A little late for April's Southwest theme. I just finished W.
Glenn Duncan's "Rafferty's Rules," the first of his series on
Dallas P.I. Rafferty
(no first name that I noticed).
As a resident of Dallas for most of my first three decades, I
read as much crime fiction set there as I can find,
especially now that I've lived elsewhere for many years. It's
like a cheap trip home, when the book captures the flavor of
the town.
"Rafferty's Rules" was no help in this regard. Beyond a few
cursory mentions of a section of town (Oak Cliff, Highland
Park) or a street, there was little about this book that
couldn't have taken place in Chicago (hell, without even
changing the Highland Park stuff) or Minneapolis. Except that
a good portion of the book actually takes place in a tiny
town miles east of Dallas. But that too rang no louder of
Texas than of, say, Kansas or Iowa to me.
As to the story itself, it seemed a bit contrived. Years
after rescuing a little girl during a coffee shop holdup,
ex-cop Rafferty is hired by the now-grown girl's family to
render vengeance upon the motorcycle gangs that recently
kidnapped, raped, and sold her. The girl is safe now, but
nearly demented from the experience. Rafferty, with the help
of his very non-Hawk-like Hawk (a redneck cowboy named
Cowboy, described on the cover blurb as "the most dangerous
man on earth" but actually nothing much more than a typical
rancher with a fair hand on a shotgun) and of a girl who has
turned her back on her motorcycling ways and is now working
as a stripper, sets out to track down the very cliché¤ and
mostly indistinguishable gang members.
Rafferty seems unusually willing simply to kill whomever he
tangles with, especially in light of having been a cop.
Cowboy shares this willingness. Neither shows much interest
in having people arrested, and both are quite up to the task
of just putting a bullet in even a wounded enemy in order to
get on to the next part of their job. I found this rather
off-putting, especially in light of the lip service Rafferty
pays to codes of honor and doing the right thing even if it
hurts. Talk was the only evidence I saw in Rafferty of these
codes.
As to the writing, Duncan seems to have read all the right
books, and he plays the familiar notes, even if some mixed
messages (see above) interrupt the flow. Rafferty is a little
too cute with the bon mots without coming near Marlovian
panache. And the titular "rules" Rafferty spits out
periodically ("Rafferty's Rule Number Five: If a client can
afford it, he -or she - pays top dollar.") have little style
(obviously) and do little but clutter up the story with more
cutesiness. I hope, if I talk myself into reading any more of
the series, that Duncan drops this gimmick. If a writer is
going to scream "Gimmick" in the title and on every fourth
page, I want him to have one that either propels the story or
compels me to read on to the next example out of sheer
amusement.
Oh, yeah. There's a secondary "Hawk," Cowboy's wife, Mimi, a
typical cowboy's wife, except she gutshoots people without
blinking an eye and she's apparently a midget. She mainly
shows up unexpectedly to shoot people when Rafferty is up
against the wall without recourse.
Jim Beaver
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