Living the Gimmick (2022)

Retired pro 'rassler Alex Donovan just wants to run his bar in peace, but when his former tag team partner Ray "The Wild Child" Wilder shows up at his door, Donovan knows the drinks will flow and blood may spill. And if the boys wanna fight you better let em. But what's this?! Somebody wants Donovan's good buddy Ray DEAD! So much so that they're willing to blow Ray's brains out on Donovan's doorstep just to prove how serious they are at this murdering business. Donovan must have been blinded by some powder in the eyes or a heel manager distraction at ringside though, because he didn't get a clear shot of who the assassin actually was. Determined to get to the bottom of the case and equally determined to not let the police simply do their own investigation, Donovan sets out on a mission of vengeance to root out Ray Wilder's killer and bring them to justice... one sidewalk slam at a time.

It pains me to say that I struggled to get through this one. As evidenced by my review of Big Apple Takedown, I'm a big advocate of pro wrestling being featured in fiction. I feel like there's an untapped goldmine of potential stories you can get out of using pro wrestling as your main tableau to entertain fans of grapplers and gimmicks, but while Living the Gimmick is indeed a novel featuring pro wrestling as the backdrop, I feel that it isn't exactly written for wrestling fans. Allow me to explain my thinking here...

So much of what is described in the text of this novel by author Bobby Mathews are things that are already going to be well known to any wrestling fan worth their salt. And yet they are relayed to the reader at times in painstaking detail, as if to let an outsider in on the joke and fully explain what some of the insider lexicon actually means. That's why I have a hunch this novel is written primarily for crime and mystery fans who are complete neophytes to the world of pro wrestling or non-fans entirely. A wrestling fan today knows what a double cross is. A wrestling fan today knows what a run-in is. A wrestling fan today knows what a blade job is. These things are all doubly true in the internet smart mark era. At worst, some of the flashbacks we see to Donovan and Wilder's heyday in the waning 80's territory period that were supposed to set up potential suspects who might have enough of a grudge against Wilder to want to murder the dude decades later came across to me as cynical attempts to inflate the page count, such were the lengths of certain asides about pro wrestling minutiae and trivia.

I also found it incredibly strange that while the author has created his own fantasy world where one character is clearly meant to be a representation of Vince McMahon and another character is clearly meant to be a representation of Ric Flair and so on, there are occasional references to real life figures in wrestling history. It's frankly jarring to have all of these fictional counterparts and suddenly there's a reference to a real-life promoter like Paul Boesch show up in the text, or a reference to the Funks. Again, these are small things that a non-fan will never notice. My best guess is the author put the real-life names that the characters are based on into the text while he was writing drafts and then went through and replaced those names with their fictional counterparts later and perhaps forgot to replace a few names here and there. It's either that or he made the baffling decision to sprinkle a few real names in with the others, which in the immortal words of Hulk Hogan, "doesn't work for me, brother."

If you're looking at Living the Gimmick purely from the mystery and whodunnit angle, it does work a lot better. Donovan as a character works well as the inadvertent makeshift sleuth pressed into service for the sake of a fallen comrade in arms. He's got the same world-weariness and beatdown temperament as a grizzled cop style character without actually being a policeman. The main difference is, Donovan acquires his blackened soul from hard years on the road doing the pro wrestling circuit as opposed to hard years working a beat in a crime-ridden neighborhood. There is a mild sense of absurdity where instead of say, canvassing a neighborhood for clues regarding a crime as a police officer might in a more conventional mystery potboiler, Donovan is instead seen trawling through the locker rooms and back offices at a wrestling show searching for leads. This discord exists because the tone of Living the Gimmick is mostly on the serious side, leaning far more towards something like The Wrestler for inspiration than say, Body Slam or No Holds Barred.

For me, this one was a miss. (Or a Dusty Finish if you like.)

Batman (1989)

The Batman's arch-nemesis known as the Joker arrives on the scene in Gotham City to cause chaos and ensure you never rub another man's rhubarb. Hilarity ensues as a man dressed as a giant rodent and a man dressed as a killer clown trade fisticuffs across the city. Bam! Zok! Kapow! Hold on to your butts, boys and girls, it's time to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight!

Fantasy author Craig Shaw Gardner was no stranger to making a quick buck from the film novelization back in the day. Also penning novelizations for Back to the Future Part II and The Lost Boys, Gardner was probably a safe pair of hands to pick to write the novelization for 1989's Batman. There was no guarantee that Batman was going to be the marketing and merchandising juggernaut it eventually did become, but with Jack Nicholson attached to the project for a while and an in-demand Tim Burton directing, there were obvious signs, so this book coming to pass when it did should surprise no one.

After a night at the opera goes horribly wrong and turns Bruce Wayne into an orphan, the grown multi-millionaire cum entrepreneur cum philanthropist cum aloof playboy begins a crusade of fighting criminal scum across the streets of Gotham City disguised as the Batman. The Batman soon crosses paths with Jack Napier, second-in-command of a group of local mobsters with their hands firmly in the pockets of the Gotham City Police. A police raid on Napier and his men at Axis Chemicals turns into a chaotic shootout and although Batman tries to save as many lives as possible, he inadvertently causes Napier to fall into a vat of acid that causes horrible scarring and chemical burns. Napier emerges and dubs himself 'the Joker' and vows revenge on Batman, Gotham City, the police, his former mob associates, and anyone and everyone in between. Meanwhile, an astute photo-journalist named Vicki Vale finds herself drawn into covering the discord surrounding Batman and the Joker's war. Vicki can't quite put her finger on it, but the handsome millionaire Bruce Wayne seems to be connected to this story somehow...

As with many novelizations, what will intrigue diehard fans of the film are the little bits and pieces from whatever draft of the script the author was working from that were either cut from the film or excised altogether before shooting began. For instance, we have a sequence where Bruce Wayne slips on a ski mask in broad daylight to hide his identity and ziplines around Gotham to chase after the Joker and his goons at one point. The existence of such a sequence lends credence to the notion that director Tim Burton was heavily influenced by Frank Miller comics at the time, because Bruce in an impromptu ski mask disguise is something seen in 1987's Year One (and later used by Christopher Nolan in his own loose interpretation of Year One, 2005's Batman Begins). There's also an extended date scene with Bruce and Vicki Vale which includes the infamous horse riding scene that actress Sean Young, originally cast as Vicki, was practicing for when she injured herself and had to drop out of the film. None of this bonus content is essential to the story, but if you're a fan it's nice to have an expansion to a story that we're already familiar with.

And familiar you will be if you've seen the film. Most of everything else on offer in Gardner's book is a close interpretation of what you saw on screen. Batman and Joker fighting in the bell tower? Check. The Joker and his goons raiding the art gallery? Check. Batman being a doofus and revealing the Batcave and his secret identity to the first skirt that flashes her eyes at him? Check.

All of the above would normally be perfectly fine, but this is a novelization that struggles somewhat simply because of the medium it's trapped in. Certain things that make the film version of Batman so cool and so memorable are things that can't really be translated into the written word. One can't exactly channel the iconic Danny Elfman score or the kitschy Prince songs into a book. Nor can they accurately show off Tim Burton's visual flair with the art deco backdrops or the particular rain soaked patina of the Gotham City streets. The Joker's lines of dialogue come across as flat without Jack Nicholson's over-the-top panache in delivering them.

As such, unless you're someone who already collects older film novelizations, I would only recommend Gardner's Batman to absolute diehard fans who want to tear through this as a random curio of the era.