Customer Reviews

McNally's Bluff

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

 

 

All of Palm Beach society is gathered at the home of a new arrival--former carnival owner Matthew Hayes. The party, a first look at a huge maze the carney built on his expensive property. But the prize turns out to be something none of the party-goers expected--a dead body at the center of the maze. Private Investigator (and man about town) Archy McNally was at the party and now Matt is asking for Archy's help in finding his wife's killer. Archy resists at first--but the case just might tie into another one that his father has been asked to provide legal services to.

As always, Archy finds himself swimming through a sea of beautiful women. There's his longtime-but-no-longer lover, Consuela. There's new love interest, Georgie. But there's also the beautiful and rich widow of a Florida billionaire--who just might have killed that very billionaire. And Archy can't help being attracted to the T.V. star--despite her being quite married. With his erstwhile sidekick, Binky, off providing services to a muckraking reporter, Archy is on his own in trying to find a killer.

The Vincent Lardo/Lawrence Sanders stories attempt and sometimes achieve a modern remake of the suave private eyes of the 1930s. Archy is always well (if sometimes ostentatiously) dressed, likes his alcohol, treats women like cute puppies, and is fastidious with his grammar. In several earlier stories, I objected to a streak of cruelty in Archy's treatment of Binky and others. Here, Archy seems not less full of himself but at least less cruel to others. His run-in with a several-year-old suit even exposed a bit of well-hidden self-doubt.

Lardo keeps a quick light tone, maintains a steady diet of beautiful women, corpses, high society, and murder, and delivers a page-turning mystery read. It's fluff, of course, but it's enjoyable fluff.

I finally finished McNally's Bluff by Laurence Sanders and Vincent Lardo. I say *finally* as this one took me about a week when generally it'd be a two day book...

Archy McNally is called to investigate a murder when a party he's attending turns into a crime scene. A carnival owner who has moved into town has a maze built on the property, and during a grand opening party his wife is murdered and found dead in the goal of the maze. It's nearly impossible that she was able to appear earlier as a performer at the party and then be found dead, but that's apparently what happened. There are a number of people who might be connected to the death in some way, but none appear to have a clear-cut motive. When one of these people shows up dead, the plot gets even more complicated. Archy is trying to solve the murder and unravel the mystery before anyone else dies in the process...

Normally I'm a big fan of the McNally series written by Lardo since Sanders passed away. And on the surface, this latest installment has the same witty writing and word play. But something just seems to be missing. Archie and Connie are no longer together, and the relationship between him and Georgia doesn't seem to advance anywhere here. His normal frustration with Binky is not there, as Binky seems to have a mind and life of his own in this book. Even Archie's dad, the head of the law firm, plays an extremely minor role here. The spark that normally propels me along with these books just wasn't there.

Everyone's entitled to an off-day. I just hope this isn't a precursor to the end of an excellent series...

I have read all of the McNally Novels and believe that Lardo has done an admirable and almost seamless job taking over the series for the late Lawrence Sanders. These books have always been lightweight, but the series appears to be moving from the Sean Connery to Roger Moore phase and becoming entirely self-parody in style. The characters are all there but the dialogue and plot are slighter than ever. From the outset of the crime, the murderer might as well carry a sign saying I did it.

It's about time Binky stood up for himself; I got the impression that Archie (grudgingly) respects that.
As for romance, Archy and Connie are sooooooo not split up. Georgie is a rebound affair that's run its course; I hope she and Archy remain friends. For me, having him living with a squeeze is close enough to marrying him off; either go whole hog, hitch him and end the series - or move him back to his aerie.

I really like that Vincent Lardo is getting handle on the McNally Character and Binky character is become more of a man than mouse. The ending of this novel was very good and with a clifhanger.But this constant sparing between Consuela and Archy it's becoming too much. Archy needs make up his mind about who he wants. I personally would like Archy and Consuela back together. While I like McNally Bluff this wasn't his personal best.

Having read all the Sanders and Vincent Lardo books about Archie and co.., this by far was my favorite: funny, witty, and suspenseful at the same time. Highly recommended for long-time fans of the McNally series as well as newcomers!

