Review of Mangrove Squeeze by Laurence Shames (Ballantine, 1998)

Aaron Katz has packed in his Wall Street job and headed to Key West with his elderly father to take over a rotting guest house, The Mangrove Arms.  Suki Sperakis is a College dropout who’s drifting through life, presently selling ad space for a local freebie paper.  She’s intrigued as to how all the Russian-owned t-shirt shops manage to turn a profit, suspecting they’re a front for laundering money.  Using her job as a cover she starts to investigate.  In the meantime, she meets Aaron and Eros casts his spell.  Then she disappears, seemingly the victim of the Russian mafia.  Along with his inventor father, his friend ex-mafiosa Bert the Shirt, and Pineapple and Fred, two vagrants who live in a ex-hotdog van, Aaron sets out to rescue Suki and take on the bad guys.  

During the 1990s Laurence Shames published a series of standalone comic noir novels set in Key West, Florida.  Mangrove Squeeze was the fifth.  In the tradition of Carl Hiassen and Tim Dorsey, Shames sets ordinary people in the crazy underbelly of Florida, interacting with a motley crew of colourful characters as they’re caught up in a madcap escapade.  So it is with Mangrove Squeeze, with Aaron and Suki taking on plutonium smuggling Russian mafia aided by two philosopher vagrants, a retired mafiosa, and Aaron’s dementia suffering inventor father.  The result is a tightly told tale that rattles along at a fair clip.  There’s no major surprises and it’s all a little predictable, but nonetheless it’s enjoyable jaunt, made-so, I feel, by its engaging assemble of well drawn actors and their interactions.  And there are some genuinely amusing moments, especially Fred and Piney ruminating on life, the universe, and whatever else comes to mind.

Review of Nice Try by Shane Maloney (Text Publishing, 1998)

Murray Whelan, Labour party fixer and advisor to the Minister for Water, has decided to try and give up cigarettes and get fit, joining an exclusive fitness club.  There he meets the beautiful aerobics instructor, Holly Deloitte, who he’d last met when she did a work experience placement as a tubby, pimply youth.  This is quickly followed by an encounter with her ex-boyfriend, Steve Radeski, a bodybuilder with a roid rage problem whose father was a member of the Polish weightlifting team at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and had defected, marrying a local girl.  After a narrow escape, Whelan heads to a meeting about Melbourne’s bid to host the 1996 games, the awarding of which is perceived to be the only way the Labour party will stay in power.  He’s asked to switch jobs for a week to help manage the visit of three IOC members - from Senegal, South Korea and Poland - and agrees to do so, but only after bargaining that his son, Red, currently living with his mother in Sydney, gets to hand the Olympic torch to the delegates at a gala dinner.  His task is to marshal an aboriginal agitator who’s intent on using the games to campaign for land rights.  It seems to be going to plan until a young aboriginal tri-athlete is murdered and one of Whelan’s colleagues goes missing.  And to add to his woes, his car has been stolen, he’s fallen for his doctor who shares his smoking habit, and Holly wants his help dealing with Radeski.  All he needs to do is keep a lid on things until after the gala dinner, but that seems all but impossible.

Nice Try is the third book in the Murray Whelan series of political satires/crime stories (my reviews of the first two are here and here).  Whelan is a three steps forward, two steps back kind of political operator -- wise to the games, shenanigans and back stabbing, but unable to always capitalise and often out manoeuvred or prey to rotten luck.  He also has a habit of walking into explosive situations and those involving dead bodies.  This is the case in Nice Try where he is co-opted into helping out a young woman whose former beefy boyfriend is seriously unhinged and roped into trying to shepherd a three person IOC group in Melbourne to assess the city’s bid to host the 1996 Olympics.  Whelan is affable, self-depreciating, shambolic lead character and Maloney populates the story with a set of colourful schemers.  The story has some nicely observed and amusing political satire and farce, though it’s never quite laugh out loud funny, and the contextualisation with regards the Olympics bid and the previous games held in the city is well done.  Whilst the plot is engaging, it does overly rely on a couple of large plot devices mainly to do with the personal intersection of a number of characters that all happen to be in Whelan’s life at the same time.  Overall, a tale that is a little too contrived, but is nonetheless a fun read.