It was Free, and Worth Every Damned Penny: Of Mice and Murderers
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Author: John Stockmeyer
Title: Of Mice and Murderers Genre: mystery In a blue-collar suburb of Kansas City, Robert “Big Bob” “the Z-man” “Z” Zapolska plies an uncertain trade as private investigator and sometime “muscle.” His planned NFL career destroyed by a knee injury in his final high-school football game, Z’s middle age is decidedly marginal. His ride’s a scabrous Chevy Cavalier instead of a Hummer and his home’s a converted garage instead of an Aspen ski chalet, but Z does have his principles (a canon some would consider less John Wayne-ish and more situationally ethical). Z has just finished a little job for a college professor, a job that involved the suspension of a crooked contractor (is that redundant?) naked, by his heels, in a setting perilously close to something like a vertical human rotisserie. Did I mention Z’s a bit of a pyro? The grateful prof has something else for Z to look into – it seems a beloved janitor at the local college is dead and the cops are calling the death a suicide (two bullet wounds to the chest? yeah, suicide). Z’s intrigued. And lo, there’s been another death in the little college community; one of Z’s own clients died of exposure, locked outside her isolated house in just a flimsy nightie on a frigid January night. Z’s suspicious. That’s not to mention that a couple of weeks ago, Z’s favorite among all the paintings at the local art museum was ripped off by a fake security guard. They're dropping like flies north of the river, and only our hero Z is smart enough to figure it out. Shame, that: one begins to wonder if anyone from this particular Kansas City suburb has the brains to tie his shoes... John Stockmyer's Of Mice and Murderers (oddly enough, there are no mice mentioned in the text, though there is a murderer) is the first of three potboilers, errr, novels in the Z series. I haven't bothered to look up what the other two are/will be - for good reason. Of Mice and Murderers is a character-driven mystery novel, mainly because you need a plot to be plot-driven. Unfortunately, although the lead character is neither sympathetic nor admirable, he also isn't sufficiently unsavory (or charming) for an Elmore Leonard-style "charming psychopath." When you come right down to it, Bob Zapolska is merely a garden-variety head case. Besides being a budding pyromaniac - Z obsessively burns the empty Sweet 'n' Low packets after his meetings at the Golden Corral - he also suffers from a raging inferiority complex, especially about education (a good candidate for certain anti-intellectual political movements, I suppose). He's obsessively jealous as well, and women tend to find him a little... ummm, scary - and not because he's ugly; though apparently he's not exactly a guy you'd hire as a male model. Perhaps it's his habit of blacking out as he goes into near-murderous rages? And then there's the probability that the idiot will die of a bleeding duodenal ulcer any day now, since he habitually eats aspirin by the handful - crunches them up and swallows the "caustic powder" dry because of the pain of that knee injury thirty or forty years ago. All those nervous tics combine to create a spectacularly unlikeable character. Plot-wise, the novel is weaker than a four-day-old kitten. There are two murders, one barely explained and the second completely lacking a motive. Hoary old tropes abound: you got your grim and grumpy middle-aged detective with a smokin'-hot girlfriend twenty years his junior; you got a blue-collar workin' guy who's smarter than the eggheads; you got your childhood buds who've gone into different family businesses (the cops and the mob). Then there are the plot holes - for instance, although Z "solves" "murder" number two, at least to his satisfaction, he never bothers to propose a reasonable motive. And we have an annoying temporal ambiguity, too: Z drives an '80s vehicle, his chick drives a Stanza (discontinued in 1992), there's a '64 Ford in the plot, and a (middle-aged) character's father blew the family fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. Yet the action has to be after 1990, since there's also a Miata mentioned in the plot. That time spread is iffy, which is only one of several errors in continuity. Of Mice and Murderers is self-published and thus came to me free, and it's proven worth every penny I paid for it. It's marred by its Swiss cheese-y plot, to be sure, but my major objection is the book's main character. Probably intended to be a slightly quirky yet charming "everyman"; Big Bob Zapolska seems instead the embodiment of those slightly threatening, shambling homeless men who congregate at the mouths of big-city alleys, glaring at passersby while shoving dirty 7-Eleven cups in their faces and demanding spare change. He's clearly disturbed: a pyromaniac, a bit of a sociopath, and those murderous rage blackouts are definitely on the wrong side of the charming|creepy border. And can't someone tell the wackjob about naproxen sodium? In the new age of publishing, anyone can get just about anything published. Given the old 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriters for 1000 years, it's likely that somewhere there is gold among the dross; an occasional novel that could be turned into something good with a little attention from a competent editor. Of Mice and Murderers, however, ain't it. all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
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