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INTRODUCTION

Carl Hiaasen

In one of my favorite scenes in Metzger’s Dog, a group of senior spooks from the Central Intelligence Agency is sitting around talking about a top-secret project known as the Exploding President.

The idea, conceived by a flaky agent named Molnar and ultimately rejected by his superiors, was to create a replica dummy of the President of the United States and then fill it with two hundred pounds of high explosives.

“What the hell for?” asks one of the CIA guys.

“To assassinate assassins. You know, at parades and ceremonies. ”

“But that would kill everybody around it for a hundred yards. ”

“Right. Well-done hamburger. If we’d gone for that one, we might have gotten the Nuclear President. I guess it’s our loss. Glad to see you’ve found something else for Molnar to do. ”

At which point the Director of the CIA looks up earnestly and says, “It’s not fair to mark a man for life just for one bad idea. ”

That subtle dose of absurdity is worthy of Graham Greene, who I suspect would approve enthusiastically of Thomas Perry.

So many mystery writers know how to spin a “crackling good yarn,” as reviewers are fond of saying, but precious few make us laugh out loud.

Perry has been blessed with the same gift. Other novelists would kill for lines he tosses away like cigarette butts.

“Marbled-eyed beggars with noses like snorkels” is how he describes a mob of hardcore dopers, queuing up for a clinical experiment that doles out free cocaine. The imagery might not be politically correct, but it is wickedly funny.

Another trait that puts Perry in an elite league of writers is the seditious zest with which he breaks the rules of his genre. Metzger’s Dog is notable for its wildly pinballing plot and also for a refreshing scarcity of traditional good guys and bad guys, which frees readers to root guiltlessly for whoever is most entertaining.

In a nutshell, the premise of the story is that a trio of marginally talented crooks sets out to steal a stash of drugs and ends up trying to blackmail the Central Intelligence Agency for ten million dollars. The chain of events is utterly outlandish, a fact wryly (and ruefully) acknowledged by every major player on both sides of the scam. Consequently, the reader is not only forgiving but hooked.

The gang’s nominal ringleader, Chinese Gordon, is a prize. He drives around Los Angeles with a loaded M-39 aircraft cannon mounted in the back of his van, while merrily improvising bawdy verses to “Bringing In the Sheaves. ”

Yet, when he’s not scouting for something to rob or blow up, Gordon can be an old-fashioned romantic, struck rapt and goo-goo-eyed by a simple glimpse of his girlfriend reading the newspaper:

“Chinese Gordon watched Margaret arch her back and then rock her hips slightly to get comfortable on the bed. She was definitely losing her suntan, the peculiar demarcation that seemed to intensify certain parts of her with a white light as if they glowed with an energy of their own, or as though some principle of evolution had caused them to be marked as areas of special interest, in the absurdly literal way that nature did things. ”