EDDY DECO'S LAST CAPER

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, even though it doesn't really work.
Review: This is a story that tells of a wonderful world of femme fatales and PIs and cops and gangsters and... more. If only Wilson had played fair.

It begins as hard-boiled parody and ends as soft science-fantasy. I am a fan of mixed genres on occasion, and of genre spoofs, and I think author Wilson could have made this work, or written a spoof of either genre individually, but together, it's just too much to give any of it justice.

Even so, the first part, before introducing too many otherworldly elements, reads like a solid if unorthodox hard-boiled parody, with serviceable parodies of PIs, femmes fatale, Runyonesque thugs, Sidney Greenstreet, Edward G. Robinson and Peter Lorre.

Then Deco goes to meet the wealthy father of the beautiful dame who came into his office to hire him... and we learn that the father survives as only eyes and a brain kept alive in a tank of fluid. From there, the story gets wilder, with lasers from skyscrapers, an octopus car, a spider woman, a lobster man and living hardware that attacks humans.

I also wonder if the creators of Men in Black did not borrow from this story, as it involves aliens who have lived on earth unbeknownst to humans, influencing culture while they work to repair their spaceships and leave our planet. The conclusion has Deco shooting his way out of the belly of a slimy creature, like Tommy Lee Jones did in the first film.

None of these things by themselves turned me off; in point of fact, I enjoyed them. But there was no context to this weird world: I found it unbelievable and damaging that no one ever showed any surprise or shock or even any real fear at these evermore outlandish events and creatures. Neither was there any groundwork established that this kind of thing had gone on regularly before. So it just didn't hold up. If there are no rules, there can be no suspense, and that diminishes the fun considerably.

There will be a certain small segment of readership that will love this book as is and say I am being a wet blanket. But I'm really not. I think a book featuring octopus-tentacled studebakers can be believable if it is engagingly written with some convincing depth. But Eddy Deco's Last Caper, aside from some smart dialogue in the first half, too often lacks these attributes.

I also found it jarring that some of the action in this story is told by illustrations, with no parallel prose. For example, the author would say, "And then..." Then there would come a picture of an arm with a gun snaking through a door into a room and firing. Then the next paragraph would pick up after the victim was already dead. It was an interesting technique, but it cheapened things somehow and made an already short book even shorter (There are illustrations on at least half of the 213 pages.) The illustrations themselves are in a juvenile style, which perhaps fits the fantastic story elements, but seemed sloppy. (Yes, I know Wilson is an award-winning cartoonist)

An interesting read for buffs and fans of the different, but not really worth a purchase.