Three complete mysteries Book

Three excellent crime novels in one volume. Well, two excellent crime novels and one quite good one but the quite good one is the first novel Kinky Friedman wrote in this ongoing series and although it is weaker than the others it does contribute to the overall context in which the other two exist, so it justifies itself more than adequately in my view.

A Case of Lone Star is the first novel in this omnibus and this was my introduction to the one liners and dry observational comedy of Kinky Friedman's prose style. I quickly learned that the plots are not important in these books. Each novel is a repository of superb one liners and is suffused with a specific noirish ambience that is neither bleak nor sunny but entertaining and offbeat. The action takes place in the New York of the mid to late 1980s but there are memories, allusions, references to other times and places, usually the more southern states of the USA and especially Texas. In this novel the focus is on country music and country music turns out to be indirectly responsible for the crimes that are committed.

Greenwich Killing Time is the second in the omnibus but was the first to be written and this is the weakest of the three. The jokes are less well crafted (but still good) and the characters are a little less quirky and meaningful. It was a wise editorial decision not to position this novel first in the omnibus. When the Cat's Away is the third and perhaps the best of the three. Once again, the plot makes no real sense. There are many red herrings and no real effort is made to integrate them into the main story. But none of this matters. The atmosphere is rendered perfectly and the general feeling of hard-bitten cynicism (with a deep underlying compassion) works well, though it must be stressed that the humour in this book is more savage than in the other two and I winced more than once at some of the pejorative terms used by a few (or even most) of the characters.