VOODOO LTD - ROSS THOMAS

AVAILABLE

Full disclosure: I meant to read this thing on a recent flight over to Kansas. It’s basically a perfect airplane book (it’s also soft-cover and the perfect, pocket-fitting size). It’s all plot and milieu and vibe. The story is winding and complicated with all sorts of twists and double-crosses that are hard to remember when you’re not deep in it. It begs to be read all in one chunk, 30k feet in the air. Sadly, I feel asleep on the plane and only finished a little over half, so the rest I read in little fits on trains and buses around town. This is not the way to read a Ross Thomas book. They read fast but you want to break it up into big sections so you can be in tune with all the subtle backstabbing and alliance shifting. His books have this weird quality where you can be totally immersed and swept away after about 10 pages of reading, and once you’re locked in the book flies by and gets better and better, but as soon as you put it down, it all evaporates. Again, the perfect plane read. As for the book itself, I was engaged the whole time. The basic plot is that a movie star is framed for a murder (or maybe she’s a killer, it’s a mystery novel) and her handlers and enablers hire Artie Wu and Quincy Durant (WuDu, get it?) to track the blackmailers down. The blackmailers originally look to be two incestuous hypnotists but as you can guess, the plots and sub-plots and double/triple crosses pile up and someone astutely points out at the end, what would be the final exchange actually ends up being non-existent money for non-existent tapes. A good explanation as any for a McGuffin. Also, the novel takes place in the upper-class West LA, Malibu, Santa Monica world during the Gulf War (the original, not the overlong, tedious sequel) which characters will occasionally comment on. Between these facts and the sort of shaggy dog nature of the plot, I got heavy Big Lebowski vibes (tho not enough drug use to place the novel in the hallowed Psychedelic Noir micro-genre). I like world and the characters, they’re all street-smart international hustlers basically. They do quasi-P.I. stuff but they also make it very clear they’re not tethered to a sense of duty or morality. Actually, if I had a complaint about the book (or Ross’ books overall) it’s that the good guys are too good. You’re supposed to think of the main crooks, Wu, Durant and the various underworld figures they hire, as fundamentally good guys. We never see them fucking over people who aren’t bad and I find it hard to believe that these characters would only scam the wicked. This is a pretty common American trope, the loveable con artist, so I won’t complain too much about it, but it strikes me as wishful thinking. But the general paranoia and low-life schemers that make up the novel are really in vogue right now, perhaps were about to enter a Ross Thomas renaissance (I think they’re making one of his books into a TV show). Ross will remain my airplane go-to. 93 double crosses.