Brown Harvest [Paperback]

Jay Russell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 10, 2001

What happens when the Boy Detective grows up, moves away, and comes home for a visit? His hometown has turned from American-as-apple-pie to darkest noir, his once-innocent girlfriend has transformed into something both more and less than she was, and his father has become a bum. Both parody and tribute to childhood heroes, Brown Harvest appropriates characters familiar to anyone who grew up reading detective stories. Borrowing from the Hardy Boys to Jay Cantor (Krazy Kat) and setting the characters on a collision path with hard-boiled thrillers, young adult mysteries, and classic noir fiction, Jay Russell creates joyful mayhem.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A man returns home to attend a funeral and gets more than he bargained for in Russell's (Celestial Dogs) latest, an over-the-top cyber noir. The unnamed protagonist, an erstwhile whiz kid and boy detective (let's call him B.D.), grew up to become a formidable hacker. Now, his quaint Midwestern hometown has been renamed Ideaville, a bland, Silicon Valley-style paradise. But beneath the shiny exterior is a cauldron of corruption, violence and psychic decay. B.D. isn't surprised, since as a teenager he witnessed (and unwittingly participated in) a scandal that left his family shattered. The funeral is for Sandy, his childhood sweetheart, who was apparently killed in a car accident. He figures out that she's not really dead, but life has been so cruel to her that she might as well be. There are plenty of demons B.D. must face, including his father, a former chief of police whose corruption and infidelities destroyed him, and Roach Blackwell, the thug who stole Sandy from B.D. decades ago. Roach now rules Ideaville with an iron fist, and his lucrative software company is in a bitter feud with two firms whose maniacal chiefs plumb the depths of depravity. B.D. hatches a plan using his hacking skills to lead the rival firms toward a bloody showdown while he sifts through the debris of his past and tries to win Sandy's love again. Unfortunately, Russell wastes much of the book on exposition and flashbacks, and the emotional turmoils and scandalous revelations too often lapse into melodrama. His black humor is fine when it works, but is otherwise a tangle of adolescent innuendo along the lines of "Been there, done that, taken the AIDS test afterward." There are plenty of entertaining and inventive moments, but this wild ride hits too many potholes to satisfy.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows (October 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568582110
• ISBN-13: 978-1568582115
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,274,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unusual but very, very entertaining, November 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Brown Harvest (Paperback)

This is a very unusual novel, but one that I found to be very funny and really entertaining. It's a kind of parody of about a zillion different things - especially kid detectives like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew - but it's a lot richer than most parodies, with some really interesting things to say about growing up and getting wise to the things that really matter in life. The plot which I believe is a close parody of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, is a little bit crazy, but in a good way and the dialogue is a blast. Lots of familiar characters from childhood turn up in almost every chapter and it's a lot of fun trying to identify them all. "Los Bros Robusto" - a disguised, crazed version of the Hardy Boys - were my favorites, along with a certain curious (and kinky) monkey and a man in a yellow hat. This is definitely not a run of the mill book and one which deserves some attention. I loved it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fallen , fallen is Brown the Great., July 16, 2002

By 

Patrick Burnett "penngos" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Brown Harvest (Paperback)

What goes up must come down, the saying goes, and Jay Russell has imagined a world in which all our childhood heroes have done just that, not simply reaching Earth, but bypassing it and sinking more deeply into the mire than I would have thought possible.

Deconstructionism and continuation have been a part of literature, almost as long as there has been literature. New authors with new ideas use the ideas, words and characters of old authors in order to illuminate the present or make some other kind of statement. Witness "The New Testament", "The Wide Sargasso Sea", "The Wind Done Gone", "Paradise Lost" or any Sherlock Holmes pastiche to see what I mean. Sometimes these attempts are profound; mostly they are dull and add nothing. Then there's "Brown Harvest", which is both a tongue-in-cheek update to Hammet's "Red Harvest" and a continuation of the stories of nearly every child detective you ever read. Ch*rry Ames is here, as are D*nny Dunne, J*piter Jones and the H*ppy H*llisters. The H*rdy Boys are major characters. So are B*gs Meany and Curious Ge*rge. But the story truly belongs to the smartest kid in Id(e)aville, *ncycl*p*d** Br*wn.

Yes, I've hidden the identities of these characters, just as Russell did, to protect their memories. In Russell's mean streets, nothing good ever happens to a fictional character when he grows up. These once-pure literary entities are now alcoholics, drug-addicts, prostitutes, wastrels, murderers, crooks and sodomites. If you loved these characters, then learning how they turned out will break your heart.

Fortunately, this is only one possible ending for these kids and I'd like to think that other books, as yet unwritten, hold a brighter future for them. But that's another matter entirely.

The story looesly follows its hard-boiled inspiration, "Red Harvest", in that a lone man enters a town gone wild, run by three opposing gangs (in this case, violent software companies). Each gang hires the loner who, in turn, begins turning the gangs against one another in order to force them to wipe the others out. The goal is to gain revenge and be the last man standing.

Jay Russell is a sly and unflinching reporter, able to bring both humor and pathos to nearly every paragraph. I did find myself laughing out loud and relating the plot or dialog to my friends (most of whom never read the originals, sadly). But on nearly every page I also felt a piece of my childhood die when I saw what Russell had done to my beloved childhood friends. This is not a book for sentimentalists or the faint of heart.
But if you can stomach it, this is a hell of an entertaining book, one that will keep you reading, keep you guessing, keeping you rummaging through the attic to retrieve those relics of the past and read them again, to assure yourself they are still as they were.

And if you get a chance, read Jay Russell's "Marty Burns" series. This book led me in that direction and I'm now a huge fan.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars very entertaining genre-bending, November 29, 2001

By 

william schafer (la jolla, ca USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brown Harvest (Paperback)

This is an unusual page-turner in which a ridiculous number of characters from kid's fiction enact a hard-boiled detective novel (the plot similarities to Hammett's Red Harvest are particularly marked). (...) to mention the other obvious primary source for the story, I will only say this: Roach Blackwell=Bugs Meaney. If you know who Bugs is, and you appreciate dark humor, you will enjoy this book.