The Devil in Velvet by John Dickson Carr

The Devil In Velvet

(The following extra was in response to a Red Room Creative Challenge to write about a favorite time travel story.)

My favorite time-travel story is The Devil in Velvet by Golden Age Mystery writer John Dickson Carr, usually known as the master of the subgenre known as the “locked room mystery.”

For Devil in Velvet, Carr stepped away from locked rooms to pen a  bubbly and delightful one-off that’s part time-travel tale, part deal-with-the-devil story, part comic-historical swashbuckling romantic mystery that I like to think must have partially inspired George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman tales.

The novel opens in 1925. Nicholas Fenton is an aging, tweedy, book-bound Cambridge professor who’s become fixated on a murder mystery dating back to 1675 Restoration England that implicates an ancestor of the professor's. If only he could his name and restore honor and dignity to the Fenton line!

Who should flare up in Nicholas’s musty study one night but another Nick, the one known as Old Scratch, to grant Nicholas’s wish.

Unfortunately, Old Horny’s method involves transplanting the meek professor’s soul into the body of the main suspect, a 26-year-old impulse-driven, drunken, sword-wielding rake, also named Nicholas Fenton. (For modern movie-going readers, think the mind of Christopher Plummer forcibly fused with the body of Johnny Depp; older readers, Sir Michael Hordern inserted into Errol Flynn).

To say that this ignites a serious case of inner conflict (as they call it in writers workshops) and Yin v. Yang warfare is putting it mildly. The good professor must not only prove the innocence of his thoroughly disgusting ancestor, but must also save the murder victim’s life without falling in love with her, all the while trying to negotiate the seamy grubby world of Restoration England.

The results are tremendously entertaining, written with precise and vivid color, narrative dash, and great humor. The Devil in Velvet never ceases to enthrall and delight. (It’s one of those books I’d throw at Nabokov and Edmund Wilson when they start carping against genre fiction). I’ve only read one other of Carr’s novels, but according to some fans, this rates as his best. Seeing it through the time machine of my memory brings a smile.

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Sister City Revolution

Bay Area author Matt Stewart has turned loose a bright, peppery, infectious, debut novel, The French Revolution, an irreverent literacy farce that entertains for most of its cheerfully eccentric path. It’s fresh, funny, and bright, qualities seldom found in our overly earnest literature, when low-rent genre novels like Twilight are written with earnestness reminiscent of John Steinbeck and Eugene O’Neill.

Though it alludes indirectly to the traumatic events of 1789, The French Revolution is a contemporary novel and a mock family saga. Its arching tone strongly reminds me of another modern comic classic, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces—a picaresque tale populated by broadly drawn characters enraptured by delusions that range from petty to grand. It’s a comedy about family, food, lust, the quest for power and influence and—maybe less successfully—modern San Francisco politics.

Set in a circus-like world of modern San Francisco, the novel follows the history of the Van Twinkle family from 1989 (two hundred years after the titular event) to 2019. Esmerelda Van Twinkle is a brilliant but failed pastry chef who has retreated into the confines of an Upper Market Street copy shop where, garrulous and gargantuan, she rules with efficient iron hand as she balloons to a weight that forcibly attaches her to numerous modes of special transportation, including a walker. Most of her life seems dedicated to keeping her feet off the ground at all times.

Esmerelda seems no man’s idea of a hot romance. But most everyone’s attractive to someone  and so Esmerelda’s Special Someone is a lovable, coupon distributor named Jasper Winslow to whom Esmie looks “better than a pecan pie at Thanksgiving dinner.”  Jasper’s not just making sport of a fat woman. His sap runs so high that one afternoon, he slips Esmerelda a confectionery mickey and steers her into the blue water bed of a sex club swimming pool where, despite all fleshly obstacles, he leaves her with child.

Two childs to be precise, who pop out precisely on Bastille Day, July 14,  in a gas station bathroom, one of many happy grotesqueries that decorate the story. In tribute to this festive historical day, Esmerelda names the girl Robespierre and Marat, after two of the original revolution’s most prominent movers. We follow this new family home to their dictatorial grandmother and, from there, into the wider, ruthless world.

