Rick Dewhurst, I have it on good authority (Phil’s), is a good guy. He’s also a good – if quirky – writer. And I can only assume he has masochistic side, because he keeps sending me his books to review, even though I can sometimes be hard on them.

His Joe LaFlam series is particularly challenging to me. In the first book, Bye Bye Bertie, we were introduced to Joe as a delusional young Christian man. His real name was John Doe, he didn’t know what city he lived in, and he thought he was a private eye when he was actually a cab driver.

Through his subsequent adventures, he has become Joe LaFlam in fact, and has been united with his real parents, who are billionaires. So as Halo Dolly begins he is living and working in a penthouse (in a big city “a lot like Seattle”), running a detective agency with his friends Alfred (a former hit man, now a Christian) and Abner (a former drunk, now a conspiracy-minded Christian). A beautiful (and rich) young woman named Grace (also a Christian, of course) walks into the office saying she needs protection from a kidnapping threat. Joe immediately takes the job (not unmindful of the fact that Grace is very good marriage prospect), and it doesn’t take long for Grace to be kidnapped from right under their noses. So begins a series of implausible and slapstick developments which lead them to his old menace, the sinister Spelunkers International organization. And to even more evil forces, including demons from the pit of Hell. Or maybe not.

As with Bye Bye Bertie, I was mostly perplexed as I read Halo Dolly. I never know how to take these books. Bertie is less delusional now than he used to be (probably), but the Christian self-talk in his narration makes me uncomfortable. I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to laugh at it. It’s so much like my own self-talk, frankly, that it seems hypocritical. Or else I just don’t get the joke.

I think it may go back to what I call the Aunt Midge Syndrome. That name refers to my own late Aunt Midge, who reacted almost violently once at a family gathering, when the Carol Burnett Show was on. Carol was playing a character with low self-esteem, who talked too much and apologized too much and self-deprecated all the time. I noted that this was precisely what Aunt Midge was like and reasoned, based on her reaction, that people in general aren’t amused by jokes dealing with their own quirks and hang-ups, even ones they’re not aware of. (This is possibly the only insight into human psychology I’ve ever had.) So it may be that I’m just too much like Joe to appreciate the joke.

Anyway, there’s nothing offensive in this book, and much mirth is derived from lampooning popular conspiracy theories – except that they seem to be generally correct here. The joke’s on all of us, I guess.

Thanks to Rick Dewhurst for a free copy.