I got a collection of Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet novels cheap, and by golly I’m going to read my way through them. They’re not entirely my kind of book, but I don’t hate them either, and cheap is good at this time in my life. So I’ve gotten to Crime Czar, the fifth book of the series.

When we last saw New Orleans lawyer Tubby Dubonnet, he had survived being kidnapped by bank robbers during the greatest flood in the city’s history. Things generally came out all right from Tubby’s point of view, except that his friend Dan got shot in the stomach saving Tubby’s life. At first it looked as if Dan would pull through, but now he’s back in the hospital, fading out. During a lucid moment, he whispers a cryptic message to Tubby.

Tubby experiences a new sensation now – a need for retribution. He knows who shot Dan – a dead-eyed, jug-eared professional killer who may or may not be dead. But Tubby wants the boss, the mastermind, the “crime czar” behind the killing.

His path to the reckoning will not run smooth – not in a Tony Dunbar novel. There will be frequent interruptions and sideshows involving the birth of Tubby’s first grandchild, a judge’s reelection campaign, the county’s corrupt sheriff, a client framed by the police, the return to town of a girlfriend, and a spunky young prostitute out after her own vengeance. These books often remind me of the stateroom scene in “A Night at the Opera,” where the comedy comes from no particular joke, but simply from the ridiculous introduction of one new character after another into a limited space.

And I guess that has something to do with why I don’t love the Tubby books as well as other people do. They kind of remind me of a party, and I’m uncomfortable at parties.

But Crime Czar was amusing. Also, I noticed for the first time that Tony Dunbar is in fact a pretty good prose stylist, capable of lines like, “she saw that his eyes were like crowder peas with woolly caterpillars crawling over them.”

Pretty good.