THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408120521
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
THE GAME OF THIRTY
WILLIAM KOTZWINKLE
Houghton Mifflin. 262 pp. $21.95.
NEW YORKER Jimmy McShane, ex-USAF, is now a private investigator with a sense of humor and fewer vices than the average priest. He's given up smoking and drinking, and makes a constant effort to avoid lustful thoughts - or at least not to verbalize them. William Kotzwinkle, author of Doctor Rat and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, makes McShane the good guy in his new suspense novel, The Game of Thirty.
Having ``shadowed humanity into its darkest corners,'' McShane is used to photographing the rich unfaithful in cheap motel rooms or disarming the thuggish unrepentant in parking garages. Tough work, but it finances the latest tools of the trade, such as radio-pens that, slipped into a suspect's desk set, allow eavesdropping from a quarter-mile away.
While up to speed on gadgetry, McShane is the first to admit he's no aesthetic whiz. His agency is turned out in sleek vintage Deco only because a former fiance ``. . . at her insistence and my expense, decorated my office. Before she came all I had was government surplus furniture and a Security Police desk set; if you'd hummed The Star-Spangled Banner everything in the place would have stood and saluted. Now my ex-fiance is gone, and I'm mistaken for a man of taste.''
The sophisticated veneer helps when a Madison Avenue antiquities dealer named Rennseler is murdered and his daughter Temple hires McShane to investigate. Like his hard-boiled fictional predecessors, the P.I. is smitten with his attractive client after a few whiffs of her perfume. (``It was Spellbound. I know perfumes pretty well, because following rich women to their hideaways is something I get paid for.'')
What's not pretty is how the deceased got that way: injected with cobra venom, then disemboweled, and his vital organs are still missing. NYPD homicide concluded that since Rennseler dealt with Egyptian criminals to procure rare (read, illegal) artifacts, and didn't always pay his bills, the dealer was assassinated by an unhappy business associate. One cop sums it up delicately: ``The ragheads don't like to be treated that way, especially by Americans.''
So McShane calls on a Cairo contact and begins learning the ancient Game of Thirty, playing it on the set that was given to him by the appreciative Temple. She'd been in the midst of a game with her father before his death, and noticed his piece had been moved - back to the penalty square of Rebirth.
McShane conducts the investigation blearily, having given up caffeine on the advice of Henderson, a naturopathic chiropractor (and unrequited love interest), ``. . . because I'm in love with her. Eliminating smoke, alcohol, and coffee had pretty much ruined my nervous system, but there's little I won't do to impress a woman.''
McShane does his level best to console Temple, but then discovers Rennseler was a pretty unsavory character. And soon realizes the murderer is playing The Game right along with him. Life starts to mirror his last move, and the ancient pastime becomes both a metaphor for and a prediction of the next danger in store. Finally all Manhattan, from the luxury co-ops of Fifth Avenue to the urine-scented alleys of Times Square, becomes a giant board on which McShane tries to jump the mysterious killer first.
Near the end the plot takes a seamy trip into the depraved underworld of modern sexual slavery. In a final twist the killer's identity is revealed, though perhaps the author foreshadows this too well. Still, The Game of Thirty is irresistible: a satiric take on 1930s-noir detective stories, a thriller with literary references and witty dialogue. In updating Sam Spade's tough guy to the quintessential '90s guy, Kotzwinkle pulls it off with panache. His locales and characters are alternately ominous, hilarious and heartbreaking. His is a world Dashiell Hammett would both recognize and be appalled by - in other words, our own. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern Shore,
where she is at work on her second novel. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
HANS PFITZINGER
William Kotzwinkle's thriller ``The Game of Thirty'' recalls the
world of Dashiell Hammett.
by CNB