book #23

[realthog]

Many, many years ago, at the 1978 Eastercon (UK national sf convention) at the Heathrow Hotel, I picked up a mass-market paperback copy of a book called All Right, Everybody Off This Planet (1972) by an author I'd never heard of before, Bob Ottum. All Right was a (very) funny sf novel in which ETs who prove every bit as cockup-prone as we are attempt a dignified bit of CETI that comes hopelessly unravelled. The late '70s was a time when really the only other authors who were doing funny sf were probably Ron Goulart and Harry Harrison (although, pass the Drano, there were some others who tried); it was therefore quite a surprise to find myself giggling over Ottum's book. The novel was nothing like Goulart, and indeed nothing like Pratchett, nothing like Holt, nothing like Adams; if I had to make a parallel, I'd say it was a precursor of Christopher Moore's work.

It may seem as if I have Christopher Moore on the brain, bearing in mind that Book #22 represented a (failed) attempt to find a Moore substitute. But wait: there is more . . . It was in that very same thrift shop where I bought the Prill book that, in the very same shopping expedition and perhaps even on the very same shelf (oo-ee-oo-ee-oooo), I discovered another novel by Ottum, whom I'd always believed to be a one-book wonder. (Quickly checking the LoC online catalogue just now, I find Ottum, sadly d1986, published several others.)

This novel is called The Tuesday Blade, was published in 1976, and isn't remotely connected to sf. If you judge by the cover blurb. it "takes its place with such memorable spellbinders as The First Deadly Sin, Marathon Man, and The Boys from Brazil" -- but it's a good idea not to judge by the cover blurb, because The Tuesday Blade bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of these books. In fact, the blurb seems to have been written by someone who couldn't be bothered to read the book, but instead skimmed a three-paragraph outline, got the wrong end of the stick, and winged it from there. You can tell that blurb and book are intended to go together, but that's about the extent of things. (Sort of like the catalogue blurb given to my book Corrupted Science by its US distributor, now I come waspishly to think of it.)

Anyway, in the book as opposed to in the blurb, statuesque blonde bombshell Gloria-Ann Cooper arrives from Oklahoma into the Port Authority Bus Terminal, NYC, and while she's waiting for her cousin to meet her is seized and doped by a high-class pimp who keeps her drugged in his posh Park Ave apartment while various of his "friends" pay to screw her. Finally emerging from the sedation, she discovers in the bathroom his set of seven antique cutthroat razors (one for each day of the week) and uses "the Tuesday razor" to exact an extremely gruesome revenge.

Once started, there's no stopping her. For the next few weeks she stalks pimps and slices them up with a will. NYC lives in fear (etc., etc.) as the cops hunt for the murderer they assume must be another Jack the Ripper. Of course, where Jack the Ripper slaughtered prostitutes, this killer is slaughtering pimps, and clever Det Sergeant Tony DeMario becomes convinced the reversal of sexual roles may extend past the victims to the murderer, too.

Don't get the impression this is a serial-killer thriller-chiller, because it isn't. Despite focusing on a serial killer and showing a quite extraordinary readiness to describe violence, The Tuesday Blade isn't a chiller and perhaps isn't even a thriller -- although it certainly makes absorbing reading (one reason why I've finished this book so soon after the last, the other reason being that the book was published back in the days when its 184 pages was a fairly standard length for a novel). From time to time it's pretty funny; most of the while it shows a depth of psychological understanding for Gloria-Ann that you don't expect to find in thrillers -- not compassion, because this isn't a compassionate account, but a certain sympathy. In this it reminded me slightly of a couple of good books that explore, although not quite as well, this same vein: Bradley Denton's Blackburn (1993) and Richard H. Francis's Daggerman (1980). (The latter was my Book #16: http://realthog.livejournal.com/30263.html.) Although I abhor killing, even I found myself having to suppress a little bubble of good cheer each time one of Gloria-Ann's scumbag victims got his. And, like DeMario in due course, I liked Gloria-Ann, and hated like hell the fact that she had to be caught.

Oh, and the book even contains a prediction -- not hugely accurate but uncannily accurate enough -- of Google.