By tying, however remotely, the French Revolution to a family saga of misfits in San Francisco (the Paris of the West), the book seems to be conveying the idea that the same passions that drove that historic event are mirrored everywhere, even in the family dynamics of colorful outsiders. This not the place to argue whether or not this is true. The real pleasure—as in all novels, dramatic and comic—is in the telling and there’s plenty of that here.

However, events do sag somewhat toward the end. A parallel story following the murderous antics of a teenage East Coast sociopath starts out with great promise, but by the time his bloody path crosses the Van Twinkles’, he’s become less interesting and essential to the story. Robespierre’s entry into local politics doesn’t ping true either. U.S. foreign policy misadventures feel shoehorned in here to little effect, I think. The novel, at this point, loses its savvy as it seems to forget an essential truism, one equally ripe for satire—that all politics is local. As a result, the action flags and the novel stumbles to a whirlwindy but somewhat forgettable ending.

Still, Matt Stewart writes in a refreshing, entertaining voice that dances and sings at happily skewed pitch. I'd look forward to more, if I were you.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author.

Thomas Burchfield's original comic screenplay Whackers will make its debut on Scrib'd on July 5, 2011, also from Ambler House. Other material can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. And if you're still not tired of him, he can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

My Dark Muse: Reading "Dracula" (Part 2 of 2)

(The second part of an article which attempts, rightly or wrongly, to persuade that Dracula by Bram Stoker deserves to be called “literature.”)

“So great was the magnetism of his genius, so profound was the sense of his dominancy that I sat spellbound”—Bram Stoker on Henry Irving

The third stroke of genius to be found in Dracula is how Stoker stage manages his titular character. Once Dracula abandons Jonathan Harker to his blood-hungry (and equally abandoned) wives in his Transylvanian ruin in Chapter 4, the reader seldom sees the Count cavort across center stage again.

Instead, he stays hovering at the edge of the reader’s inner eye, creeping and teasing, red eyes glittering and glowing from every corner. From time to time, he storms in to slake his thirst, then dashes off, a prankish specter from a barely remembered dream, his only mark a bloody stain on the throat and metallic feeling in body and soul. His ability to shape shift and control the elements make him a prankster, screwing with people’s minds for the hellish joy of it.

Sometimes he appears as a stranger in encounters with unwary witnesses (such as a scene set in the Zoological Garden). Often he’s glimpsed from far off: for instance, when Mina Harker comes upon him at a distance as he feeds on Lucy Westenra in the Whitby cemetery (“ . . . and something raised a head and from where I was I could see a face and red, gleaming eyes”).

We also seem him at odd angles, as when Mina glimpses him feeding from Lucy as she slumps across her bedroom window sill; and, in another delightfully eerie episode when Renfield escapes from Dr. Seward’s asylum on one of his otherwise puzzling missions.

Some contemporary readers become impatient with this teasing, with expectations of action from page one. In fact, it would have been easy for Stoker to put Dracula at center stage of every chapter. But he chose not to, and he was spot-on right. He may have rightly sensed that too much of Dracula would only cheapen him, douse his mystery and magic, and diminish his threat. The devil, I recall it being said somewhere, is not even black when dragged into sunlight. Or that matter, under glaring stage lights.

Finally, we come to Dracula’s last stroke of genius. As an astute fellow admirer of this ungainly novel pointed out to me, no one reads Dracula because they want to root for Jonathan Harker, Professor Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Renfield, or even Mina Harker (after Dracula, the novel’s most successful, nuanced characterization).

We read Dracula because we want to root for Dracula and no one else. The real hero of Dracula is . . . Dracula.

In traditional pop genre narratives, the protagonist is always also the good guy, the one we want to like and root, for as writing groups and online reviewers never tire of insisting: the hero must be “lovable” and work for the Good. Even in literary genre works like The Maltese Falcon, the venal Sam Spade still glimmers with some heroism when he overrides his passion to deliver Brigid O’Shaughnessy to the law. He’s not “likable” or “relatable,” but, pragmatically, he manages to do the right thing.

With Dracula, Bram Stoker—maybe without meaning to—turns heroic ideology completely on its head. Count Dracula is a romantic nihilist, barren of even a single redeeming moral feature. He doesn’t even qualify as an “anti-hero,” at least in my understanding of the word. He never invites sympathy. Even the “look of peace” that rises in his face before he sinks to dust, seems an uncertain, tacked-on gesture. The book has not done one thing to prepare us for it. This includes the Count’s remark, during Harker’s memorable encounter with his wives in Chapter 3: “Yes, I too can love” comes across as a shudder-inducing homo-erotic teasing, not an expression of humane sentiment.

