There are monsters in Mirkwood!

Growing up is hard, but it’s even harder when you are a dwarf, living in a small town in Nebraska, where other kids physically torment you and everyone else shuns you, leaving you as an outcast. If you’re Dr. Robert “Mongo” Frederickson, you might even move to New York City and get a PhD in criminology, becoming a university professor after giving up a highly successful career in the circus. It’d take a lot to bring you back to your home town… such as the death of a favourite nephew.

Tommy was a bright kid. He had an incredibly high IQ and was a veritable wizard with a computer. He was also a very big fan of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and was part of a group of kids who played a game called “Sorscience”, where you score points by matching real-life phenomena to events from The Lord of the Rings. He and a fellow player were discovered dead, apparently a murder-suicide between two young gay lovers. The town is shocked and so nobody minds it when the whole incident is covered up as quickly as possible. But Mongo is then hired by an unusual person: Coop Lugmor, who abused Mongo when they were children, tries to hire the dwarf to investigate the deaths. According to Coop, his younger brother was no “fag” and he wants Mongo to prove it and catch the person who did this.

All Aboard the Cliché Train!!!

There’s a certain type of mystery plot out there that is really starting to get on my nerves. The plot isn’t confined to a single sub-genre. The book can be set in a charming English village where an elderly lady plays the role of amateur sleuth. It can just as easily be a tough-as-nails hardboiled story about a tough wise-cracking PI. But for some reason, many authors think it’s a clever idea to use the following twist ending: the killer is gay.

What does the author of such a tale expect me to do? Throw my hands in the air and scream “Oh, my God!!! A gay person!!! I thought they were only mythical creatures that hid in forests, picked berries while the moon was full, and secretly stole pens whenever you needed them!” This twist ending has long outgrown its shock value… and its welcome. And the ending has introduced a brand-new set of clichés to the genre, clichés I’m sick of seeing.

The Not-So-Talented Miss Highsmith

Strangers on a Train was Patricia Highsmith’s first published novel, and it was a smash hit. So big, in fact, that a film adaptation was quickly made by the master of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock. And the first script was written by Raymond Chandler – although venom-filled “creative differences” between Hitch and Raymondo ended up getting Chandler dismissed from the project. The final product is one of Hitchcock’s finest thrillers. But how does the novel compare?

Fans of the film are warned that the book is very, very different from the film. I suspect that many of the differences arose thanks to the Hollywood censors, but if that was the case I can only say “Thank God!” When reviewing Francis Iles’ Before the Fact, which became the film Suspicion, I remarked that Hitchcock could take the silliest stories and turn them into terrific thrillers. My batting average for books-that-become-Hitchcock-films is very low right now: Strangers on a Train is one of those silly stories. And I have no idea why it has such a high reputation.