I recently finished my third Leo Malet book, although second
in the series, Dynamite vs. QED. The story is as ridiculously
contrived as any of the traditional mysteries hardboiled is
supposed to have countered with realism, depending on quite a
few very convenient coincidences -- bumping into a mystery
woman during an air raid in Paris, okay, but then
accidentally knocking on that same mystery woman's door in
the country when lost while looking for another house, come
on, and knocking on that door at the exact moment she is
being threatened by criminals, too much. These and other
coincidences are part of a pretty convoluted plot; frankly, I
didn't even try to keep up with all of the twists and
turns.
So why is this book still so enjoyable? There is just
something about Nestor "Dynamite" Burma that is a hoot. His
tongue in cheek, sometimes superior (always around the cops,
especially when withholding information) and sometimes
self-deprecating (often around women, though he always gets
them) first person narration is just a whole lot of fun. Not
only does it make the ridiculous plot contrivances tolerable,
but almost winning for the inevitable scene in which,
Sherlock Holmes-like, he explains to his cop friend Faroux
(ex-anarchist Burma hates cops, except for Faroux, who is
"okay for a cop") everything the cops have missed, but he has
put together so easily. A whole lot of fun.
Mark
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 29 Sep 2003 EDT