Dracula’s attitude toward morality and humanity is as black as deep space, blacker than his sleep: “[Y]our peasant is at heart a coward and fool!” he claims with icy grandiosity. He’s ruthless, immoral, self-seeking and a hundred other synonymous adjectives from Roget’s. Humanity’s blood flows coldly through his veins.

And so my shadow, the place where it's always sunset and midnight and the moon always shines while wolfbane blooms, alights upon the dark earth and dances.

Dracula is, perversely, is the one we root for, the one we’ve always rooted for. How could we not? There is a perverse, anarchic joy about him: the capering of a man free and happy with himself, who savors his Eternal Stay in this Life. As with the purest sociopath, he’s a monster because his awful powers permit it. His real-life counterparts may be found in such figures as Hitler and bin laden.

Unlike real-life monsters though, Dracula is so much fun, this fiend who can shape shift into other animals, make himself invisible, turn himself into smoke and shadow and rides on beams of moonlight; he who commands the creatures of the night and lives free and above our grimy struggles, petty pains and deep loneliness. No matter how base and evil, this magician of flesh and soul, of matter and mind, enchants, a God turned morally inside out.

How does this happen, especially in a work intended to be popular, to soothe and entertain? One easy answer might be Stoker’s clumsy hand with his heroes. Dracula looks so good because the good guys—the ones we’re supposed to root for—are so dull.

So, perhaps, Bram Stoker simply wasn’t interested in his heroes. He put them in his narrative because he had to put someone—keeping with this book’s morally perverse tone, call them antagonists—in conflict with the real hero of the story.

This still leaves the question: Why Dracula the hero? The answer may well lie in Stoker’s thirty-year association with the greatest actor of the Victorian Era—Sir Henry Irving, a titan of his era.

Henry Irving was an extraordinary man. The first actor ever to be knighted by the Queen, he was both enormously popular and controversial and, not surprisingly, domineering and self-centered to a fault. As one story goes, he walked out on his wife for good from their horse-drawn carriage after she needled him about his future as an actor. He never spoke to her again, or, for many years, to their two children.

Stoker and Irving met in 1877, after Stoker, a theater critic at the time, extravagantly praised Irving’s performance in Hamlet. Stoker fell under the spell of Irving’s dynamism and hired on as the energetic, hard-working manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theater. Once Irving fastened on Stoker, there was no letting go.

Most sources—especially Barbara Belford’s book Bram Stoker and the Man Who was Dracula—say that Stoker (along with many others) worshipped Henry Irving. Working for Irving was no walk-on part, involving long, draining hours, exact attention to detail and catering to a boss known for imperiousness, extravagance, and recklessness. It was said that more than anyone, it was jovial, diligent Bram Stoker who kept Henry Irving’s Lyceum from going under until Irving’s death in 1905 (touchingly described in Bedford’s book—he left this life like a trouper!).

As much as Stoker adored Irving, however, keeping after this thundering whirlwind was a chore. It’s not too hard to imagine deep undercurrents of resentment and a certain moral tension welling to the surface. Given the hold Irving seems to have had over Stoker’s mind, it’s not surprising that a loyal employee might build up an unconscious store of resentment: “Can’t kill my boss . . . but I can portray him as a monster!” From there, rose the central figure and hero of Stoker’s most lasting contribution, a magical fusion of love and loathing, a unique palimpsest of the darkest corner of the human spirit.

(Re-edited 6/7/11)

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author.

Thomas Burchfield can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

Nabokov's Gift to a Midnight Reader

Have you ever been pleasurably lost? Have you ever realized you had no idea where you were, but didn’t care, because the wind was blowing softly, gently, at the right heat on your skin as it played its familiar rushing tune through bending reeds.

Rain may have been falling at midnight outside your window, but, within the book in your hands, the flowers were so bright, their colors blade-sharp, you could taste them, drops of candied pearls on your swelling tongue; a green landscape gathers around you, gently swelling and falling in endless
varied rhythms.

