Carl Hiaasen sure knows how to lead off a story, and he proves it all over again in a savage takedown of Donald Trump. “On the night of January twenty-third, unseasonably warm,” he writes, “a woman named Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons went missing during a charity gala in the exclusive island town of Palm Beach, Florida. […]
Continue Reading...Christopher Buckley is far and away the most accomplished political satirist writing today in America. In novels such as Thank You for Smoking and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, he has skewered the nation’s political establishment six ways from Sunday. Now, for the first time in nearly a decade, he returns to that field of […]
Continue Reading...In the sixth and final entry in Ron Goulart‘s series of Groucho Marx Mysteries, the irrepressible comedian and his trusty sidekick and scriptwriter, Frank Denby, once again wander into the thicket of Hollywood studio politics to investigate a murder. This time around, the murder victim in question is a musclebound would-be actor who has been […]
Continue Reading...You can read the Groucho Marx Mysteries as detective stories in an historical setting. Certainly, they’re conceived and plotted along those lines, and they work as mysteries. The fifth book in the series, in which Groucho exposes Nazi spies in Hollywood, certainly does. But for me the main attraction of these charming little books is […]
Continue Reading...It’s a little hard to believe that anyone could write a satirical story about Donald Trump, whose behavior is so far over the top that he would seem immune to satire. Yet that’s exactly what San Francisco literary phenomenon Dave Eggers has done in The Captain and the Glory. Unlike Christopher Buckley and other well-established […]
Continue Reading...For most Americans who recognize the name, Groucho Marx was one of the three Marx Brothers who headlined a series of 1930s Hollywood comedies, most famously Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera. Yet to me he was the hilarious host of the radio and, later, television quiz show, You Bet Your Life. […]
Continue Reading...If you’ve read many of Carl Hiaasen‘s more than two dozen novels, you’ve probably come across the six-foot-six, one-eyed Florida ex-governor who’s gone feral in the Everglades and subsists largely on road kill. His name is Clinton Tyree, but other than a few close friends, one and all know him as Skink. By partnering with […]
Continue Reading...In the course of his 75 years, Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) published more than 100 novels and nonfiction books. He’s best known for his comic stories about crime capers, especially the fourteen books in the Dortmunder series about (to crib a phrase from Jimmy Breslin) a “gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” He wrote under numerous […]
Continue Reading...Every self-respecting film buff is well acquainted with the Marx Brothers. Both Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera are among the top twelve comic films selected by the American Film Institute, and three others they made join them in the top 100. There were five brothers. But of all five, the only one […]
Continue Reading...What is this? A new Jeeves and Wooster novel? Didn’t P. G. Wodehouse die in 1975? Surprise! Long after the authors died, new novels kept coming out in the bestselling series by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming, Vince Flynn, Stieg Larsson, Robert Ludlum, and Robert B. Parker, among others. There’s a […]
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