Match Game PM*: a review of David Dodge's The Last Match.
I read another library book -- David Dodge's The Last Match (NY: Hard Case Crime [Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.], 2006 [originally written by David Dodge in 1973; published here for the first time]; ISBN: 0-8439-5596-1;HCC-025; 319 pps., including a five-paged afterword by the author's daughter, Kendal Dodge Butler) -- from Tuesday, 11 August through Saturday, 15 August.
David Dodge is most noted for having written the eponymous novel that was the basis of the 1955 Alfred Hitchcock movie To Catch a Thief, but another of his books was also filmed in the 1950s (Plunder of the Sun), and he wrote a four novel series in the 1940s featuring a crime-solving CPA named James "Whit" Whitney (Death and Taxes, Shear the Black Sheep, Bullets For the Bridegroom and It Ain't Hay); a three novel series published from 1947 to 1950 featuring a gringo PI working in Latin America named Al Colby (Plunder of the Sun is the second novel); and a two novel sequence starring a T-man named John Abraham Lincoln (Hooligan [1969] and Troubleshooter [1971]), which "are Dodge’s most graphic and violent works."
As ever, you gotta love Hard Case Crime's covers, even if the scenes that they illustrate aren't of tremendous importance to the narrative or indeed stretch the linkage to the book's contents to the breaking point and beyond.
The Last Match is the first person story of a nameless ne'er-do-well (the closest thing to a handle he ever has is "Curly" or "Curlilocks," bestowed upon him by his inamorata/nemesis, Regina [Reggie] Forbes-Jones, daughter of an English lord) as he flits from one confidence scheme to another, from the French Riviera to Tangier to Marrakech to Baltimore to Lima to Iquitos to a Brazilian penal camp near Belterra to Belem and back to the French Mediterranean. It's essentially a shaggy dog story and not truly a hard-boiled or noir tale, but fun nevertheless, if you're of a mind to be taken on a long, aimless, mostly amusing ride. The narrator's self-description, early in the first chapter, gives you an idea of what to expect:
"One of the curses of my formative years was an overdose of prettiness. It is mine no more, thank God, age and a receding hairline being as erosive as they are, but mention of this early failing is necessary because of what it did to my youth. As a child I was a lady-killer at the age of six. Women loved my mop of brown curls, my brown calf's eyes with the long curly lashes they all envied me for, my cute button nose, all the rest. (The cute nose got unbuttoned in later years, but even that didn't change things much.) With the cunning of the deceptive little bastard I was I learned to capitalize on these assets, and did so at every opportunity. My parents should have drowned me, but didn't.
"As an adolescent I was an unmitigated young prick, like most adolescents, but a prick with charm I had cultivated since childhood. Girls were easy for me, including other guys' girls. This led to trouble from time to time with one of the other guys, who would feel justified in trying to beat on me. I was big enough to beat back, bigger than average, so I didn't take as many lickings as I was entitled to. In college I began to grow up some, learn different values, but the twig had been bent and the tree was so inclined. Women, including other guys' wives, were as easy for me as girls had been. I even developed a talent for slickering husbands out of beating on me when they should have been beating on me. I became, in short, a college-trained con man; amateur skill, but with all the qualifications to turn professional at any time. Two years of compulsory servitude in the army only deferred my eventual blossoming in the full flower of fulfillment; first, briefly, as a gigolo, later an off-and-on jailbird, in time and with experience as a hustler, bunco steerer and peddler of phony gold bricks."
-- pps. 13-4
There are striking similarities in tone and style to Robert A. Heinlein: a stylized self-mockery that does not preclude a high self-regard; an erudition displayed with an ostentatious casualness, here chiefly evidenced by the narrator's use of foreign profanity and criminal argot (I was pleased to see the French word "grisbi" -- thieves' slang for "loot" -- used here); utterly unbelievable female characters that are little more than fantasy figures from a male's masturbatory reverie (a fault that Dodge's daughter also decries in her afterword; see p. 318); and a meandering discursiveness that is more interested in spieling a Mother McRee than in adhering to any formalities of plot structure (although, thankfully, Dodge doesn't exhibit here any of the ideological hobby-horses that sometimes drag Heinlein's work down). Again, if one is willing to make allowances for tone and POV -- Dodge's daughter notes that The Last Match was written "in the early 70s, ostensibly about fictional events in the 50s and 60s, but in fact reaching all the way back to [her father's] early years in the 20s and 30s" (p. 319) -- and doesn't take any of the events in it very seriously, The Last Match is a quick, entertaining read, which is more than some authors I could name can accomplish.
