Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411290056
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Though Donald Westlake is known primarily as a crime writer, and though there is a murder at the center of this novel, "Baby, Would I Lie?" is not really a mystery.
It's more a novel of manners, a barely fictional examination of the social/cultural/musical phenomenon known as Branson, Mo. Of course, it's also really, really funny. Here, for example, is our heroine Sara Joclyn's introduction to the place:
"Campers, pickups, huge tour buses, station wagons, every kind of motorized vehicle known to man - all crept both ways along this narrow, winding ridge road, two traffic lanes ... flanked by any number of country-music theaters intermixed with the most appalling examples of family fun: water rides, roller coasters, parachute jumps. Bungee jumping inside a tower. Family restaurants; all you can eat at our buffet. Family motels. Family shows. Family shopping malls. And all of it perched like colorful scavenger birds along the teetery rim of this ridge-line, so narrow that beyond the gauntlet of fun on both sides of the road, the stony land could been seen to fall precipitously away into semidesert, as through God had blasted everything else in the whole world and had left just this one meandering highland line of neon glitz as a reminder of what it was that had teed Him off in the first place."
Branson is where singer-songwriter Ray Jones has built his theater and where he's about to be indicted for the murder of one of his cashiers. The matter has riveted the attention of the nation. (The similarities to the O.J. Simpson case are striking. In an interview, Westlake said that if whoever killed Nicole Simpson had done it six months earlier, he'd have had to abandon the book. More about that later.)
Reporter Sara Joslyn is covering the trial for Trend magazine, a giant step up the journalistic ladder from her previous job at Galaxy, a supermarket tabloid. Naturally, the guys from Galaxy are on hand, too, - and they're into to every bit of mischief their fertile minds can dream up - but Sara's immersion in the strange world of Branson is the real point of the novel.
She is astonished by this relentlessly "G-rated place," as Westlake calls it. He describes it with a careful eye for the physical and psychological details of Branson. His portrait of the town is far from flattering. But after three visits and several interviews with people in the entertainment and legal communities, he developed a genuine respect for the performers.
"I don't remember where my head was when I started the book," Westlake said, "but by the time I'd finished it, I admired those people. They're in a sort of wonderful retirement vilage. They're not going to produce anything new; nobody's asking them to produce anything new, but they can still do the old stuff as well as ever.
"They pretend to be simple country boys like you and me but they're really very intelligent, very talented survivors. They're shrewd and sophisticated. They can do their job well enough to get five million people a year to come down to that little town. They enjoy themselves and I like them."
The similarities between his fictional homicide and the Simpson case were a complete surprise. At the time he began work, the last major American celebrity to be accused of murder was Fatty Arbuckle. To imagine how such a trial would play itself out today, he talked to lawyers and read up on the jury system. Though some of the strategies he describes sound bizarre, he said, "as far as the trial is going, the stuff my research said was going to happen is happening."
But that's nothing more than a coincidence and the novel doesn't need that kind of attention. "Baby, Would I Lie?" is simply vintage Westlake; deftly plotted, well written and filled with humor based on sometimes painful truth.
by CNB