News of the impending arrival of The Staggster, an avowed and admitted Kinky Friedman fan, had me doing a quick check of the online sources to check on details of recent fictional efforts by the aforesaid Mr Friedman.
As an aside, re. the current kerfuffle about the effect of online shopping on the Australian retail sector, experience suggests I'm unlikely to find what I'm looking for in a bricks and mortar establishment.
I'd gained the impression that Kinky's recent literary efforts tended towards the non-fiction sphere, heavy on personal reminiscences about political identities and musings on Texas etiquette, rather than the crime fiction based around the misadventures of the fictional Kinkster and the assorted cast of merry associates usually referred to as the Greenwich Village Irregulars.
Investigations revealed attractively-priced copies of Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned ($12.60), The Prisoner of Vandam Street ($8.86) and Ten Little New Yorkers ($9.44), so I figures those titles would round off the Friedman collection on the Little House of Concrete Bookshelves. I wasn't inclined towards What Would Kinky Do? How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World, Kinky Friedman's Guide to Texas Etiquette: Or How to Get to Heaven or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth, Scuse Me While I Whip This Out: Reflections on Country Singers, Presidents and Other Troublemakers or Texas Hold 'em: How I Was Born in a Manger, Died in the Saddle and Came Back as a Horny Toad, even at a substantial discount from RRP.
I've remarked elsewhere that I thought I was going off Kinky Friedman, but there's still a place for these little potboilers in the big picture of Hughesy's reading. For a start, they're relatively lightweight in both the literary and physical sense, provide a chortle or three and make almost ideal in transit reading between The Little House of Concrete and whichever destination we're flying to.
Something to pass the time through the transit lounge, onto the aircraft, during the flight and in transit to wherever we're staying, in other words, and if you don't get all the way through a re-read this time you can always aim to finish it on the return journey or hold it over for next time.
So, yes, I've read everything up to those three titles at least once, and they'll fill a useful function once they're here and have had the rapid first squiz.
There was nothing in the advance publicity to indicate that Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned was anything other than a stock standard Kinkster adventure with all the associated hangers-on, until a glance at the blurb on the back cover revealed the identities of the main characters, novelist Walter Snow, beautiful and intelligent Clyde Potts and the certifiable Fox Harris.
Not, in other words, a Greenwich Village Irregular in sight.
And I'm not entirely sure where the Kill Two Birds bit kicks in either. There's a fairly liberal supply of Malabimbi (sic) Madness which accounts for the & Get Stoned in this tale of recovering alcoholic author Walter Snow and his newfound inspiration at the hands of a couple of leftovers from the Yippe Era of cultural terrorism.
Coming off seven years of writer's block, Walter's chance encounter with an attractive woman who needs access to a safe deposit box to secure her grandmother's Russian heirloom silverware set from the depredations of her mother's gypsy boyfriend seems relatively innocuous, but as things turn out the heirloom silverware is a dead fish, and visiting police officers advise Walter to have nothing further to do with the woman we come to know as Clyde Potts and to contact them if she contacts him.
She does re-establish contact, of course, and, equally predictably, Walter fails to contact the authorities as Clyde Potts and her associate Fox Harris inveigle the author into an escalating series of scams against corporate targets, starting with a fairly straightforward switcheroo con at an operation in the Bennigan's Irish pub-themed restaurant chain, liberating a large Afro-American inmate from a mental hospital, charging a gourmet extravaganza to Donald Trump's credit card and, finally, launching an all-out assault on a Starbucks franchise that has had the temerity to take over the premises formerly occupied by a down at heel neighbourhood Irish bar.
Along the way, Walter picks up the inspiration that gets the creative juices flowing again, though how a supposedly fictional account of these activities equates to the Great Armenian Novel isn't obvious to this reader. Predictably, by the end of the novel Walter's a best-selling author who has been able to move from his basement apartment to a large airy penthouse looking over Central Park.
Along the way things flow along at a fairly merry pace without any hint of the cornpone pholosophising we've come to know and mostly love through The Kinkster's oeuvre. There are plenty of other musings there, largely along the lines of wistful reflections of the would-be romantic recovering alcoholic, so while it's a reasonable read with its share of humour it's not quite Kinky Friedman as we've come to know the dude.
Dedicated Friedman fans are, accordingly, advised to approach with caution, while those who find the regular Kinkster offering a bit hard to take might find this alternative offering a little more palatable.
Or not, as the case might be.
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