Word: lundgren
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Dates: during 1981-1981
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...Walt Whitman had holed up in a Michigan roadhouse to concoct a mystery yarn, the resulting melange of cosmic erotica, snappish humor and hirsute lyricism might resemble this send-up of the "tecs" by Poet and Novelist Jim Harrison (Farmer, Legends of the Fall). His mock hero, Johnny Lundgren, nicknamed Warlock, is a reluctant Swedish-American gumshoe who has been fired from his job as a foundation executive. He flees to the comforting semi-poverty of rural northern Michigan where irrelevance turns to comic Scandinavian angst. Trysts in his overheated Subaru prove difficult; his forays at gourmet cooking are disasters...
...Lundgren sets out with the family Airedale, a dim, stubborn beast named Hudley who drinks by submerging his head and opening his mouth. An uncertain backwoods cunning helps the make-believe p.i. collar the lumber rustlers, so it's on to Florida to deal with Dr. Rabun's wife...
...series of manic bumbles follows. A naive disguise of clipped hair, a new mustache and a tanning parlor's efforts almost gets Lundgren expelled from a "straight" bar in Key West as a gay tourist. Ever the optimist, Lundgren reflects: "Rare, indeed, is a woman or man so sullied that they can't be rebaptized with a few drinks, a pizza, and a shower." Disdaining the private eye's code of resisting advances by female suspects, Warlock goes on an erotic tear. Mrs. Rabun, an art gallery owner, lures him with cocaine, and her friend Laura Fardel...
Drowning might have been better than enlightenment. Rabun, the relatives disclose, is a nasty pervert and financial highwayman robbing them of rightful trust funds. From the home front, Lundgren learns that Diana and Rabun have been carrying on in his absence. His cinematic version of revenge brakes just short of disaster...
Harrison's humor in Warlock puts the wrong man in the trench coat. Lundgren is a poet, not a flatfoot, a satyr trying his hoof at logic and deduction. Like most literary fools since Don Quixote saddled up Rosinante, Lundgren is redeemed by his own goodness. Harrison's taste for the bat ty sometimes cloys: "He really wasn't so much a fool as he was giddy about still being alive." Lengthy erotic descriptions tend to become postcoital arias. But Har rison scores well on the firing range: his humor usually strikes in the killing zone. Dashiell...