He's on top of his game as creative director of the The Prescott Agency in L.A., a jaundiced adman who looks at you and sees a narrow demographic-and a very fat paycheck. His identical twin, Michael, a do-gooder Catholic priest, can traipse around the Third World doing all the emergency relief work he wants. For Dan, doing good means having the biggest home entertainment center money can buy. But his life of conspicuous consumption is about to come to a horrible screeching whoa.Cross Dressing
Just returned from Rwanda, Father Michael is ill, so Dan sends him to the hospital on his own insurance coverage; what's a brother for, right? But when Michael's disease turns fatal, Dan is suddenly facing a prison sentence for insurance fraud. Since Dan also needs to hide from an enraged copywriter whose brilliant idea he stole, the best solution is to take up the cloth and masquerade as his brother, the Father. Soon, Dan is thrust into a world even savvier in the wiles of marketing and mass persuasion than his own: the world of organized religion. What's worse, in addition to the homicidal copywriter and a righteous insurance investigator, a shadowy and dangerous figure from Father Michael's past is also advancing ever closer toward Dan. And then the counterfeit clergyman lands at a run-down mission headed by the good-looking and strangely fascinating Sister Peg, who's determined to help the downtrodden even if she has to pull a gun or two to do it. Try as he might to fight it, Peg is beginning to give Dan impure thoughts about renouncing his vow-not that he ever took one, anyway...
What begins as an interesting equation of the advertising business and organized religion quickly degenerates into predictable slapstick humor in this somewhat crowded comic novel. Dan Steele, an up-and-coming creative director in a swank L.A. ad agency, is desperate to make partner. Trouble is, his manic-depressive mother, Ruth, periodically suffers bipolar episodes. Dan tries to help, but he's been living extravagantly and he's out of cash, so when lowly copywriter Scott Emmons comes up with the perfect ad campaign for a Japanese corporate client, Dan thinks it's only fair to steal Scott's idea. Scott goes postal with a .44 magnum, but before he can ventilate his sleazy superior, Dan has an unexpected visit from his long-lost twin brother, Michael, a priest back from a mission in Africa, where he witnessed Church and state corruption and tangled with a local warlord, who has left him with a terminal souvenir of his homeland. Dan switches identities with his brother so that Michael can be treated under his own health insurance, but Michael promptly dies and Dan is forced to continue his clerical impersonation to avoid felony insurance fraud. With the trappings of his former life repossessed and the maniacal Scott in pursuit, Dan finds a haven at last at a halfway house, where he meets Sister Peg, a transparently secular nun and antibureaucracy crusader. Sparks fly between the non-priest and non-nun; climax, fadeout and roll credits. Fitzhugh (Pest Control; The Organ Grinders) may have written Cross Dressing with deals in mind: according to the publisher, he even arranged with Seagram to feature their liquor products in his text. While he ably proves his comic wit on the printed page, and backs some of the novel's more informative sections with actual research, this novel is ultimately as slickly packaged and shallow as the industries it parodies. Film rights to Shady Acres/Universal Pictures and Shady Acres Entertainment. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Having taken on geneticists in his earlier effortsDof which his latest was The Organ GrindersDFitzhugh turns his gimlet eye almost nostalgically to such tried-and-true satirical targets as advertising, the Catholic Church, and Los Angeles, demonstrating their staying power. Everything is finally coming together for rising advertising executive Dan Steele. His latest campaign (stolen from a colleague) is clearly considered the equal of "Where's the Beef?" Beverly is ready to lead him through the Kama Sutra, page by Technicolor page. It is then that things predictably start to unravel. His wronged colleague goes ballistic, he misses his rendezvous with Beverly, and his credit cards max out. When his twin brother, a Roman Catholic priest, returns from Africa to die, Dan happily assumes his identity only to learn that it's all a matter of image. Before his past catches up with him, it turns out that this slick operator fits almost too comfortably into the new Cat-o-Lite Church ("less guilt; more forgiveness"). Fans of other outrageous caper books, say, those by Elmore Leonard or Donald E. Westlake, might want to sample Fitzhugh. Fans of The Simpsons might keep Cross Dressing in mind during the summer rerun season. For all larger public libraries.DBob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Bill Fitzhugh was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He has also lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Seattle, Washington, and Los Angeles. He writes satiric crime novels, the occasional comic mystery, and a weekly show for the Deep Tracks channel of Sirius-XM Satellite Radio.
Two of his novels, Pest Control and Cross Dressing have been in development at Warner Brothers and Universal Studios respectively for nearly a decade. Imagine how good they'll be when they're done. Cross Dressing was nominated for the Barry Award as well as the Salt Lake County Library System's Reader's Choice Award and it won the 2002 Best Fiction award from the Mississippi Library Association.
Pest Control was one of Amazon's Top 50 Mysteries in 1997.
