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Dark colours, a comic accent and a noir ghost
Book Review
By Derryll White
Hallinan, Timothy (2014). Herbie’s Game.
Timothy Hallinan is a new author to me, and I haven’t noticed him in the store. But we got an advanced release copy at Lotus Books and I decided to give him a try. To my surprise the author has 17 published novels to his credit, and four in the Junior Bender series with ‘Herbie’s Game’ being the fifth. So he should know what he’s doing as a writer.
I was amazed to find that Junior Bender, the main character, is a burglar and a thief. The reader realizes immediately that this work is a little different. The writing has that haunted old cadence and diction that makes one think of Raymond Chandler, Stewart Kaminsky and Donald Westlake. It’s a narrative tone with dark colours, a comic accent and a noir ghost. And the secretary in arch thief Wattles’ office is a series of blow-up sex dolls – French maid, Tiffany, Nurse Perky – which Wattles sells as his only legitimate claim to business. Yes, kind of weird, but funny.
There are little-known facts, fascinating tidbits, randomly offered – the history of platinum or platina, once thought to be unripe gold, is one such scrap. Or the “liberation jewelry” created underground by Cartier in the Second World War to mock the German occupiers with luscious pieces of beauty that scorned the Nazis. Who would have thought, in a Raymond Chandler-type mystery novel?
About a third of the way through ‘Herbie’s Game’ I decided I really liked Timothy Hallinan. He does know himself, and as a writer he pushes that sense of security into uncharted areas – probing, exploring, discovering. I get the sense that, like most of the good writers I enjoy, he will not succumb to some lazy formula of novel production. He has too much curiosity and innate humanity to fall for that.
In fact, I liked this novel all the way through to the end. Junior’s relationship to his new lady, Ronnie, grew throughout the novel, and in ways I want my own relationship to grow. He stayed true to himself and, for a burglar, exhibited some exemplary traits of commitment, caring and moral strength. I am now looking for old Timothy Hallinan novels.
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CRIMINALS – Identified him externally, that is. Wattle’s interior landscape, a column of dark, buzzing flies looking impatiently for the day’s first kill, was tucked safely out of sight.
COMMERCE- All of the blow-ups [sex dolls] leaked sooner or later, thanks to the low manufacturing standards of the Chinese factory where they were produced, which Wattles hadn’t complained about because it ensured re-orders.
BEAUTY – The late-morning sunlight was discovering 24-karat gold in Ronnie’s hair, which was in the kind of multidimensional tangle predicted by chaos theory, like a foam of whipped Mobius loops.
JEWELRY – “It’s too nice for Stinky. Cartier made these things and brave women wore them while the Gestapo basements were squeezing out screams all over Paris.”
SEX – I gave up. Morning chats with an attractive and potentially consenting member of the opposite sex always made me shift focus to one of the lower chakras, and getting Ronnie mad would lessen the chance of that chakra being allowed to go out to play.
GUILE – “Maybe she preserves the quaint idea that a woman should give the man a chance to define how the relationship is going to be, even if it’s only because it gives her a clearer negotiating position.”
FATE – “Well, appreciate it while you got it [luck]. Just say thanks all the time. ‘Cause you know what? It’ll average out. Every day you stay lucky, every day you stay happy, your personal supply of bad luck gets bigger. It’s like a rock hanging over your head, the luckier you are, the bigger and heavier it gets. Listen, things go a little wrong? You got some problems? Your teeth hurt? Say thanks, because that’s whittling away at the rock hanging above you.”
COMMERCE – …with a beautiful art deco floor lamp from the mid-twenties standing behind it. Threw a nice yellow light, just like reading lamps are supposed to, not the vein-popping, iris-shriveling, soul-shrinking glare of the ones that are saving the world this year until it becomes public information that they’re full of mercury and people in China who live near the factories are developing Mad Hatter-disease delusions. I had a hundred now-illegal incandescent bulbs for my lamp, and I’d buy a hundred more in a minute if I knew where.
LUCK – “Luck is a tough one…. What I think is that I agree with Pasteur: fortune favors the prepared mind. Luck? I don’t have any idea. Maybe it’s something that kicks up spontaneously, like a breeze, and then it’s gone.”
AMERICA – “Anybody who likes American cars,” Louie said, “they got a lot of sad car stories. Poor little Neon, such a sad bag of crap. Trying to compete with the Japanese for 20 years and they still hadn’t figured it out.”
HUMANS – People change. Everybody says it but nobody believes it. I think that’s because most of us can’t really imagine other people as being much different from ourselves, and we feel – even after we’ve successfully changed our behavior – that our flaws, our stagnant pools and errant spirits, are still down there, running things. Our behavior is a new overcoat, persuasive, well-fitted, and attractive, but beneath it we believe we’re the same equivocal mess we’ve always been. Why should we think other people are different.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
Lotus Books is pleased to sponsor book reviews by Derryll White. If you are interested in a book that Derryll has reviewed you can shop online at https://lotusbooks.ca/, call us at 250-426-3415 or please visit us at 33 10th Ave. S. Cranbrook, and we would be happy to help you find a great read.
