Barry’s review below is just a small part of the
bigger celebration and honor of Ed Gorman today. Make sure you head over to
Patti Abbott’s blog where there will
be many more in honor him.
MURDER ON THE AISLE
(1987) by Ed Gorman
Reviewed by Barry
Ergang
Tobin is a short man—five-foot-five—with
a far from admirable past and an even shorter temper at times. His stature,
among other traits, has been known to
get him into trouble, as it already has when the novel opens. He’s trying to
dodge the newspaper reporters and columnists camped out in front of Emory
Communications, the company that syndicates Peeps,
the movie review program on which he co-stars with his former college roommate
and former best friend, Richard Dunphy. Why? Among a number of other reasons,
at the night before, at a trendy restaurant, Tobin slugged Dunphy.
Dunphy’s contract with the
broadcaster expires after tonight’s program, and rumor has it that he’s
thinking about not re-signing. If he doesn’t renew, Tobin could be out of work.
Peeps is
notable as “the only movie-review TV show with a live audience,” an audience frequently
full of film students, among whom some are able to respond to the two critics
during the program’s final segment. “Sometimes the result resembled a brawl.” A
vehement disagreement about a film erupts into an actual brawl between Tobin
and Dunphy during the taping of the latest show, requiring stagehands to pull
the two apart—but not until they’ve inflicted noticeable damage on one another.
When, a little later on,
Dunphy knocks on Tobin’s dressing room door and, upon being admitted, falls
into Tobin’s arms, a knife sticking out of his back, Tobin becomes the prime
suspect in the investigation being conducted by no-nonsense NYPD Detective
Huggins, who “reminded him of Frog Face McGraw, the eighth grade’s most
notorious bully.” As far as Huggins and others are concerned, Tobin has more murderous
motives than anyone else connected to Dunphy, but as Huggins explains when
Tobin asks if he’s going to be arrested, “You’ve got a newspaper column and
you’ve got a TV show. And you’ve got a lot of friends. So you’re not on your
way to the lockup, are you?”
“I guess not.”
“But that doesn’t mean that
you won’t be real soon now, Mr. Tobin.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Tobin
says repeatedly, but Huggins isn’t buying it. Thus, in a familiar
murder-mystery manner, Tobin sets out to find the real killer himself. In the
process, he encounters a variety of people he’s dealt with before and others he
encounters for the first time. Some seem harmless, others seem—or are—genuinely
dangerous, and still others reveal things to him about his late partner that he
didn’t know. He also gains some insights into himself, painful though they
often are.
Lest I ruin others’
enjoyment, I won’t reveal much more about this brief, quick read of a whodunit
beyond that it’s very amusing and loaded with wry commentary about popular
music, film, TV, and some of the celebrities therein, and that it’s threaded
with mordant humor that spurs its pace. For instance: “He was halfway to the
bathroom (he was planning on removing his liver and taking it downstairs to the
laundry room and putting it in the drier) when the living-room phone rang.” There
are also some semi-serious, semi-humorous descriptive moments: “He stood there
as if frozen—feeling at the moment completely isolated from the rest of
humanity (no man is an island but some are peninsulas)….”
Murder on the Aisle is a long way from a literary masterpiece, but it’s
a fast entertaining novel likely to provide good reading to mystery fans who
like amateur detective stories with hard-edges melded with some comedic moments.
Caveat:
though it doesn’t abound, there is
some raw language in this novel.
© Barry Ergang 2016
Former Managing Editor of Futures
Mystery Anthology Magazine and First Senior Editor of Mysterical-E,
Derringer winner Barry Ergang's work has appeared in numerous publications,
print and electronic. His website is http://writetrack.yolasite.com/.
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