The Organ Grinders, which the Washington Post Book Review called, 'A laugh out loud read [and] an awe-inspiring feat' is a tender exploration of the feasibility and genetic implications of human gonad transplants, among other things. As Booklist pointed out, 'It's not easy walking the tightrope between medical thrillers a la Crichton and absurdist black comedy in the Hiaasen mold, but Fitzhugh manages it smoothly.'
One of Bill's proudest moments was when the brilliant and hysterically funny Molly Ivins wrote in one of her columns, 'Bill Fitzhugh is a seriously funny guy...The Organ Grinders is hilarious, but it can also make you gasp with horror... and the humor is completely off-the-wall.'
Reviewing his award winning novel, Fender Benders, The New York Times said, 'Fitzhugh is a strange and deadly amalgam of screenwriter and comic novelist and his facility and wit, and his taste for the perverse, put him in a league with Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard.' Fender Benders won The Lefty Award for best humorous novel of 2001. Kinky Friedman himself said Fender Benders is 'Wickedly, irredeemable funny [and] wise beyond words and music. Fitzhugh has nailed the truest depiction of Nashville since Hank went to Jesus."
Fitzhugh's fifth novel was the political satire, Heart Seizure. Former Texas governor Ann Richards said 'Fitzhugh can spin a story and skewer a politician better than just about anyone I know.' As if that wasn't enough, the good folks at the Sunday Oklahoman called it, 'A wickedly outrageous satire that takes on the federal government, the media, and today's health care system with precise and scathing wit.'
Radio Activity, the first of a comic mystery series featuring classic rock deejay Rick Shannon, was published in April 2004. Jill Conner Browne, the Boss Sweet Potato Queen herownself said, 'Bill Fitzhugh is the only mystery writer I ever really loved.'
The second novel in this series, Highway 61 Resurfaced, was published in April 2005. Unable to control himself after reading it, Carl Hiaasen said, 'Bill Fitzhugh is a deeply disturbed individual who uses his warped talents to write very funny novels, the latest being Highway 61 Resurfaced. You will seriously dig this book if you like classic rock, Southern blues, clever mysteries and cats with loathsome sinus infections.'
Fitzhugh, a one-time FM rock deejay, also writes, produces, and hosts a weekly show on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio's Deep Tracks channel called 'Fitzhugh's All Hand Mixed Vinyl.' It's a weekly dose of nostalgia for anyone who grew up listening to FM rock radio before the consultants took over. Great segues, mixes, and mash-ups the way we used to do 'em.
Fitzhugh, whose books have been translated into German, Japanese, and Italian, Spanish, and Romanian lives in Los Angeles with his wife and his record collection. He has completed The Exterminators, the sequel to Pest Control, which will be published in 2011.
After defying the sophomore slump with the excellent "The Organ Grinders," his follow-up to the hysterical "Pest Control," Bill Fitzhugh has established a bona fide winning streak with "Cross Dressing." It's mood inhabits a middle ground between the first two books--more emotional depth than "Pest," not as intense as "Grinders"--but is no less hilarious. His characters are, as always, instantly recognizable and relatable (if that's a word), and he accurately and fairly skewers both the media and the Catholic Church (and I know from where I speak--I'm a practicing Catholic who works in the media!). If you enjoy a very funny and (this is key with Fitzhugh) very VISUAL read, by all means read this book and everything else he's written or has yet to write.
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Pest Control was one of my favorite books....too funny. OK, now we have "Cross Dressing" as another favorite book. Brothers, church, prostitute, what a wonderful scenario. I love hysterical reads...Fitzhugh provides me with this. Laugh and love the characters. The rich vs. poor, sainted vs. slutty, moviedom vs. churchdom. Hey, I am having a wonderful time with Fitzhugh's book. It all makes for a wonderful ending.
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This was Fitzhugh's first book, although it came out after Pest Control and Organ Grinders. That's because it was actually written as a screenplay when Bill was taking a writer's workshop in LA, I think, and he had to go back and do some rewriting to convert it into a book.
It's not quite as funny as the other two books, but then, it's still damn good as a first effort, and it shows Fitzhugh's great nascent talent which would come to full fruition in Pest Control and Organ Grinders.
Sister Peg and Dan Steele are interesting characters, and the obvious chemistry between two people who in normal life would be unlikely friends, is a nice touch. One reviewer objected to the occasional preachy passage and some off-the-cuff theologizing, but I didn't mind it. I've read a lot of theology myself, including many of the most important western writers on religion (such as Tillich, Niebuhr, Barth, Rosenzweig, Buber, Marcel, Berdyaef, and Bultmann, to give a partial list), and, notwithstanding the respect I have for the above writers, nobody can say their theology is any better than anybody else's, since there's no way to prove any of it, as much as I would like to believe otherwise.
But to get back to the book, Fitzhugh has another winner in this novel. I only give it four stars since the other two were so exceptional and deserved more like 8 stars. But if this were any other writer than Fitzhugh, it would rate five stars.
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