Recently, I had the opportunity to review 40 Nickels for the Independent Book Review website. I’m reposting it here, but be sure to follow Independent Book Review, “a celebration of small press and self-published books.” This is a well-curated list of the best in indie books of all genres. The site has recently added a convenient bookshop for all reviewed titles.
40 Nickels by R. Daniel Lester takes the reader on a wild tow-truck ride of a murder investigation through the seamy side of 1950s Vancouver. A novella, it’s a quick and entertaining read.
40 Nickels’ Noir
40 Nickels is the second title in R. Daniel Lester’s Carnegie Finch series. The genre is unique, a slapstick noir with a bit of bizarro weirdness thrown in for fun. Standard noir tropes, like “life is cheap” and “power corrupts,” and characters, such as the wise-cracking detective and the femme fatale, are served up with a humorous twist. The book is a glimpse of 1950s popular culture—such as the influence of that new invention, television—taken to absurdist extremes.
PI is a Fast-Talking Rogue
The story narrator, Carnegie Finch, is a fast-talking, lovable rogue with little visible means of support. He yearns for a career as a private investigator, but all he has going for him is the desire. He certainly has no training, experience, or license. He’s motived by a jonesing for “the buzz, the jolt” of poking around for clues and pieces them together.
The book opens with a short prologue in a Toronto hobo camp. For a brief, glorious moment Finch possesses the MacGuffin of the piece, but he just as quickly loses it to a dentist conman, Janssen. If Finch didn’t have bad luck, he’d have no luck at all.
Investigation of a Shady Dentist
Flash forward a few years to Vancouver and Finch, his act slightly cleaned up, aiming to make it as a detective by cracking the missing Mr. Jangles case. But that trail has grown cold, and his lady frenemy, Adora, has some career advice: Drive a tow truck. Oh, and by the way, she further orders, check out the fishy skid-row rescue mission some of her restaurant employees have started attending.
Finch, always a sucker for a swell dame, hops to it, only to find that the mission is a cult runs by Janssen, the Toronto dentist conman. Although now he calls himself “Quest.” Finch hasn’t forgotten Janssen/Quest stole something from him and will do quite a lot to get it back.
Finch finds Quest is, indeed, fleecing the flock, as Adora suspected. But when a wealthy widow has concerns about Quest’s influence on her son, Finch is sure he’s also wheeling-and-dealing among the city’s well-heeled. Finch pokes around the cult and smells a rat, but it turns out to be a body in the trunk of a Rolls.
40 Nickel’s Imagery
40 Nickels’ language and imagery are a real treat. Finch doesn’t just have the gift of gab; his mind jumps about in free-association allusions that are a joy to read. When Adora proposes a night on the town to cheer up a traumatized Finch, he replies, “What, you’re gonna whisk me away to a secret destination and ply me with booze?” Adora confesses that could very well happen, and Finch’s internal narrative voice continues, “So, like an egg cracked into a mixing bowl, not knowing if it’d end up scrambled or baked in a cake, I let myself be whisked.”
Later, Finch borrows a car, but the car’s owner, Taffy, stipulates Finch drive him and his wife to the airport first. Finch’s description of the couple is priceless.
As far as the mood in the car, it was a battlefield and I had to keep my head low so as not to get hit by a stray bullet. Taffy and his wife were the kind of career soldiers that wore camouflage and hid in bunkers and sniped at each other over familiar territory that made precious little sense to anybody else.
Carnegie Finch in 40 Nickels
40 Nickels gives a fair amount of detail about Dead Clown Blues, the first book of the series, which the reader doesn’t really need to know enjoy this tale. Noir detective stories fans who can take a joke will find that 40 Nickels really pays off in laughs.
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