Review: Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore

Title: Go to Helena Handbasket

Author: Donna Moore

Publisher: Point Blank Press

ISBN: 9780809557363

Length: 153 pages

Setting: UK, present day

Genre: Private Eye Parody

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4/5

One-liner: A sharp, screwball comedy with the added bonus of being deliciously short.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

First let me say how difficult I found it to review this book without giving away spoilers of not only the plot but where the jokes are. So the review is short. Like the book.

Helena Handbasket’s private investigation practice isn’t doing too well when Owen Banks walks (well crashes if we’re being entirely accurate) through the door and begs her to find out what happened to his brother Robin whose hands were posted to him that morning. What unfolds is a tale of a diamond heist, a serial killer with a penchant for hands (and fish), blackmail and a man whose girlfriends blow up in rather alarming quantities.

This book is to the crime genre what Scrubs is to TV medical dramas: a not-so-subtle but top notch parody. The characters, the story and the writing are all wonderfully absurd. There are clichés a-plenty: portents, brilliant felines, a serial-killer’s contemplative prologue and many more all put together in a way guaranteed to make a crime fan chuckle almost continuously. Humour in general and parody in particular is difficult to get right but Moore has achieved it with a combination of tight, pun-laden writing and an obvious affection for the hard-boiled PI novel. I don’t know what you’d make of the book if you’ve never read a mystery before and haven’t occasionally rolled your eyes at gratuitous femjep or the MacGyver-like survival skills of a protagonist but I’d suggest giving it a go anyway (for the character names alone).

Other stuff

Go to Helena Handbasket is also reviewed at Crime Scene Scotland, Euro Crime and The View from the Blue House

 

Review: Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasan

Title: Skinny Dip

Author:Carl Hiaasan

Publisher: Black Swan (2005)

ISBN: 0-552-77393-X

The book opens with Joey Perrone being thrown head first off a cruise liner into the Atlantic Ocean by her husband Chaz for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Unfortunately for Chaz Joey survives the fall and her stint in the sea. Rather than inform the authorities Joey, her rescuer and an assortment of friends and family have loads of fun extracting revenge by playing with Chaz’ mind and generally making him regret being alive. 

I found this book by a circuitous route while searching for something a little lighter than normal that my face to face book group hadn’t read before. I tried half a dozen books that I was assured are humours and found, not surprisingly, that it’s not only beauty that ’tis in the eye of the beholder. 

I wouldn’t describe the book as laugh out loud funny but it did have me smiling a most of the time. I can’t think of another book to compare it to but it reminded me of one of my favourite movies, Fargo. It’s the same kind of satire and has the same delicious inevitability in the unfolding downfall of the loser husband. The people who populate the book, good and bad alike, are larger than life and full of eccentricities but are credible within the context of the story. Most of them are also very, very likeable. Even the guy who collects roadside death markers.

Even though I’m something of an ageing hippy I found the environmental overtones a bit obvious but they’re a minor feature of the book so not too much of a problem. Despite what it says on the book jacket I don’t know that it qualifies as crime fiction (there’s not much of a puzzle after all) but it’s a sharply written romp of a yarn in the best sense of the word and offers that totally satisfying feeling that comes from a bad guy getting what’s coming to him.

My rating 4/5