*NOTE: The "PM" in this post's subject header stands here for "post mortem, and is a shameless pun on a TV game show hosted by Gene Rayburn with risqué badinage amongst its celebrity panelists that I much enjoyed as a lad in the 1970s. Sue me.
David Dodge is most noted for having written the eponymous novel that was the basis of the 1955 Alfred Hitchcock movie To Catch a Thief, but another of his books was also filmed in the 1950s (Plunder of the Sun), and he wrote a four novel series in the 1940s featuring a crime-solving CPA named James "Whit" Whitney (Death and Taxes, Shear the Black Sheep, Bullets For the Bridegroom and It Ain't Hay); a three novel series published from 1947 to 1950 featuring a gringo PI working in Latin America named Al Colby (Plunder of the Sun is the second novel); and a two novel sequence starring a T-man named John Abraham Lincoln (Hooligan [1969] and Troubleshooter [1971]), which "are Dodge’s most graphic and violent works."
As ever, you gotta love Hard Case Crime's covers, even if the scenes that they illustrate aren't of tremendous importance to the narrative or indeed stretch the linkage to the book's contents to the breaking point and beyond.
The Last Match is the first person story of a nameless ne'er-do-well (the closest thing to a handle he ever has is "Curly" or "Curlilocks," bestowed upon him by his inamorata/nemesis, Regina [Reggie] Forbes-Jones, daughter of an English lord) as he flits from one confidence scheme to another, from the French Riviera to Tangier to Marrakech to Baltimore to Lima to Iquitos to a Brazilian penal camp near Belterra to Belem and back to the French Mediterranean. It's essentially a shaggy dog story and not truly a hard-boiled or noir tale, but fun nevertheless, if you're of a mind to be taken on a long, aimless, mostly amusing ride. The narrator's self-description, early in the first chapter, gives you an idea of what to expect:
"One of the curses of my formative years was an overdose of prettiness. It is mine no more, thank God, age and a receding hairline being as erosive as they are, but mention of this early failing is necessary because of what it did to my youth. As a child I was a lady-killer at the age of six. Women loved my mop of brown curls, my brown calf's eyes with the long curly lashes they all envied me for, my cute button nose, all the rest. (The cute nose got unbuttoned in later years, but even that didn't change things much.) With the cunning of the deceptive little bastard I was I learned to capitalize on these assets, and did so at every opportunity. My parents should have drowned me, but didn't.
"As an adolescent I was an unmitigated young prick, like most adolescents, but a prick with charm I had cultivated since childhood. Girls were easy for me, including other guys' girls. This led to trouble from time to time with one of the other guys, who would feel justified in trying to beat on me. I was big enough to beat back, bigger than average, so I didn't take as many lickings as I was entitled to. In college I began to grow up some, learn different values, but the twig had been bent and the tree was so inclined. Women, including other guys' wives, were as easy for me as girls had been. I even developed a talent for slickering husbands out of beating on me when they should have been beating on me. I became, in short, a college-trained con man; amateur skill, but with all the qualifications to turn professional at any time. Two years of compulsory servitude in the army only deferred my eventual blossoming in the full flower of fulfillment; first, briefly, as a gigolo, later an off-and-on jailbird, in time and with experience as a hustler, bunco steerer and peddler of phony gold bricks."
-- pps. 13-4
There are striking similarities in tone and style to Robert A. Heinlein: a stylized self-mockery that does not preclude a high self-regard; an erudition displayed with an ostentatious casualness, here chiefly evidenced by the narrator's use of foreign profanity and criminal argot (I was pleased to see the French word "grisbi" -- thieves' slang for "loot" -- used here); utterly unbelievable female characters that are little more than fantasy figures from a male's masturbatory reverie (a fault that Dodge's daughter also decries in her afterword; see p. 318); and a meandering discursiveness that is more interested in spieling a Mother McRee than in adhering to any formalities of plot structure (although, thankfully, Dodge doesn't exhibit here any of the ideological hobby-horses that sometimes drag Heinlein's work down). Again, if one is willing to make allowances for tone and POV -- Dodge's daughter notes that The Last Match was written "in the early 70s, ostensibly about fictional events in the 50s and 60s, but in fact reaching all the way back to [her father's] early years in the 20s and 30s" (p. 319) -- and doesn't take any of the events in it very seriously, The Last Match is a quick, entertaining read, which is more than some authors I could name can accomplish.
*NOTE: The "PM" in this post's subject header stands here for "post mortem, and is a shameless pun on a TV game show hosted by Gene Rayburn with risqué badinage amongst its celebrity panelists that I much enjoyed as a lad in the 1970s. Sue me.