There's this trick to getting newly adopted puppies to sleep where you place a ticking clock beneath a blanket in their basket. The steady, gentle percussion is supposed to soothe the pup, reminding him of his mother's heartbeat. I'm beginning to suspect that Duane Swierczynski's lineage includes crank-smoking wolves based on the relentless, cacaphonic rat-a-tat-tat of the sometimes literal ticking clock engine his super-sticky hard-candy thrillers run on. In fact, I think we could dub Swierczynski and Victor Gischler Romulus and Remus suckling a sugar-rush from the same feral, amphetamine-fond mother and establishing a new technicolor empire of pulp fiction. Theirs is a kingdom built upon principles selected by whim from the bounty of the natural world, seventy-plus years of pop-culture and reckless speculation, where death and pleasure's colors run together, but never dilute, streaking the landscape of an alternate reality familiar as rumor to our own.
Can I confess an elevated pulse when I heard the news that Swierczynski was contracted for a trilogy of books to be released within a year? The synapses clackety-clacking in that big Polish noggin of his churn out some of the wildest stories you're likely ever to mainline and they finish fast as a bag of Skittles. In fact, three in one year sounds like hardly enough to sustain my growling jones. Anyone with me bumping along on the Swizzle-band-wagon can rejoice now upon release of the first installment of said trilogy, Fun and Games.
Charlie Hardy is having a bad day. His house-sitting gig is experiencing some irritating complications involving a flight delay, lost luggage and now a crazy squatter in the basement of the Hollywood domicile he's supposed to be taking care of for a stretch. The first injury he receives comes as a surprise - a jolt that ought to alert him to the stakes he's unwittingly playing for, but alas, he's slow to catch on. By the time he gets blown up and awakens zipped inside a body-bag, Hardy's dormant survival instincts, the ones he honed for years as a policeman, then abandoned after an investigation cost the lives of innocent loved ones, come roaring back and the super-slick team of assassins he's run afoul of are in for a helluva challenge. Like Steven Seagal, Charlie is (cough) Hard to Kill.
Movies are on everybody's mind in this book. First off, the intended target of the hit is an actress, a former party-girl under court orders to straighten up and who knows too many dirty secrets of the big, dumb, beautiful Adonis who's new picture is the tent-pole of a major studio's entire summer. Secondly, The Accident People are pure Hollywood. They don't consider themselves killers so much as story-tellers shaping modern history in the biggest reality-show there is. They go by code names that reference legendary film directors and specialize in offings that appear to be accidental, suicides, murder/suicides (if there're more than one target) or general misadventure. What concerns them most is 'narrative.' How does the story of a target's demise play? Have they produced a plausible plot-line rooted in character and will it leave the desired legacy? They're artists.
Swierczynski has fashioned another hyper-kinetic conspiracy thriller very much in the vein of earlier books like Severance Package and extended an invitation to visit his very own altered-state Swierczynskia (which is going to cut an even broader swath through popular consciousness soon - Michelle Monaghan may be producing and starring in an adaptation of Duane's book The Blonde and rumors persist about an adaptation of The Wheelman with a script co-authored by Allan Guthrie!) BTW, for those keeping score, Fun & Games is the second book this summer to feature the murder of an actress made to look like an auto accident on the PCH (the first being Marcus Sakey's The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes.)
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
