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Literary Books
MYSTERY
Monkey Wrench
By Liza Cody
Mysterious Press, 1995
246 pages, $18.95 hardcover
Reviewed by Jamie Agnew
Owner of Aunt Agatha's
Mysteries, like all good fiction, have always been about character. Even the fiendish puzzles designed by Edgar Allan Poe to test the first great detective, C. August Dupin, were designed to show how Dupin's mind worked with an ideal blend of intuition and deduction. Sherlock Holmes, surely the most famous character in English literature, successfully resisted his creator Conan Doyle's attempt to kill him off and today adventures on in pastiche after pastiche while his less well known progenitor writes no more.
So it is with great joy that I announce the appearance of another great mystery character- in the blue corner the London Lassasin, Eva Wylie. Yes, Eva's a professional wrestler, but her creator Liza Cody resists the easy derisive way out and shows the improbable glory of it all: "That's what I want - doing what l'm good at where everyone can see me do it. How many of you suckers can say the same? Eh? Tell me that. How many of you can stand in that cage of light and yell at hundreds of faces - 'Shut up yer face, you rumbums, l'm up herein the light and you're down there in the dark!' Go on. How many? That's what I call job satisfaction. "
Like Huck Finn, Eva's voice crackles with a creative use of the vernacular combined with an unquenchable fierceness of spirit. In a genre where female characters are getting tougher and tougher, with self-confessed "amoral savages" like Smilla of "Smilla's Sense of Snow" and Mallory of "Mallory's Oracle," making V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone look like sociable wimps, Eva has the worst attitude of all. While paranoid superwomen like Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta are becoming irritating and unreal, the very unreliability of Eva's narrative Iets us see through her while still maintaining an affection through the bluster.
Cody's second Eva Wylie book "Monkey Wrench" continúes the flow of the first, "Bucket Nut." More like chapters in the characters life than traditional murder puzzles, they both end up in a bang-up denoument that resounds but gives no real resolution. Although in real life l'm not sure if I would welcome the return of an extremely large, extremely ugly, extremely angry woman, in fiction I can't wait for Eva Wylie to come barreling my way again.
This month, more than four years after Ted Geisel's death, children of all ages will gather before video screens to enjoy How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and many children will find gift wrapped Dr. Seuss books under trees. If there is justice in the literary world, a lot of adults who learned to read from The Cat In the Hat - and others who are interested in the creative process- will get Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel to brighten the winter gloom.