The broad band of blue river winds on one side while, on the other, a butterfly flutters, the two of you following the trail as it bends out of sight with the easy curve of the river’s bank.

What’s around that bend? you wonder. There’s not another place in the world I need to be.

That was how I experienced  The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov, a novel—and I’m not sure that’s the word— that is indeed, a gift. I moseyed through it over a couple of months, the kind of book that made me take pleasure in my twice-weekly bouts of insomnia. You read this book in a quiet spot, a favored comfortable chair at midnight; or by a brook with the sun breaking through the leaves, painting its waving patterns on the page; or in a nearby rose garden, in May, when the first blooms burst, pink and scarlet.

Oh, don’t mind me . . . I pour Nabokov into my head, this is what comes out, foolish glitter. . . .

Vladimir Nabokov (whom you know—or should—as the author of Lolita) wrote The Gift in the late 1930s. It was the last novel he wrote in his native Russian, nearly the last before he and wife, Vera, and their only son Dimitri fled as the Nazi wave rolling over Europe caught at their heels.

Though set in a highly charged atmosphere of émigré Russian ex-pats in Berlin in the 1920s, nothing really happens in The Gift (though it’s set during the decade when Nabokov’s father was murdered by Czarists). There’s infighting at the edges, but no black-leathered Stalinist agents, no one getting killed, though death’s chilly eye slyly winks, here and there. Conversations take place that are largely fictitious, little plays acted out on the secret theater of a young man’s mind.

That young man is a poet—name of Fyodor—whose mind opens into new awareness as he wanders through the large Russian émigré community, a community whose hopes of returning to their lost Russian homeland are fading as the Bolsheviks tighten their grip and Nazism’s stench still waits to smoke its way across the world.

In the roaming course of this novel, Fyodor publishes a book of poetry read only by a few. He’s asked to write a book about a young suicide and declines. Somewhere along the way, the sight of a pale blue dress inspires Fyodor to move into an apartment and start an affair with a girl living there (even though it’s not her dress).

Fyodor pays tribute to his beloved father, a noted and passionate lepidopterist who vanished on a butterfly expedition in Central Asia; Fyodor conjures himself into journeys he was never able to be part of. One page contained a lyrically strung list of all the butterflies Fyodor’s father had brought home from one of his expeditions. (I noted them down and Googled most them with only lumpy success. Nomenclature is even more slippery than reality, I guess.)

Fyodor also writes and publishes a take-down of a famous Russian Revolutionary writer (and favorite of Nikolai Lenin’s), a project that fails. This section is considered by critics to be a parody of biography, a genre Nabokov apparently disapproved of. The universal disparagement that greets Fyodor’s effort—even the anti-Bolsheviks hate it--comes also, I think, because the project emerges from a false place within himself; his book is a rejection of a world he wants nothing to do with anyway, a diversion from the new world awakening within, a new eye that some people call the soul.

But failure never fazes Fyodor. As he’s already lost one world, he realizes, the world he is in now will soon also no longer be his. There’s no anger, as we roam along with him, seeing the world through his exquisite eye. Even when his clothes are stolen from him on an afternoon walk in the park, there’s no panic, resentment or even a ink blot of bitterness; just an offbeat wonder:

“When he left the forest and started to cross a street, the tarry stickiness of the asphalt under his bare foot proved to be a pleasant novelty.”

As mentioned, I got lost as I wandered through these fields of eloquent prose. Much of the “story” is also taken up with Fyoder’s passion regarding Russian literature (the “hero” of the book, as Nabokov describes it in his introduction), long philosophical disputes about writers I’d never heard of and
even whose This-World existence I faintly doubted. (In the three decades since I first read Pale Fire, I see Charles Kinbote lurking behind every weedy Nabokovian semi-colon, sticking out a comma-root to snag my foot and send me sprawling.) With any other writer, I would have closed the
book and said not a word, even about its brief lifespan on my shelf.

I read on, taking deep pleasure in the not-knowing as I sailed along on the rolling, supple waves of Nabokov’s prose, his skewed, stunning, and somehow true, perspective. Like no other author I’ve ever read, Nabokov saw into things, into life’s slippery, shifting beautiful nature, into how the world cascades by. He must be the most fervent and mystical of literary writers in English.

