Someone recommended Victor Gischler's GUN MONKEYS (2001) to
me, but I can't remember who. I don't hold it against them,
whoever it was, even though I dropped the book half-way
through and it's already on my donate- to-the-booksale pile.
(Gischler's been published online by a number of rare birds,
I noticed with interest, but I haven't read any of those
stories. This is his first novel.)
The story is narrated by a Florida hood, an enforcer, a gun
monkey, who works for an octogenerian gangster named Stan. We
meet him, at the start of the book, driving around with a
headless corpse in his trunk. Soon Stan asks him to take care
of some business, and he walks into a bar and shoots everyone
inside. A day or two later, he leaves someone bound in a
bathtub with scalding water running. The assumption is that
the hot water heater will run out before the fellow
dies.
That's where I dropped the book. I don't mind grim stuff in
books, but it's got to be handled right. The screwball tone
of this book was all wrong. To have a sociopathic criminal
narrate a story in a breezy manner takes a lot of skill to
pull off, and Gischler didn't manage it. Jim Thompson's THE
KILLER INSIDE ME was in the first person, but it was a
masterpiece. Stark's Parker books are told in the third
person, and Parker takes things seriously. He may kill people
if he needs to, but he's not joking around. GUN MONKEYS is
derivative of PULP FICTION, the movie, and it might work as a
movie. Some of the scenes seem written with that in
mind.
The whole thing hinges on the enforcer's loyalty to Stan.
Now, when a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do
something about it, but when his boss is killed he's not
supposed to make blustering speeches of devotion that make
other people, who were going to side with the incoming
gangster, clench their jaws and remember that old Stan did
help them buy this house, didn't he, and by God he always
remember their birthday, so they'd help after all. It's just
too forced and too cliched.
Reading this right after Pelecanos's SOUL CIRCUS certainly
didn't help it, either.
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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