Why don't they take Lawrence Sanders' name off the McNally books? Vincent Lardo obviously hasn't studied them in depth, since he makes mistakes with reference to Sanders' stories. Archy states he doesn't want to get married if he can't have a marriage as perfect as his parents. Lardo apparently is unaware that the "pater" had an affair in one of Sanders' installments! Archy isn't quite the same guy and is becoming quite the annoying snob. Al Rogoff was hardly in this one and I missed him. Archy's living with a girlfriend and there are few references to the McNally "manse", dinners with the folks, etc. And the climax was anything but; a true anticlimax that was over before I realized. Time to hang up the series? I do believe.

McNally's Bluff displays clearly the chasm between Lawrence Sanders and Vincent Lardo. LS understood wit and served it up with lightness and style; VL is not much more than a smartass, not as literate, and the constant wisecracking is ultimately exhausting. In addition, Boyd Gaines, the narrator of the digital e-version, adds an over-the top, forced broadness to the reading, sounding like a geriatric WC Fields without the talent, making the entire package unbearably irritating - I could only listen about a third of the way through before I had to stop.

LS had a deep grasp of how language works; it was part of the whole wonderful, supreme joke that his thrillers were well-written, interestingly plotted, and literate, as well as quite funny. Lardo makes grammatical mood errors motivated by what I can't help interpreting as plain old pretentiousness (subjunctive instead of plain conditional, for example) and other simple syntactical errors that do not do justice to LS's craft.

In Sanders's hands, Archy McNally is a scamp and a rogue, at least in his own eyes, but still a human being who loves his parents and solves crimes while chasing women and eating too much. Lardo turns Archy into an empty caricature, alternately boring and boorish and completely unfunny. It's a shame and he should stop now.

An ethereal quality which I quite enjoyed bled through into parts of this # 6 novel in Vincent Lardo's Archy collection (# 13 in the whole series). In certain luxuriously drawn scenes, I could almost sense light pouring holes through the pages, similarly to images which have been portrayed in movies like the Harry Potter series, and The Never Ending Story. In McNally's BLUFF, Lardo had honed his author skills so well, he seemed to be literally producing magic in how certain scenes lifted off the pages and danced before, around, and within me. One scene in particular, which was infused with this type of "living light," was of the short yacht excursion to which Archy and Georgy were invited by Carolyn Taylor, and which included her boy toy, Billy, and Connie and Alex.

While reading BLUFF I was able to conceptualize another of the core differences I've been sensing (on an edge of unconsciousness) between Sanders and Lardo. Lawrence Sander seemed to naturally view life through a philosophical perspective; Vincent Lardo seems to look at human machinations through a sociological lens. Each seasoned author etched those leanings, consciously or not, into their thematic content, plot structure, and designs of Archy's motivations, curiosities, and basic drives through life. Sanders was automatically focused on the meaning of life itself, and how to get the most out of the experience as an individual. Lardo seems to automatically center on the interconnections among human beings, especially as they're separated socially or politically into clusters, cliques, or classes.

I don't know if these two authors fully realized how they were driven by this type of targeted viewpoint, when they were in process with a plot. Probably few of us do. Yet, I believe we're each driven by unique needs to know, by unique curiosities, which we each possess at core, at the center, the target of our essence-of-being, and of moving forward.

In SECRET, Sanders had Archy state that we're all hedonists at heart, though few of us admit it. In essence, through his McNally series, Sanders uses Archy to dramatize that unique, individual desire to know what gives personal pleasure, what gives a sense of satisfaction, why it does so, and how to enhance that need to "suck the marrow out of life."

In BLUFF, Lardo's Archy seems to imply that we (as human beings) tend to compare ourselves to others at higher levels in social class structure, and that we need to belong, to be accepted within the cream of social strata. Yet, at the same time we've been liberally taught to revile luxury, opulence, privilege and class.

These contrasts bring to mind the thematic essence of Ayn Rand's novels, FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED. Are we naturally oriented, as a species, to self or to others; and which is the prime/ethical way of being.

In myself, I have felt the natural needs of both Archies. I am very much an individual, and have released some of the culturally induced taint of feeling evil in having chosen to allow myself to center in a personal focus. Yet, I also crave to connect with and relate to others, fairly, sometimes intimately in friendship (to mutual benefit), and rightly. I'm wondering if this might be why, along with many others, I've been so fascinated with this series, especially given the comparisons and contrasts of the dual authorship.

In an overall balance I'm more of a philosopher/psychologist, than a sociologist, and I know that's one of the reasons I enjoy the Spenser series. To me, Parker seems more like Sanders than Lardo, in his art, yet, like Lardo, Parker works with (and entertains through) sociological issues, too.

