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Barry Ergang's FFB Review: Murder On The Aisle by Ed Gorman
From the
massively magnificent archive …
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,
2022
Among his other works, Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s
locked-room novelette, The Play of Light and Shadow, can be found in e-book formats at Smashwords.com and Amazon.com
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