Customer Reviews

Double negative: A novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Just picked this up and enjoyed it thoroughly! Unusual setting is a linguistics facility doubling as day care center. (They study the evolution of language in toddlers.) One of the linguists is run over at night and the mystery begins.

It's intelligent, humorous, and human as our hero, Jeremy Cook, stumbles along being head smart, heart dumb, dealing with a quirky police lieutenant, a beautiful young graduate student, a napoleonic department head, and fellow academic linguists who like him more than he realizes.

The plot twist is unusual but what really makes the book endearing is being inside Jeremy's head and hearing human concerns expressed through bookish terms in a warm and funny way. I've ordered the next two already.

The first title of a trilogy featuring the central character, Jeremy Cook, a linguist who in this mystery is employed in a research lab/day-care center where the scientists study the development of language in children. When one of the researchers is discovered dead in Cook's office he becomes the prime suspect. Eventually, however, the answer comes from the mouths of babes. This was Carkeet's first book, and his only straightforward mystery. Its quirky-but-likeable characters are well-suited to the form, but the two succeeding volumes ("The Full Catastrophe," 1990, and "The Error of Our Ways," 1997) were set in more conventional, albeit bizarre, situations. All three are concerned with the effect of speech (or lack of it) in interpersonal relationships. Carkeet is also the author of "The Greatest Slump of All Time," (1984), a superb novel about baseball players; "I Been There Before, (1985), about the resurrection of Mark Twain; "The Silent Treatment," (1988), a novel for young adults; and "Campus Sexpot," (2005), a memoir of his high-school days in Sonora, CA in the early 1960s and the effect on the town by the publication of a steamy roman-a-clef that was written by a former teacher.

I won't repeat the story line since others have already done that. And in fact I will also pass on it's standing as a novel. I agree with others that the characters are mostly charming if a bit quirky and the sub-plot of linguistics is quite interesting.

I'll chose instead to focus most of my remarks on it's place within the mystery genre. And here, unfortunately, it really doesn't hit the mark. My bias is toward mysteries that pull you along. That is, provide you with clues and diversions that engage you as the reader to match wits with the author. To see if you can solve the crime before everything is revealed. Naturally the best of these also have characters that we care about, scenes that feel alive and suspense that keeps you turning the pages.

Double Negative does have interesting characters and the scenes do feel authentic but there really isn't any suspense and most of the clues center on who loves or hates Jeremy, not on whom the murderer might be.

Enjoyable read, but don't go out of your way to find a copy.

I put David Carkeet in the same category as Patrick Dennis. He finds unlikely scenarios and populates them with likeable characters. He may be considered a young adult author because even his adult books are accessible (no strong language or graphic scenes). This is not a book to be agitated by but to be reassured by: good people survive when the inevitably unfortunate circumstances develop in the routine interactions of daily home and work, however unlikely the actual work may be.

"Hoosier, n., etymology obscure and boring: a dumb white man with a fat white wife who eats greens, attaches his muffler to his car with a coat hanger, and leaves refrigerators in his yard for children to suffocate in."

You know how reviewers rave about books that they "can't put down" once they pick them up? I always thought this was the absolute top praise you could heap on a tome. But then I read Double Negative by David Carkeet and realized that books can do one better: they can make you keep putting them down to marvel at the cleverness of a phrase, or to gasp for air amid fits of laughter. "Easily clutched" becomes penultimate praise by comparison.

Double Negative was nominated for an Edgar for best mystery in 1980, and it is the first in a trilogy by David Carkeet featuring the title character, Jeremy Cook, a famous linguist (as far as a linguist can be, I suppose) and all-around swell guy.

Jeremy works in a daycare center that doubles as a linguistics research facility. In exchange for discount toddler oversight, the staff is allowed to take copious notes about every utterance their tykes make as they learn to form words and sentences. A large part of the book's charm is that the characters all appreciate sentence structure, leading to some humor that only book geeks could appreciate. It is a wonderful premise that allows Carkeet to show off his verbiage with a built-in excuse for excess.

The story he gets to tell with these skills reminded me a bit of the CLUE movie to which our site pays homage. When one of the linguists that works along with Jeremy is killed, the entire staff turns their eyes towards the mystery and each other. Everyone knows that one of them committed the murder, which leads to the hilarious snooping, traps, questions, suspicions, and misplaced trust that made the movie adaptation such a classic.

Just as in the CLUE movie, the characters are vivid and unique. The book's detective is an intelligent and quirky fellow whose interplay with Jeremy is so good that many bouts of dialog begged to be enjoyed with multiple readings. And Jeremy is one of those rare book protagonists that you immediately fall in love with after only a few pages. By the end of the book he is a real person, completely fleshed out, and just as wonderful for his faults as for his charms.

The plot is interesting enough, but it is Carkeet's ability to dizzy the reader with a turn of phrase that makes this an enticing read. Again and again I would damn the author for using up an analogy that I sure would have enjoyed coming up with on my own. My head is now filled with superior phrasings that make simple tasks, such as emailing my wife from the road, a depressing exercise in linguistic futility. I just want to send her excerpts from the book instead of the dull crap that spills out of my less-intelligent noggin.

Understand ahead of time that this is not a mystery you are meant to solve along with the protagonist. It is a humerus suspense story with some fascinating philosophy and linguistic theory thrown into the mix. If Douglas Adams could have turned it down a notch and written a good mystery, Double Negative would have been the result. Word-lovers, people whose sense of humor often soars over the heads of their peers, and anyone with an IQ over 120 will love, love, love this book. It is the best mystery I have read since Aunt Dimity Slays the Dragon and funniest book I have snorted through since Them by Jon Ronson.

This novel has all the makings of a good "cozy" mystery--little graphic violence or bloodshed, not many sexually explicit scenes, fairly tame language. What makes this book such a delight to read is the cast of characters--a bunch of academics. Specifically, a group of high-level linguistic researchers studying language development in children. Indeed, these characters are paid to conduct research--they don't even teach graduate students, let alone undergrads, so you know that their every thought is consumed by language-related theory. To add an extra level of strangeness, the research center has its own day care unit so that the researchers can have a ready supply of subjects (I wonder about the ethics of that).

The plot is fairly slow, but cozy readers will probably not be bothered by that. I personally was delighted to find a cozy that wasn't focused on food, knitting, or some sort of craft for a change. A real thinking-person's mystery.

Patricia Rockwell
Author--"Sounds of Murder"

I'm happy to have discovered a new detective story writer. 'Double Negative' by David Carkeet is quite good. It's a Felony & Mayhem paperback!

I found this book to be silly. It is not really a mystery. It focuses heavily on whether the central characters like one another or not. And this reader did not care!

This book actually won an award? I will give it the Useless Profanity Award. What the *%#!@ does the "_" word and all the "g-d d--ns" have to do with a good mystery? I threw it in the trash after Chapter 3. I consider myself an average reader but the profanity was wa-a-a-ay too distracting. I wasted my money and my time. Hopefully this review will save yours.