Spanking Watson
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REVIEW BY JAY LEE MACDONALD
When last we visited the cockeyed world of country-singer-turned-amateur-sleuth Kinky Friedman, a chunk of ceiling plaster, dislodged by Winnie Katz's lesbian dance class upstairs, had transported the vicar of Vandam Street on a comatose trip back to the Seventies. In Blast from the Past, he revealed the origins of his loose-knit supporting cast, the Village Irregulars, while Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman scampered about, using the then-struggling musician's crash pad as a most unlikely safe house. In his 12th comic mystery, Spanking Watson, the Kinkster concocts a cold revenge on his upstairs neighbor, and of course things go immediately awry. A death threat to Winnie, written in a drunken haze by Kinky himself, becomes the vehicle by which our snockered Sherlock hopes to determine conclusively which of his motley Irregulars is the penultimate Watson. With an almost criminal glee, Kinky dupes and recruits his colorful cronies to find the would-be assassin, then unleashes them on the unsuspecting Winnie and her Danskin-clad students like a horde of locusts on a summer field. When he learns that someone actually is intent on killing Katz, the merry chase begins in earnest. No Kinky novel would be a Kinky novel without plenty of outrageous asides, and in Spanking Watson Friedman happily stampedes roughshod over the full range of racial and sexual stereotypes. In a New York taxi, he implores the Pakistani driver, "C'mon, you're in America. Speak Spanish." His Italian-American references, from the plaster repairmen sent by mob capo Joe the Hyena to his nun-holds-barred search for one Genovese Maria Tortellini, are unlikely to win him any speaking engagements at the Sons of Italy. Ever the equal opportunity offender, Kinky free-associates his way through a hilarious chapter-long Talmudic treatise that manages to improbably link Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Groucho Marx, Jack Ruby, Lenny Bruce, Joseph Heller and Gabby Hayes. Perhaps even more blasphemous is this exchange with his Zionist buddy Rambam: "Beats watching Seinfeld," I said. "Anything beats watching Seinfeld." What does any of it have to do with Le Petomane, the Moulin Rouge novelty act whose tuneful gastric emissions were all the rage of gay Paree from 1892-1914? Don't ask. Like Cracker Jacks, one does not buy a Kinky Friedman novel for the free puzzle inside, but for the deliciously sweet and nutty trip to the bottom of the box. Jay Lee MacDonald is a writer in Naples, Florida.
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