I’d been away long enough that I struggled to connect the word home with this landscape. My body still felt it. My heart did, too, but that organ was buried in so much scar tissue it was hard to get a solid reading from it.
Sometimes a novel will astonish you with its high quality. Such is the case with Three Minute Hero by Craig Terlson, who – so far as I can tell – is an author who should have written a lot more novels, and ought to be much more famous than he is.
Luke Fischer, our hero and narrator, is a native of the Manitoba plains. But he fled the small town where he grew up, finally drifting to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he works now in an informal way – favor for favor – for Benno, a crime boss. Now Benno wants him to drive a car up to Canada, to look for a fellow employee Luke calls “Mostly Harold.” Mostly Harold is a professional hit man, a huge guy who wears cowboy boots and is devoted to the music of Burt Bacharach. He set out for Canada himself recently, in pursuit of a girlfriend who dumped him. And Benno suspects she had something to do with the recent murder of his own nephew.
Luke hasn’t been back to the Canadian plains for a long time, and he doesn’t find the folks especially friendly. Particularly as he’s following a string of dead and wounded tough guys, left behind by Mostly Harold’s juggernaut. But he’ll still find some time to confront his own past along the way.
The most obvious quality of Three Minute Hero, for the fan of hard-boiled detective fiction, is the obvious inspiration of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, another mystery centering on a big thug in search of a dangerous dame. But (with all due respect to Chandler) Mostly Harold is a far more complex and interesting character than Moose Malloy.
The prose is also very much in Chandler’s league. I don’t think I’ve read such a well-written hard-boiled story in a long time. Finely-crafted lines abound, like, “Worn-out tables were filled with circle fossils as memories of beers gone past.”
Some of Chandler’s weaknesses are also emulated. The plot is extremely complex and confusing. It was hard to keep track of the players. And there are some rookie factual errors, probably derived from TV and movies – pistols seem to have infinite ammunition supplies, a bullet wound to the shoulder is dismissed as minor, and automobiles get undue credit for their bullet-stopping properties.
Three Minute Hero is clearly set sometime before the turn of the 21st Century – there are no cell phones or internet. I don’t know when the book was actually written – the data on Amazon.com gives no clue. The author, Craig Terlson, is apparently a successful graphic artist as well as a novelist. I wish he’d written more than he has. This is good stuff.
Cautions for language and lots of violence. Highly recommended for hard-boiled fans.