Friday means Friday's Forgotten Books. Barry Ergang is
back today kicking off the shortest month of the year. For the complete list of
books, authors, and reviewers, please surf over to Evan Lewis' blog titled Davey Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West here ..........
MR. MONK IS MISERABLE (2009) by Lee Goldberg
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
In the previous book in this series of original novels based
on the television series "Monk," the obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian
Monk learns that Dr. Kroger plans to attend a conference in Germany. The
idea of not having his three sessions a week with the doctor is overwhelming to
Monk so, as his indispensable assistant Natalie Teeger explains in Mr. Monk is Miserable, "in an act
of desperation and insanity that will probably go down in the annals of
stalking history, Monk decided to follow his psychiatrist to Germany." This,
of course, led to him solving a couple of murders and nearly getting himself
and Natalie killed in the process.
Determined to make a real vacation out of the trip, and
because Paris,
to which she has a sentimental attachment, isn't that far away, Natalie
blackmails Monk into making a trip there. The flight is comical for the reader,
if not for Natalie and the other passengers—especially the one who is murdered,
"It's always murder. Nobody dies of natural causes around Adrian
Monk." Monk solves it, of course (in the novels there are always some
murders unrelated to the primary one for Monk to solve in passing), and upon
landing earns the respect and admiration of Chief Inspector Le Roux and his
assistant, Inspector Gadois.
In Paris,
Natalie and Monk do a lot of sightseeing, Monk often making a nuisance of
himself in the course of things. But he stuns Natalie when he tells her he
wants to visit the city's famous sewers.
This is the man who, after all, is "afraid of germs, splinters, coloring
books, mixed nuts, lint, curly hair, sleeveless T-shirts, balls of yarn, dust
bunnies, Neil Diamond, bird droppings, untucked shirts, granola, Chia Pets, and
so many other things that he's created a list of his phobias that spans several
leather-bound volumes with footnotes, historical references, photographs,
diagrams, and a detailed index." The visit, which is not uneventful,
prompts Natalie to take him for a visit to the catacombs beneath the city.
The catacombs have served for several centuries as a crypt
for millions of bodies and have become a tourist attraction. Its passageways
are lined with walls of different types of bones. It takes an Adrian Monk to
spot, amidst thousands of others, the one skull that is out of place because the
fillings in its teeth are only a decade or so old. And, of course, the man was
murdered. An angry and frustrated Natalie knows her vacation has ended and
Monk's has just begun.
Nevertheless, she is determined to participate in more of
the many delights Paris has to offer, and to that end makes a dinner
reservation at Toujours Nuit, a restaurant she read about back in the States, a
restaurant that provides a unique and sensual dining experience she can't tell
Monk about in advance lest he refuse to go. Shortly after they are seated, they
are joined by a woman named Sandrine who is there unescorted. It is not long
before she quietly tells Monk, "I know who you found." It is not long
after this that dinner ends with a thunk:
Sandrine's lifeless but not knifeless body hitting the floor.
Added to the need to determine the identity of the murder
victim from the catacombs and an investigation of the circumstances that led to
his death, suddenly Adrian Monk has an impossible murder, complete with
locked-room conundrum, on his hands.
What makes it impossible? About this and other story factors
I've been deliberately vague so as not to spoil the experience for readers. I
must add, however, that any veteran reader/viewer of mystery/suspense/thriller
stories will know immediately how one aspect of the "impossibility"
was effected and thus subsequently have no trouble identifying the culprit the
moment a particular item is mentioned. In this regard the book is no
competition for the bafflers of John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot, Clayton Rawson
or Edward D. Hoch, among others.
Readers who are detective story purists, as well as those
who are not fans of or who have never seen the television series, might complain,
and not unjustly, that there are too many "travelogue" passages in Mr. Monk is Miserable that slow the
story and detract from the investigative portions. Since I have always loved
the program and have enjoyed the previous books in the series, I barreled
through this one, occasionally chuckling out loud at Monk's antics, of which
there are many, and did not find the aforementioned passages objectionable.
As usual, Lee Goldberg does an outstanding job of capturing
the voices and intonations of the recurrent characters. I can hear Traylor Howard as Natalie in both
narrative and dialogue, and in dialogue Tony Shaloub as Monk, Ted Levine as
Captain Leland Stottlemeyer, and Jason Gray-Stanford as Lieutenant Randy
Disher.
It is far from the best in the series, but I give Goldberg
points for attempting a less-than-stellar impossible crime story while
providing a mystery that can stand alongside some of the works of Jonathan
Latimer, Craig Rice, and Donald E. Westlake for its comedic value.
Barry Ergang ©2013
Barry’s books for
sale from his personal collection are at http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/.
You can find his fiction at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005GXMF86
and http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/cassidy20.
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