least two ways. Maybe more.

One. He’s the writer of all sorts of things. His debut novel, and one of my favorites, “Gun Monkeys,” was nominated for the Edgar Award. You may be more familiar with some of his other novels — the ones with the clever titles like “Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse” and “Vampire a Go-Go.” He also writes comic books, Deadpool and X-Men and others. There’s Twitter talk sometimes about a screenplay. And if you do follow him on Twitter there’s the occasional feature called “Ask Gischler” where he offers to answer any and all questions. Note I said he offers to answer them. I’m not sure he ever answers anything.

Two. When I said Renaissance man, I was thinking more of a typical man who lived during the time of the Renaissance. The kind of man whose life was nasty, brutish, and short. One who learns that life has a noir underbelly. Who rolls life over on its back and says, “Come over here and look at this. Is that cool or what?”

The kind of man who could write “The Deputy” (Tyrus Books). The kind of novel that could make you to want to go out and clean up a town.

“The Deputy” is about Toby Sawyer, who the local police chief lets work as a part-time deputy so that Toby can make something of himself. Toby is a deputy in Coyote Crossing, Oklahoma. Take Washington D.C. out of the competition (after all, it’s in a class all by itself), and Coyote Crossing could be in the running for the title of the most corrupt town on Earth.

At its core, the story of “The Deputy” is a western movie of the type we’ve all seen or heard hundreds of times. It takes place in a town that needs one good man to clean it up. But Toby is not Shane of the movie or Marshal Matt Dillon of TV’s Gunsmoke. He’s not Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op. And he’s surely not Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Because Toby sure doesn’t set out to clean up a town. He just wants to love his son, have a good woman by his side — or with him in bed — and find the missing body of Luke Jordan so he can go home and get some sleep.

But Toby is a guy who can’t manage to do one thing right. Or the easy way. So, naturally, when he goes about cleaning up Coyote Crossing, he does it in a really messy way. Given that chance to make something of himself, Toby goes out of his way to screw up. Given the seemingly dead-easy task of guarding the freshly killed body of one member of the town’s most notorious trouble-making family, Toby wanders off to have sex with his girlfriend. His girlfriend who is not his wife and not the mother of his child. Who probably is not going to be the good woman by his side by the end of the book. Or even by the end of the night.

And believe it or not, it goes downhill from there.

Gischler’s genius is that he makes us want good things to happen for Toby. No matter how stupid he is. And he is. No matter how violent he is. And he is. No matter how much of a screw up he is. And he is. We like Toby. We root for him to win. We want him to clean up Coyote Crossing, even though Gischler has shown us over the course of 249 pages that this ass-end-of-nowhere town is not worth cleaning up. We want Toby to win even while we’re questioning whether what he’s winning is really worth having.

It might just take a real Renaissance man to make us want that.

Louise Penny

I finished Bury Your Dead quite a while ago. I've been hemming and hawing around about talking about it because it is so complex and difficult to talk about without ruining the book for other readers. I grasped completely the brouhaha on Louise Penny's blog when someone blurted something out. It's difficult not to. Let's just say that I peaked ahead on this one to reassure myself about one of my favorite characters.

There are four stories going on at once in the book. Some are told in flashbacks, some in historical documents, some direct drama. I thought from the blurbs I had read that this was going to be similar to Daughter of Time. It does have that element to it, but it so much more than that.

The book really turns Gamache into Sherlock Holmes or even better, Nero Wolfe. His detecting is almost all done through reading documents, even in the present day murder. He does meet and talk to people, but not as much as a usual Three Pines mysteries. He does very much let other people be his "Archie". And his solving of the Champlain mystery is indeed straight out of Josephine Tey.

I adore all the minor characters in these books and was relieved when they came back in with such vigor. The use of Clara as a fifth columnist was hysterically funny. And of course any time that Ruth is around is fun. The poignancy of Ruth and the duck is an absolutely stunning element. It's just bizarre, but wonderful.

And this use of the minor characters is the reason I love these books. There are comic elements in all the books, but at the heart, something deadly serious is going on. There is a murder and it's not funny. And it is usually dangerous. Louise Penny knows how to combine all the elements of life in a story about a murder investigation.

And although I am absolutely character driven, this book, and by extension all the Three Pines books, is also technically brilliant. I normally hate weaving around from one story to another and letting out bits of story drop by painful drop. I might in less skillful hands have called the story about the raid sandbagging. Because the characters know the whole story--it just isn't revealed all at once. But the pacing and all the distractions of the three other stories kept me hanging. on. every. morsel.

A fabulous denouement and almost a cliffhanger at the end of the book. But a character one, not a plot one. What will happen next? The last book left me stunned. This book left me in despair at how long it will be until the next one comes out. How will she dodge the Cabot Cove conundrum and find another way to kill someone in the eensy town? Will everyone welcome Gamache back with open arms? And what complicated technical problem will Louise Penny set for herself? I can't wait.

What kind of reader are you?

I am finding out a lot about myself as a reader since I began to keep a journal of everything I read. I started this after Zoe Sharp's husband, Andy, asked me how many books I read in a year. A lot was my first answer. Then I narrowed it to probably 150. I was pretty close, although I'm about 15 off the pace so far to reach 150 by December 31. It has, however, identified one reader habit I was not completely aware of. I read large blocks of the same author. In other words I tend to read in clumps. So far this year, I've had a Patricia Highsmith clump, a Ruth Rendell clump, and a Marcia Talley clump. Last year it was Donna Andrews and Kent Krueger. If I discover an author I haven't read before, I read everything I can about them and by them.

David, on the other hand, actively dislikes clump reading. He thinks it magnifies any verbal tics and strategies the author may have. This ruins the books for him. So he tends to read in a very one from column A, two from B, etc. kind of way.

Series books for me become a nice long 19th century novel if read one after the other. I became absolutely enamored with Inspector Wexford while reading the Ruth Rendell books. I'm completely fine with the fact that time is a bit fiddly in the books, and that Wexford should have retired a long time ago. Beginning in the sixties and working into the next century, Wexford remains a constant in the police force. The books are not about the crimes. I forget sometimes which crimes go with which book. The books are about this policeman and his family and his job. And I care about his eating right to maintain his weight.

The books have moved from relatively standard mysteries with twists to twisty mysteries involving some kind of social issue. Simisola asks Wexford and the reader to examine their attitudes toward race. Wexford comes out of this poorly after misidentifying a murder victim who happens to be African. He knows he wouldn't have made the assumptions he did if the victim had been white. It makes a nice change to have the detective examining himself over social attitudes instead of personal relationships. And adds some real depth.

Creating a hero with depth is unusual, but not difficult. The reader is absolutely expected to like the hero. Rendell has set herself a challenge with the character of Mike Burden. He's Wexford's second in command and in most attitudes, his opposite. But he is so fully realized that you like him, too, even when you disagree with him. He does not ever examine himself because he is always sure he is right.

My reading, then, is usually done in clumps and almost always involves character-driven books. I don't care about plots because I generally figure them out. I figured out From Doon with Death the first Inspector Wexford book. If you haven't read that one, I'll just say it proves I never take anything at face value. And that's the only way to consistently figure out mystery books.

And as a postscript because I'm so excited and can't wait, Peter Robinson's new book, Bad Boy is out today. I put a note about it on my bulletin board so I don't forget. Woo Hoo.