In her recent novel, Cleaning Nabokov’s House, Leslie Daniels neatly proposes that the secret to Nabokov’s magic lies on how he writes his sentences: “Because the word string and the thoughts behind the words are so original, the reader’s brain can’t jump ahead . . . . So the reader is suspended in the

perfect moment of the now” (quoting from my advance proof copy).

The great genre writer Donald Westlake said Nabokov’s  mastery “was to make you feel the emotion in a scene without ever referring to it directly. It all roils below the surface while the surface remains apparently calm.” (Taken from Westlake’s website; that other genre writers, such as Ramsey Campbell and Peter Straub, are drawn to Nabokov's flame—the fire of a fantastic, often exasperating, snob about literature--would make for a small monograph.)

One clue I stumbled on as I took my solitary late-night ride on his supple prose, was the way The Gift revealed how a certain kind of mind blooms. Toward the end, I realized suddenly that the flow of Fyodor's thoughts and observations more than ucannily matched the flow of my own, like two distant—and very different--streams suddenly flowing together and through each other.

Not what I think about things, but how I think about things.

As I thought, again and again, That’s how I think, I saw Vladimir Nabokov’s book as giving voice to human consciousness, to Being,—complex, intricate, intense and always shimmering and shifting. To me, The Gift was an invitation to a quiet spot to see my experience—though distant and comparatively colorless—reflected playfully, lovingly, in another’s.

And so, back goes Nabokov’s Gift on the shelf, a gift, in a way, to him, so that someday, he can present it to me again.



Photos by Author

Thomas Burchfield can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.
 

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Ms. in a Dresser Drawer

As a newly coined Nabokov Nerd (and lone student in my Nabokov Studies class, often conducted during sleepless midnights), I couldn’t pass up the free, advance, uncorrected copy of Leslie Daniels’ debut novel Cleaning Nabokov’s House when its blue and white cover gleamed at me from the Simon & Schuster display table, during a booksellers convention in Oakland last October.

The story seemed irresistible. A divorcee moves into the house that the great writer and his wife, Vera, occupied while Lolita emerged from its cocoon. She then unearths (or undrawers) what may be a lost, unfinished novel by the Master Conjurer.

Oh, There Will Be Trouble, Won’t There?

That it turned out to be not quite what I expected may say more about this reader—a male genre writer, mostly ignorant of “women’s fiction.” I find this genre hard to relate to, as Nabokov seemed to have found Jane Austen hard to relate to, though he taught Austen’s Mansfield Park when he was a
professor and, I’ve read, was a greatly beloved teacher.

And so, Cleaning Nabokov’s House is not a book I melded with. Still, I still found things to like throughout this wry, gentle comic novel of contemporary life. (In fact, it has just occurred to me, we might read this narrative as Nabokov Meets Austen.)

Leslie Daniels is very good company, a sparkling writer with a spirited heroine and she seems to play her first novel in three sprightly keys.

The first key: Our narrator and heroine is Barb Barrett, thirty-nine, recently divorced and cruelly deprived of her two children, Sam and Darcy, by her intolerant, über-competent husband. Like some of Nabokov’s protagonists—the smitten young man in Glory and the lost professor in Pnin—Barb is an
exile. In her case, though, she is an internal exile, a Manhattanite who’s been cast away in semi-rural upstate New York. She sees herself as an incompetent, her only justification her love for her children.

Barb’s determination to remain in her childrens' lives confine her to the fictional upstate town of Onkwedo (which seems to stand in for Ithaca, where Nabokov taught at nearby Cornell University, here called Waindell). Her psyche must somehow survive in this apparent Dullardsville on meagerly parsed parental visits while she ekes out a living answering customer mail for the Old Daitch Dairy company.

Meanwhile--through an inheritance that shows up and disappears rapidly, at least in my review copy--Barb winds up buying and moving into the house where Vladimir and Vera Nabokov once lived.

Not long after, the second key is played: On a lonely morning, Barb yanks open a sticky, built-in, bedroom bottom drawer. Inside, sits stacks of index note cards. They contain the text of an epic novel about baseball. This may well be an incomplete draft of a lost novel, a Forgotten Treasure by the Master Exile himself. From there, Barb launches a quest to have the manuscript authenticated and, then, to find herself an agent and then a buyer and a publisher.

