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.)

Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

After a client is killed on his watch, Los Angeles-based private detective Philip Marlowe finds himself embroiled in another puzzle box of a case involving jewel thieves, a corrupt fortune teller, some crooked cops, a gambling ring evading the local law, and a not-so-gentle giant hoodlum on the prowl for his treacherous ex-girlfriend. Grab your cigarette case and the nearest carafe of black coffee, gumshoes, because we're about to get more concussions than a 1980's pro wrestler!

Murder, My Sweet starring Dick Powell as Phillip Marlowe is quite possibly my favorite film noir and after re-watching recently it occurred to me that the novel it was based on - Farewell, My Lovely - was one of the few Raymond Chandler pieces I hadn't got around to reading yet. I corrected this heinous oversight as quickly as possible and found myself once again sucked into the lights and shadows of Chandler's vision of the West Coast with Phillip Marlowe - perpetual smartass and would-be knight in shining armor - as my tour guide.

Those steeped in crime novel lore are likely already aware that Chandler often cobbled his Marlowe novels together by stitching previously written short stories into a singular narrative, but truthfully, the sometimes abrupt changes of pace and plot trajectory in Farewell, My Lovely might give away this trick to even a neophyte reader. I personally don't have a problem with this, but I concede this factor could be bothersome to some, especially keen mystery and whodunnit fans looking for a neat and comprehensive wrap-up by the end of the novel. In bringing different stories together as one, Chandler sometimes inadvertently creates plot holes, drops characters for long stretches of time with no apparent explanation, or introduces what should be an important character extremely late in the narrative.

However, the loose strands of plot surrounding the confounding mysteries Chandler presents never appeared to be of any major concern to the author. His primary objective was drenching the reader in atmosphere, and Farewell, My Lovely, much like its immediate predecessor The Big Sleep, is awash in a delightfully blackened ambiance from the sinful streets of Los Angeles to the broken and disaffected cast of characters each with a stain or three upon their souls. In the middle of it all is Marlowe, a man who should be broken in more ways than one but always finds a way to persevere through the mire and pursue justice... even if no one else appears to be interested in pursuing it.

There are moments of purple prose that wonderfully exemplify the pulp style, where Chandler goes out of his way to describe scenes in lavish detail to really transport the reader into the room. These are the moments where the reader can tell how much Chandler was in love with language, but there are just as many instances where instead of belaboring the point, Chandler's quick wit comes through like a blunt weapon over the head:

"I used my knee on his face. It hurt my knee. He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face."

Finally, I'll leave you with this: a fun Farewell, My Lovely drinking game. Point your browser to a completely cucked and compromised den of leftist gobbledygook like Goodreads and take a shot every time you scroll past a contemporary review of this novel where the reviewer clutches their pearls and nearly faints at Raymond Chandler's use of colorful language. Congratulations. You're now as much of an alcoholic as Philip Marlowe appears to be. It's no secret that Chandler, much like his pal Ian Fleming, wrote novels that are no longer suitable for mOdErN aUdIeNcEs, which is why you'd be best served picking up an older edition of this book if you're ever interested in reading it, because a master of prose like Chandler deserves to be read free of censorship or abominably tedious "content warning" invasions prefacing his work like bad graffiti.

Kill Me Tender (2000)

A killer has the diehards of the Elvis Presley fan club All Shook Up and the only man for the job is the King himself. Elvis skips out on recording sessions to become a private investigator and locks horns with an early impersonator, sings in random gospel choirs, cheats on Priscilla, and ponders the calorie count of one too many peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

I love Elvis. He's on my personal Mount Rushmore of rock icons. The voice, the style, the unbridled spirit of rock and goddamn roll - it's always going to move me. I'm even listening to Elvis as I type this review. So with that being said, you'd think I'd be more amenable to Elvis in fiction. I mean, he pops up everywhere, from films like Bubba Ho-Tep or True Romance to Douglas Adams and Kim Newman books. It seems like every creative mind with a kooky story idea wants to somehow shoehorn Elvis into the narrative... and I can't exactly blame them. Even now as we get ever closer to 50 years since his death, the King is still a hot selling ticket.

And I admit, I was lured in by the premise of Kill Me Tender. Elvis solving a murder mystery sounds like the perfect kind of goofy-ass yarn that's right up my alley. But turning over the last page left me with A Mess of Blues. I felt Way Down. Just like a Puppet on a String. I almost wanted to start Crying in the Chapel. Doncha' Think It's Time that I stopped wedging all of these Elvis song titles into the review as puns and just got on with it?

I think my biggest problem with this novel is the characterization of Elvis here is... it's as if author Daniel Klein watched a marathon of Elvis movies and decided "Ya know, I'm gonna write my novel just like one of his films... only cheesier!" This is one of the most cornball depictions of Elvis I've ever come across. The real life Elvis had his share of very human flaws. He was possessive and jealous, had a foul temper at times, and of course, he had demons that came in a pill bottle plaguing him repeatedly throughout his life. I understand not wanting to depict all of the man's foibles in a piece of fiction, especially if you're aiming for more lighthearted fare, but this version of Elvis becomes so hokey and fake it really does come across like some kind of kitschy novelization of a lost Elvis movie. The only thing missing is a goofy name for the main character like Rusty Wells or Lucky Jackson.

I was also put off by some of what I can only see as progressive politics talking points the author wanted to jam into his book for headpats (and probably to increase the likelihood of getting it published), showing us that social justice is a disease that stretches back a lot further than the past several years. The author appears to be extra hellbent on having his fictional Elvis bump uglies with a black woman. We know now that Elvis just liked all the girls, period, and it likely didn't matter what color they were to him, but Mr. Klein definitely wants you to know that his Elvis is progressive and oh-so-modern cosmopolitan when it concerns interracial relationships in the early 1960's deep south. He also has Elvis interact with a black lesbian psychic, which made me roar with laughter for all the wrong reasons. Honestly, I'm surprised Netflix didn't pick this trash up for their latest Elvis cash-in over Agent Elvis. You could adapt most of it for today's ESG-obsessed woke television standards with little to no changes.

I'll at least give the author credit for the whodunnit aspect of Kill Me Tender, as that's one of the most important things in a murder mystery. There are a number of viable suspects to be the killer and there are cryptic clues abound in the form of creepy records being delivered to Graceland to taunt Elvis. There's at least the bones of a satisfying mystery novel here, but everything else is T-R-O-U-B-L-E. (Yes, I said I would cease with the song titles. I'm very sorry.)