Customer Reviews

Drop Dead, My Lovely

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Peter Ingalls gets banged on the head by falling books in the store where he works and suffers amnesia. When he awakens, however, he is convinced that he is a private investigator. He proceeds to open an office and hire a wanna-be actress as an assistant who curses like a sailor and quits every five minutes only to regret it and ask to be taken back. Peter always obliges. He even hires her back when he fires her before she can quit.

He has two customers who come in for help. One has a missing boyfriend and the other thinks her husband is having an affair. Using 1940s private eye lingo and dressing the part so well people think he's wearing a costume, Peter manages to screw up both cases. He decides that both the women seeking help are actually lesbians who are having an affair with each other. Meanwhile, an actual murder and disappearance take place that are connected to his two cases. If it weren't for his foul-mouthed assistant, he'd never get to first base on either of his cases because, in real life, Peter is a naïve mama's boy who lived at home until his accident. Peter's bumbling manages to cause all kinds of problems. His inept behavior, naïve reaction to bad situations and brawls with his assistant cause laugh-out-loud reactions. Peter does manage to dig deep within himself and rise to the occasion and solve the mysteries.

In DROP DEAD, MY LOVELY, Ellis Weiner has created a charming character that you want to give advice to and help along. You actually find yourself yelling at Pete when he's getting ready to do something really dumb and telling him to lose the fedora and the double-breasted suit. His sassy assistant, Stephanie, adds a wonderful dimension to the insanity of the private detective's office and his clients aren't too sane either. It's a book that drags you into the action while entertaining you.

Reviewed by alice Holman
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

Amnesiac hero Pete Ingalls will have you laughing on every page. Believing that he is an old-style private eye, Pete calls the ladies "angel" and "doll"--getting decidedly mixed responses from today's liberated women. But the real action starts when the two cases he takes on sends him out on the streets to dig up clues. A bit like Steve Martin's "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" but far cleverer, "Drop Dead, My Lovely" will leave your sides aching.
-Adrian W.

All Pete Ingalls remembers is waking up in the hospital. He has no recollection of the case that put him there. Still, he figures that the best things to do is get back to work, so he finds a new office, hires a secretary, and does just that.

See, Pete thinks he's a hardboiled PI in the very classic sense. And the two dames in distress that come calling seem to need him. One is looking for a missing lover. The other wants proof that her husband is having an affair. And while Pete has no clue what he's doing, his secretary, fortunately, does. But will it be enough to get them both through this in one piece?

I'm not familiar with the classic hardboiled detectives of the past, but the little I do know makes it obvious they were the inspiration for this hilarious tale. It's rather obvious to us early on that Pete has amnesia and is delusional. We keep getting clues about his past that put the pieces into place. The mystery plot of the story is also done extremely well. There were several nice twists up until the very end, when everything was wrapped up nice and neat. And the humor! I was laughing out loud the entire way through the book at the confusion of the other characters to Pete, his own confusion over literal interpretations, and his hilarious commentary on life. It was right up my sense of humor.

So why the four stars? This book had foul language that I'm not used to running into in a book. Lots and lots of it. It seemed to get better as the book went along, which I appreciated. There were also several cases of sexual innuendo I didn't care for and a sex scene that I skipped over but still could have done without. I'm well aware this will not bother most people out there, but it bothered me and lowered my enjoyment of the book. Since I'm the one rating it, I took that into account.

Overall, I enjoyed the book enough to give the sequel a chance. Here's hoping that it's as funny as this one was.

This book is brilliantly clever and fun. I stayed up till four am reading it, then immediately read it again upon waking. Best fiction I've read in a long, long time.

I drove by a bookstore in Dallas that was closing out it's inventory and bought several books for $1 each. I picked this one up on a whim. After reading it I would have happily paid full price for the book. It was a great lighthearted read cleverly done. I will pass this on to friends who enjoy a light read with good writing. Can't wait to see what else I might find from this author.

