Did everybody catch up with Fun and Games yet? If not, you really should consider realigning your priorities. When Mulholland Books announced plans to release a trilogy of books by Duane Swierczynski there was much rejoicing in geekdom (my house). When the schedule was announced – three brand new books in a span of ten months! – there was heard a great clunk-thud-kersplat as I rearranged the psychic furniture and cleared my reading calendar to give myself a full day for each book (I really only need a couple hours – I’m like that dude on Man V. Food with his books – but, much like that dude on TV, I need a day to reset my system afterward). Knowing this, I was responsible with my copy of Fun & Games and only picked it up juuust before I needed to write about it, (aside from David Freese rounding third in game six last week, it’s the most pure fun I’ve had with my eyeballs this year), but I’m afraid I showed no such restraint with Hell and Gone, the pivotal second step in the Charlie Hardie waltz. Sucked it down as soon as it arrived. So fast, I got brain-freeze.
It’s, it’s, it’s… it’s got its work cut out for it, it does. How do you take a book like F&G and write a sequel? Where do you go? What stone was left unturned in the first? Part two of a trilogy has a tough and often thankless job to do: expand upon the mythology established in the first, then subvert and/or deconstruct that universe and end with a cliffhanger that sets things in motion for a final showdown/climax. The second chapter is the ugly step-sister of the first and merely the warm-up act for the third, though once in a while there’s an exceptional second act that performs its function perfectly, and refuses to be relegated to invisible middle child status, (The Empire Strikes Back anybody? How about The Matrix Reloaded? Oh yes, I just did, it was number three that jumped the shark in a single bound.)
So, in case you didn’t know, the Charlie Hardie trilogy was inspired by the recent and bizarre world view adopted by (or dropped upon) Randy Quaid. Even if you don’t know the “Hollywood Star Whackers” of his nightmares , the “Accident People” Charlie runs afoul of should ring half-familiar to anybody who’s spent an evening flipping through the twenty-four hour news cycle of cable TV - the ambiguous “they” who’re responsible for everything from celebrity deaths to the price of gas. The top of their to-do list is the last place you wanna be.
Unfortunately for Charlie Hardy, he occupied exactly that spot for an entire book (I think I mentioned it earlier Fun & Games – go. Read. Now like.) and now he’s graduated to the top of their not-finished-with-them-not-by-a-long-shot-list. Sorry, Charlie. Hell & Gone is a prison novel inspired in part by the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo but, like the lost-in-Quaid premise of F&G, it’s merely a sturdy and springy launch pad from which the story erupts straight – down.
This one is a bad acid trip through time and a very limited space.
Expand the mythology? Check. Subverts the established universe? Yup. Ends with a cliff-hanger? Oh my. The kids are gonna talk about this one. Wilco Tango Foxtrot? Am I the only one getting a Moonraker vibe, here? Sets up a final showdown for the final installment? Uh- yeah. It's gonna be epic - the revolution is gonna unseat the balance of power and unquo the status or something - and it'll be televised, I'm calling that now. In fact, I've got a feeling that several of the cast introduced in H&G could turn up in comic books down the road. They belong there. Point and Shoot, get here already!
Jedidiah Ayres was a bartender, a soldier, a cop, and finally a mercenary and recovery specialist who loved to right wrongs. He also writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
