Here is another load of kosher corn noir from the foremost Texas Jewboy Kinky Friedman and just the thing for reading aloud to adversaries who are recovering from abdominal surgery. While it is not really possible to send up a genre that is already pretty much a parody of itself that hasn't stopped the Kinkster's list of detective novels from getting near the double digits any more than it has stopped him from issuing alleged country music albums. While the novels lack the tender lyrical quality of musical offerings such as "Wild Man from Borneo" and the penetrating psychological insight of "The Ballad of Charles Whitman," they are nonetheless worth a shot if you are hoping to bust a stitch.
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The Kinkster is, as we say in Texas, "muy mishuggah"
The novels detail the exploits of private investigator Kinky Friedman, a person bearing an uncanny resemblance to the author, with the exception of being brain-damaged enough to persist in living in New York City. The Bandera Home for the Bewildered appears to have sunk all its advertising budget into product placement in Friedman's novels and that is probably where you have been, or out of state which amounts to the same thing, if you really have no idea who Kinky Friedman is. But if you are like me you probably lost track of the Kinkster and a lot of your underwear some time in the Seventies, and when the fog lifted about 1983 things just weren't the same. Evidently somewhere in there the Kinkster slipped off to New York, no doubt to get to the bottom of great Talmudic mysteries such as whether there is such a thing as a pareve enchilada and took up residence in Greenwich Village where the detective portion of his being remains.
The result is a strange brew of genres like Ernie Kovacs directs Hee-Haw and it turns out for once to be really funny, or the Judds meet the Sex Pistols. The Kinkster is a two-minute-egg, tact-challenged private eye with a lesbian dance class in the attic and a considerable amount of boiler-plate shtick that can pretty much be cut-and-pasted from one volume to the next and is not really so bad depending upon whether one prefers one's gays running or at a brisk walking pace. In The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover the leggy blonde appears on page 14 and it has just got to be one of three things: cheating husband, missing husband, falsely accused husband. She's got to have a husband because in spite of the Kinkster's every effort to let us know that there is more to him than meets the eye in baggy trousers, he doesn't get the girls. From there it is only a matter of time until little green men, the men in black, and the singular British sauce come into it—not to forget the German sausage-stuffing machine that dares not speak its name.
While there is little doubt that Kinkster the author would like to pay fromage to Sherlock Holmes, the world of cheesy detectives moves on as much as the real world. You're about to get around to learning the lambada when everything has turned into macarena which seems like it ought to have something to with braiding wall-hangings or be some place that Ralph the Swimming Pig has got a new gig, and if you try to do Holmes you get detectives à la Micky Spillane played by Jack Nicholson or Humphrey Bogart and if you are not careful one day you go to the mirror and you are looking Tom Sellick or Kojack in the eye. Actually it seems possible that these are the kind of books Holmes himself would have written if Watson had not always been hiding the tincture of Andes and the syringe. Holmes had his Persian slipper, and the Kinkster has a puppet head on the refrigerator. The puppet head contains the key to the door downstairs and is thrown down to clients when they call. This lets them know the kind of operation they are dealing with, if they haven't caught a clue from the neighborhood. And for all the New York sophistication that tossing keys down entails it is very clear that the Kinkster cannot shake his Texas roots as evidenced by his Texas-shaped ashtray and the bull's horn the Kinkster drinks from as he tries to get to the worm at the bottom of the Jameson's bottle.
I am always a little wary of going too much into the plot of detective novels, but in this case the reader has little trouble staying ahead of Kinky the detective although Friedman the author is ahead of both. Detective novels never have been the locked-room sort of puzzles that Christie and Sayers made of the mystery novel. You can go right back to Conan Doyle and see how few of the Holmes pieces really are whodunits, and a lot turns, so far as the reader's attention span goes, on whether one finds the company enjoyable. And you gotta believe that someone who names bodily functions after disgraced former presidents has got his heart in the right place even if you don't generally find sex and race jokes funny or are allergic to cigar smoke. Kinky is, as the old Texas saying goes, "muy mishuggah" and you have to take it that way or leave it. Now the really scary stuff about this particular volume is that the further out this book gets, the more it seems like yesterday's headlines. Perhaps in an attempt to make his wild plot twists plausible, the Kinkster relates his version of what the FBI really was doing to Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the same story I have heard told in leftist circles for years, but this is the first place I have seen it explicitly in print. The FBI does not like to lose and does not like to be wrong. Ah, but those were all things that happened in the bad old Hoover days, right? It is not like the FBI in this day and age would do anything like continuing to follow and harass the one person in America that we can be certain did not have anything to do with the Atlanta pipebomb, right? Of course the fact that they are out to get you doesn't mean that you aren't paranoid, so just for the record I wish to assure the Kinkster that the little Aryan kids who kick the back of your seat on airplanes do it to everyone—at least they do it also to fags who are only Jewish by surgery.
Judging the whims of the American consuming public is a chancy thing. I for one don't see why songs like "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Get Your Buns in Bed," or "They Ain't Makin' Jews like Jesus Anymore" didn't ring the bell at the top of the charts or why Kinky doesn't try to make it on the "Have your credit card ready" video circuit like Ray Stevens. Maybe people would never be sure whether it was Frank Zappa or Grocho Marx—at three in the morning I sometimes can't tell Stevens from the AbFlex ads. But these novels seem to be doing the Slim Whitman thing in Europe—although I don't know how you translate a line like "Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder"—and it looks like the Kinkster is about the break out at last.
