Books: Calling Dr. Patchwork By Ron Goulart (1978)

“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.