“Raffles Tunny, a juggler in
the employ of the United States government, is relaxing at his Swiss chalet
when a killer comes to call. He’s found the next day, electrocuted in the style
of serial murderer Shocker Fulson, the man with the electric touch. The trouble
is, Shocker’s dead—cremated and interred in New Orleans—and Raffles is not the
first victim. Six other government-employed entertainers are have been
murdered, all of them killed in the style of an executed madman. A case this
insane demands an equally insane detective, which means it’s time to call Odd
Jobs, Inc. Jake and Hildy Pace have made names for themselves solving
impossible murders. But nabbing the copycat lunatic will mean facing down the
Amateur Mafia, a gang of belly-button ventriloquists, and the strangest doctor
the future has ever seen. One false step, and they’ll follow Raffles to the
great music hall in the sky.”
Set in
the near-future world of 2002, author Ron Goulart shines his satiric wit at
politics and entertainment-influenced society with a distinctly noir undertones
of a detective story. Like a lot of Goulart’s sci-fi, it’s filled with absurd
touches that includes a president who seemly won not on political acumen, but
on the strength of their ability to be entertaining, along with the two-party
system -the Republican-Democrats and the Democrat-Republicans. I’ve often
bemoaned the idea that a lot of sci-fi writers of the Golden Age who wrote about
the 21st Century still had people smoking. Of course, this was written in the
1970s after the Surgeon Generals reports on the hazards of smoking, so here
Goulart’s 2002 includes the fact that tobacco smoking is outlawed.
Calling
Dr. Patchwork is the first of four slim volumes Goulart wrote featuring Jake and
Hildy and their company, Odd Job’s Inc. I’ll get to the other three in coming
months. A prolific writer of that 60s and 70s era, Goulart created several
series of various lengths. Some are just weird, but all are not that
intellectually challenging –mostly because they seemly are juvenile in tone. I’ve
often thought of him as a man who wanted to write hardboiled noir thrillers and
“men’s adventure” books, but found a niche doing these types of books (he also was
and still is, a great connoisseur of comic books).
Much like
his Groucho Marx detective novels, this is light entertainment, silly jokes,
and sly social commentary.
Now onto 2022.
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