Pete Dexter's columns collection, Paper Trails has an apt subtitle - True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence and Forbidden Desires a Surprising Number of Which are Not About Marriage.
Last year, my wife took the kids to visit some family out of town and I was left the run of the house for the weekend. You know that saying about while the cat's away? After a hedonistic forty-two hours, I came to my senses and began cleaning like a madman. I even mowed the lawn and trimmed the bushes... If only I'd stopped at mowing the lawn. Word of advice - don't touch my wife's shrubs. I slept with both eyes open for a month. Any minute I believed she might take my life.
That's as close as I've come to being offed by my spouse and it was terrifying, but it would've been a crime of passion, heat of the moment kind of thing. Believe me if I was to die for my sins it was going to be at her hands. She was not about to pass on the pleasure of her revenge to some professional, some hired killer. There was no inheritance or insurance policy to gain, no illicit lover to go away with and no desire to duck responsibility for it. (You really should've seen those mangled bushes.)
Spouses who wanna do each other in are a staple of my favorite kinds of fiction, (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Stray Dogs Red Rock West), but it's not always the fiery, passionate affair my own do-us-part episode would have been. Folks fester, simmer and slow boil. They plot and scheme and hire third parties to do the fun part and/or take the fall for it. They even get away with it sometimes.
They also have a tendency to hire someone who's in business for themselves. Somebody playing both sides against the middle. Why is that?
Misadventure, the second and final novel from Millard Kaufman, (screenwriter of Bad Day at Black Rock and Take the High Ground) features a marriage with murder on its mind. It's told from the point of view of Jack a slightly unbalanced veteran now working as a realtor in southern California who allows himself to be seduced by the young, pretty wife of a Real Estate tycoon, who then solicits his help in killing her husband.
Jack tries to convince himself he's not the type. She's got him all wrong, but incidents in his past seem to suggest otherwise. And she's awfully attractive. And, it's hardly worth mentioning, but she has promised to pay him handsomely. Money makes everything, even murder, seem so cheap.
Meanwhile Jack chafes while working for men with half his intelligence and when said hubby buys out the small company Jack works for, he sees potential in Jack and utilizes him for sensitive operations that build up to, do I really need to tell you? Yeah, you got it, killing his wife for him.
Toss in some seriously weird and mysterious goings on on an island off the Mexican coast, a pom-pom dancing ex-maid with some unique familial demands and the growing suspicions of Jack's immature and unpredictable supervisor, then put them in the hands of a writer of Kaufman's skill and experience, (did I mention he was in his eighties when he was writing this?) and you've got a first rate book.
Is it a comic novel about murder or a thriller laced with sharp-edged humor? I'm not sure, but I sure wish Kaufman, who passed away during the editing of this novel, were going to be writing more like it.
What about you then? What's your favorite spousal disposal book?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