Fans of noir detective novels will recognize that by titling his book "Drop Dead, My Lovely," author Ellis Weiner announces his intention to spoof 1940s style noir fiction right off the bat. Namely, Raymond Chandler's 1940s hard boiled detective Philip Marlowe, who was famously portrayed on the big screen by Humphrey Bogart... and Chandler's crime novel "Farewell, My Lovely."

Our story begins with Pete Ingalls awakening in a hospital bed, having spent two days there after suffering a blow to the head. In reality, Pete is employed as a clerk in a bookstore, however as a result of his head injury he believes himself to be a Private Investigator. He dresses and talks in the manner of a tough, wise-cracking detective straight out of 1940s pulp fiction. When he's adressing a dame or a skirt, he'll call her Dollface or Angel or Sugar. He's not afraid to step into dangerous physical confrontations, but he fights more like a bookstore clerk than a gritty, rough-trade gumshoe.

Weiner succeeds in producing a fun, often hilarious detective story delivered masterfully in the style of the genre. The dialogue is full of witty banter. The meandering thoughts of the hero, revealed through his narration of the story, were hysterical. Throughout his narrative and his dialogue with other characters in the story, Pete never breaks character from the hard-boiled detective lingo. I often found myself amused that his bump on the noggin seemed to lead his thought processes to be a little addled as he waxed philosophical about life for the reader. For example, in describing the appearance of a female client, "... It was the kind of face you'd call an aristocratic face, if you were the kind of person who believed in an aristocracy of faces and went around gassing off about it."

I enjoyed this book from beginning to end. If you like crime noir, and you like laughing... you will like this book!

When he wakes up in the hospital, Pete Ingalls thinks he?s a private investigator and talks like a gumshoe out of a forties film. He has no memory of being a mild mannered hermetic bookstore clerk who had an accident when a pile of books fell on his head. His friend thinks he is putting him on but when he leaves the hospital, he opens up a PI office, places an ad in the newspaper, prints some business cards, and hires a secretary who wanders if her boss is legitimate or crazy.

Actually Pete has two walk in cases that he eagerly grabs up. The first one involves Celeste Vroman who wants Pete to find her lover Jeff Litman who seems to have disappeared. He finds Jeff hiding at his office avoiding Celeste because he started an affair with Olivia Cartwright. His second case involves Catherine Flonger who thinks her TV reporter husband is cheating on her and wants proof. Neither case goes smoothly. Jeff disappears, Olivia is found murdered and Pete has a quickie with Catherine in a women?s dressing room. It goes downhill from there.

What makes DROP DEAD, MY LOVELY an outstanding reading experience is the hero is suffering from amnesia yet effortlessly becomes a private investigator modeling himself on tough PI?s like Same Spade and Spencer. There is plenty of action because Pete manages to get himself in a lot of trouble while working on cases yet the best part of Ellis Weiner?s novel is the dialogue. Pete sounds like an anachronistic Phillip Marlow clone in a twenty-first century context and that makes for a hilarious novel.

Harriet Klausner

This book could have been really fun but I think the author tried too hard to include "noir" sayings. And I can't imagine that anyone in this guys family wouldn't have tried to see what was wrong with him. And are we supposed to believe that someone who is this dumb could actually come up with all the clever sayings? And that he was able to act like this after a week of reading detective novels? Will not read the follow up book -- this was just painful to get through.

This centaur of a book--half mystery, half comedy--will prove equally upsetting and confusing to readers of both comedy and mystery. What is so funny about someone being killed? What is so mysterious when the private eye who tells the story is so obviously a deluded fool? As I make clear on the Unofficial Ellis Weiner website (www.ellisweiner.com), Mr. Ellis Weiner has, in this novel, outsmarted both himself and the reading public. The narrator--a hard-boiled, big-city detective who thinks, among other things, that "the Fonz" is an international police institution--commands very little credibility. And yet I have given it five stars. Why? Because I believe as many people as possible should buy it and read it, the better to expose to the world the disgraceful performance it is. The more people read this, the more people will be prepared and motivated to not read the next work foisted on the public by this too-clever-by-half author, who is too clever by half. Yours truly, Prof. Renee Willis, Euphonia College.