Issue 153 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

If you're tired of pretentious Canadian literary experiences and want a good story that keeps you laughing, Ann Diamond's Dead White Males is a heartening change. Males following David Dennings, Private Detective, as he becomes entangled in a web of double-crosses, femme fatales and - mermaids.

The tone of Dead White Males amused me from the first page. David Dennings, a down-on-his-luck P.I. and part-time hairdresser, (whose slogan reads No Hair Too Thin, No Case Too Small) is sitting and stewing in his office. The phone rings. It's a potential client. Enter the effeminate and flamboyant Nick Maggot, who, in a snappy dialogue exchange, asks Detective Dennings to find Vera A. Utall, who broke his heart. Maggot hands Dennings her photograph. Dennings notices immediately that she's a mermaid. They negotiate.

Private Detective Dennings knows hair. As a result, he encounters characters that are either former customers, whom he recalls through nostalgic shampoo-and-blow-dry flashbacks, or potential customers. He either has done everyone's hair or has the uncontrollable desire to do everyone's hair. Every third line reads like hard-boiled Truman Capote turned on its head - except that in this case, the P.I. ends up falling not only for the missing Vera A. Utall, but his client, Nick Maggot, as well.

Dennings tries to track down Vera A. Utall, working only with her failed thesis - a semi-coherent mish-mash of purple prose and journal entries. The thesis becomes progressively more significant as the author reveals excerpt after excerpt at different intervals throughout Dead White Males. Just as you think you're on solid ground, Diamond pulls the rug from beneath you, keeping you laughing and turning pages as you try to find your feet again.

Set against the backdrop of Montreal in cold winter, I found the novel had good local feel, despite having the unique genre along the lines of The Big Sleep meets Brazil meets Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The title, Dead White Males, refers to a covert group of dusty University professors who may or may not be pulling strings behind the scenes.

Of course, Dead White Males would not be a detective yarn without a gallery of suspicious and strange characters, such as Sergeant-Detective Gaston Plouffe, who dogs Dennings at every turn and the bisexual, cross-dressing Nick Maggot, who could either be friend or foe. Others include the disgruntled Weather Girl, Ramonda Valdez, who Denning thinks needs a new perm, Ned Bone, the literary genius, who has a penchant for young, vulnerable women and Soleil Soleil, the flakey police consultant and witch doctor, who constantly blurts obscure and useless phrases (such as "Missing persons are everywhere").

While at times, the reader may get dizzy from the tangled web of plot as Dennings wanders through Montreal and Venezuela stumbling through surreal twists and turns, Ann Diamond delivers an ending tying up all loose ends - with, of course, the requisite twist. The repartee, snappy phrasing, betrayals and sense of desperation - all traits of the classic Humphrey Bogart flick - work well in a theatre of the absurd. In fact, Dead White Males is one of those rare books that would, on a second reading, like the second viewing of a film, glean more fine detail and laughter.

***

We've all had a strange ride on a bus, subway or taxi at one time or another. Vancouver-based author and editor, Grant Buday, has aptly named Exact Fare Only: Good, Bad & Ugly Rides on Public Transit, a celebration of weird and, sometimes beautiful, travel experiences. An eclectic collection, Exact Fare Only divides the traveler's experience into five segments Reflections, Travelling, Tunnels, The Commute Strange Rides and The Driver's Seats - drawing on gems and lumps of coal from the travel experience. Through many different lenses, the reader gets to see a lot of country.

Betsy Trumpener's story, "Where It Hurts," is such a gem. In two pages, the author dismisses one's doubts of the short-short story form. The narrator, en route to work one morning on Queen Street, sees a bus hit a pedestrian and reacts by rushing out to comfort him as he lays crumpled in the street. The scene evokes a quality of mercy that the anonymous day-to-day, nine-to-five commute lacks.

Buday's other selections add variety where I thought I would simply shut the book. By getting the interpretation of bus drivers and passengers in Toronto, Vancouver, New York City and London, England, through comic strips, poetry or personal accounts, I found passages alternatively readable and mediocre.

Mark Anthony Jarman's "My Empty Sleeve," a passenger's surreal bus trip that begets one mishap after another, left this reader confused and stunned and "Gifts," M.A.C. Farrant's loosely-strung short story piece about a character driving around in a hearse instead of a taxi, seemed only sound and fury. Exact Fare stories, with new perspectives, compensate for weak ones.

"Diary of a Mad Bus Driver" by Brian Pratt (which needs little expanding) put me in the bus driver's seat. "The Customer Is (Eventually) Always Right at B.C. Transit," by Bob Smith, is a hilarious open letter by a driver who simply wants to continue reading pocket novels during brief breaks. Mathew Crisci's "20 Years of Blank Expressions," a subway driver's dismal observations of 'brain-dead' commuters going from suburbia to New York City, shows what toll the daily grind takes on people. Crisci's yarn is surely an ugly one, but perceptive, as are a few others.

The ugliest short story is easily "Blood Transfer." Gregory Betts describes, in straightforward fashion, a drunken bus passenger with a busted, bloody nose trying to get home. The reader doesn't find out how he got there - just how he's trying to get through the stares and revulsion of fellow passengers. The reader makes his or her own deductions from the tone.

In the book's last section, "The Driver's Seat," Exact Fare departs from any semblance of tone with an interview with Bob Smith, bus driver of twenty years. The stories in the interview make this chapter a fine capper. One story, though, proves the success of Exact Fare Only - "Hounded to the Coast."

In "Hounded," the protagonist busses his way from Sudbury, Ontario to Vancouver, B.C., encountering smart-ass kids, a musician, vacationing cowboys, a parolee and all manner of characters that may have walked straight out of a Jack Kerouac book. The catch is that the main character has left a bittersweet love affair behind, effectively taking the lover, Marie, on his trips. Anyone who has traveled knows how easily you can take people without meaning to. The West Coast, as he sees it, can be either a rebirth or death. Passages of the bus rolling on through day and night are punctuated by curt poetic passages describing Dryden, Kenora, Hope and other whistle stops.

Buday has assembled a fair mix of perceptions, one of the finest being "Hounded to the Coast." While the lens is sometimes out of focus, the reader still glimpses rare truths and moments of clarity that we can all see if we look around in our travels. Reading Exact Fare, like in any good journey, I didn't want to step off. Instead, I wanted to see what happened along that road.