If you’re thinking, ah, here is where the action really begins, an adventure through the crazy, mad world of contemporary publishing, disguised as a Maltese Falcon story, you’re only partially there.

There is one more chord to play.

While out walking one day, her thoughts twining around her children and the suppressed sexuality she senses in the lives of women of Onkwedo, Barb weaves a unique and perilous scheme: Make enough money to regain custody by opening a brothel, located on the town’s bucolic outskirts. This brothel would unbank the frustrated sexuality of Onkwedo’s women, and be staffed by the best, most-willing young hunks that Waindell University can provide. Barb adds another layer of rationalization by collecting information about her clients’ sexual preferences, for “scientific purposes” (a plot thread that doesn’t amount to much).

Barb’s whorehouse adventures make for some of the most amusing episodes, but if your ear is telling you that these three chords do not play well together in chorus, you might be right. The novel is funny in places—Barb Barrett is as bright, spirited and witty a heroine as we’re likely to meet anywhere—but her story never seemed to roar together into a single flame that ignited that wick at the top of my spine. The result is a read that feels spotty and disconnected.

Cleaning Nabokov’s House seems a little afraid of its plot elements. In a comic novel (as in genre novels in general), calamity lurks around every corner as our dreams and vanities crash hilariously into inscrutable reality and the agenda of the larger world.

Perhaps out of kindness, the author seems to dodge or pull away from the potential disasters in Barb’s plan to run a gigolo pen in a conservative rural university town. The mind (or mine at least, more cunning, sadistic, and delighting in exaggeration) boggles in anticipation of the Things That Could Go Wrong . . . but except for a few narrow squeaks and a clever but unremarkable twist during a custody hearing, events never really plummet south as we might like them to--

--for instance, a cross-country chase, with Barb fleeing like guilty Humbert, her young studs in tow, as the law, representing Society’s Indignation, snaps at her heels--

Also, I found it hard to grasp the place of the Lost Treasure. The title leads us to expect it to be the central theme, but—and I might be wrong—its echo registers only faintly in the other
chambers. I half-expected a loving but perhaps tormented meditation on the surprising impact of a great writer’s work; not just his lost artifact, but his Art—buoyant and dangerous—on the life of someone discovering him for the first time. A blooming of the soul both delightful and fearful—

--which climaxes in a cross-country chase with the heroine clutching the manuscript, as desperately as Humbert clutches his Lo, while Nabokov’s son, Dimitri, plus a pack of greedy lawyers and crazed jealous scholars, dog her every step.

While the novel provides revealing nuggets about Nabokov’s work, the artist’s shade seems to reach only so far before fading. His reflection seldom shows. Did the mysterious manuscript—a magical object, I'd say--somehow inspire Barb to open the brothel? It’s not clear. How does it relate
to her struggle to regain her children or to her romance with a handsome local? I’m not able to tell.

It would be of course, grossly inappropriate and unjust to compare Leslie Daniels’s writing (or anyone’s, especially including mine) with Nabokov’s, a danger the author neatly disarms herself when Barb tries to fill in a missing chapter in the Lost Novel with her own prose.

Still, whenever any famous artist winds up in fiction, we always look and listen closely for that voice, for that face, even if it’s just a glimpse, through a shade of another mind. If my comment above is correct—that this novel is a case of Nabokov Meets Austen—then maybe it’s Austen’s artistry
that shines through here. Cleaning Nabokov’s House seems a little too cleansed of Nabokov for me.

Photo by Author

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield


Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published this Spring by Ambler House Publishing. Other essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.
 

 

The Exciting Secret Adventures of Naked Man

Author John-Ivan Palmer’s long colorful career in American show business gives him a lens able to focus on corners far removed from the experience of most writers.

Since the 1960s, the peripatetic Palmer, has roamed the country, first as a magician and, later as a popular stage hypnotist and mentalist. Along the way, he's written a huge number of of distinctive, often brilliant, articles on the often-treacherous ins-and-outs of the fading world of traveling show business folk. He is, in his words, "the only known literary author who is a stage hypnotist."

In his long overdue first novel, the farcical, roughly charming and racy picaresque Motels of Burning Madness (The Drill Press, 195 pp; available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc.), he takes willing readers on a fast, entertaining, bawdy, no-holds-barred voyage into the musky backwater swamp of male strippers and other remote bizarries of live entertainment in America.

Though very explicit, Motels is not a sex novel at all of the type found in Borders’ erotica section. Instead, it's a picaresque novel, a traditional form stretching back to Ancient Rome and Petronious' Satyricon. Set in the early 1980s Rome of Los Angeles, its protagonist is Huey Dubois, a 24-year-old gigolo and stripper of fine uncut endowment, not much brain, but more heart than you’d expect. Handsome Huey is a misfit’s misfit—a good soul who’s not much good at anything but being a prancing, g-stringed boy toy, and because of that, he always seems to be bumping n’ grinding away in survival
mode. He’s paradoxical young man: though an exhibitionistic gigolo, stripper (and other kinds of performance, er, artist), he pursues these pursuits while a sense of misplaced honor constantly struggles to break through his selfish exterior.

Even his own private desires make him a freak in an environment already a-roiling with alternative, offbeat desires (S&M fans and the like). Huey has little taste for women his own age. He likes them older. In fact, much older as revealed in Palmer’s sympathetic portraits of Huey’s three main forty years-plus paramours: Malibu matron Madelein; Debra, the abused, lonely wife of an L.A. cop; and, the real
song of his heart, Gloria Madlock, the late-night waitress at the Donut Hole for whom Huey loyally puts on a free midnight show from behind his hotel window, san culottes.

As the novel opens, Madelein from Malibu has just given Huey the boot out of her beachfront bodega in the mis-belief that Huey stole her jewelry. The next day, Madelein winds up mysteriously dead. Not surprisingly, straight society’s suspicion naturally turns toward Huey, who, like his associates in the sexual underworld, is no friend of law and order, lying to the cops even when he’d better off telling the truth.

Soon, Gloria herself mysteriously vanishes as the law closes in. Huey has to leave L.A., but on the way out, he takes us on a gamy, hair-curling tour through the underground of male strip venues, “staggette” parties, private video shoots, all of this arranged by some of the sleaziest, most crooked agents imaginable.

With the hot breath of the law steaming his shoulders, Huey jumps from a bedroom window and lands in a fugitive’s gig--a traveling male striptease troupe that takes him through Las Vegas and on a zany zigzag into America’s heartland (where the biggest audiences of all exist for this kind of entertainment). This barrel-bottom, Barnum & Bailey male animal act happens to be the hideout of a fellow narcissist whom Huey suspects made off with both Madelein’s jewelry and her life: the perfectly named Billy Slipton.

After a series of entertaining and tawdry mishaps—why anyone would ever choose this showbiz career path befuddles my comparatively conservative mind—Huey rips off and gives the nefarious Slipton the slip and sets fire to the troupe’s motel in his escape (hence the title).

Hugh finally tracks his beloved Gloria in Omaha, only to learn that she, like so many in this world, keeps her own secrets, even while parading naked.

After a pungent exploration and analysis of women’s mud wrestling (there’s actually a business and craft behind this performance genre), Huey learns once again he’s only found another bad refuge and so must flee. From there, he stumbles into my favorite stop-over in the entire novel: Clown Town, a bizarro setting that could birth a whole novel of its own inside its limits. (At this point, I must leave you to discover this community for yourself.)

At the end, Huey does land on his feet, a little wiser and, as he realizes with touching insight, a little older. Like other comic heroes, he may not get what he starts out wanting, but he gets something much better.

Palmer—who worked as a male stripper to research Motels (I doubt George Plimpton went so far)—describes Huey’s world with lively evocative care, insight, humor and remarkable kindness. Such a milieu is a natural target for easy putdowns and lazy, knee-jerk moralism. Palmer avoids both.

Sometimes, though, the narrative seems thin. We’re told little, if anything, about Huey’s background and the plot eventually seems to drift away from its whodunnit aspects. Motels of Burning Madness could have burned on for a few pages longer; for example, I wanted more insight into Huey’s brief sojurns of dancing in respectable middle-class households. Though, with a roomful of women grabbing at his intimacies, Huey probably doesn’t have much time to ponder the family photos he passes by and reflect on his outsider's role in the secret world hidden behind those bland smiling masks.

(Photo by author)