Seeing this perspective contrast between the Sanders and Lardo Archies, the fact begins to clarify for me, of the two personas' varied needs to control (or not) others and their environments. If a person's focus is based comfortably in oneself, there's less or no need to control others. Whereas, if one is based in needs for social interaction, and for acceptance and approval from outside oneself, the need to control becomes natural, sometimes vital for emotional (and physical) survival. Though Ayn Rand does so, I do not want to conclude yet that one or the other type of personality structure is ethically right or wrong, morally good or evil. Maybe the correct fact is that we're each naturally different in these types of slants, and in different phases of maturity. I will admit, though, that the less I feel a need to control, the better I like life and myself.

An angry face of a gorgeous tiger was featured on the book jacket design on the hardcover of McNally's BLUFF (# 13 in this series). At first the symbolism in that design had me puzzled, as I attempted to connect it to the plot. I had wondered why a maze hadn't been used as the graphic symbol... until I contrasted the appealingly brassy red-and-gold colors, and tiger in the bulls-eye on BLUFF's jacket, to the ritzy but somber black-and-gold book jacket on the hardback of McNally's SECRET (the pilot to the series). That cover design comparison gave me a double-bulls-eye "ah ha!" into the slightly different focus of Sanders and Lardo in their offerings in this series.

With McNally's BLUFF, which appears to be the final book in the series, the McNally family's carnival history "secret" is coming full circle...

I didn't want to see that circus circle closing, or stepping fully out of the closet in all its gore and glory. If I saw that too clearly, I might have to accept an underlying significance that # 13 is truly the end of this series. No!

If that is so, however, McNally's BLUFF accomplished that honor of closing this series with amazing grace and literary panache!

In view of this speculation, I needed to read BLUFF on one of my slowest savor speeds. As I did so, I gradually came to love the perfection of that jacket on the hardcover. Actually, the paperback design is appealingly interesting, too, given the above perspective.

When I was more than half-way through the book, I noticed that the most current paperback design was very different; it applied an ebony background with a maze hedge stylized with a target in its center. Possibly due to the brain's need to "connect dots" that center symbol flashed my focus to the target used for Susan Silverman's practice with a fire arm in CRIMSON ROSE, # 15 in Robert B. Parker's Spenser series, which I reviewed recently. For some reason I continue seeing links between Spenser's world and Archy's, and what a stretch that is! I wrote about that brain spark in my review of McNally's SECRET.

McNally's Secret
Crimson Joy
The Godwulf Manuscript

Though this may be my last McNally novel to review, I can offset that loss by looking forward to the several Spenser novels I haven't yet read. That thought takes me to my novels; my first thought (actually it felt like a craving) after having finished writing each of them was, "I wish I could read this novel fresh, without having written it."

Thus, it is with added thanks that I have more Spenser novels to experience from that fresh first time of reading. And, that pleasant awareness brings to focus for me the contrast of the author paths involved in the creation and endurance of Spenser and Archy McNally. I believe both situations have brought "amazing" (a prominent word in BLUFF) cultural insights to the history of literature and the mysteries of life.

I love a good story, a good mystery, from almost any angle of approach.

What amazing gifts we have available in all of the above. Maybe that's the "bluff":

That it's all real and it's all a bluff. Long live the spiritual sanctuary of the novel. It almost, sometimes, seems to qualify as a church.

Linda Shelnutt

We've enjoyed the entire Archy McNally series, including the seven by Sanders and the now six by Vincent Pardo writing for the estate. However, we have to agree with those feeling this is the lightest of the light. Most of these books have us hobnobbing with the rich (if not famous) in Palm Beach and the various happenings, sometimes including murder, that cause them to seek McNally's "discrete" private eye services. While solving a mystery that is usually not too violent and not too enigmatic, we get steady doses of Archy's love life, his lavish wardrobe, his gossip sessions at the family manse, his sparring with his father's secretary and the mailroom attendant (Binky) at work, and his sumptuous meals at the Pelican Club and other hangouts.

All of these elements resurface in "Bluff"; but the underlying mystery is so light, and its conclusion so direct, that the book seems little more than an assembly of past storylines and character interactions. While using now rich ex-carny entertainers as the principals wasn't a bad idea, the plot, centering on the murdered "Venus", Marlena Marvel, found in a literal maze of bushes, otherwise just generated little or no suspense to carry off the 300-page hunt for a close-at-hand killer.

Sometimes these continuing series novels run out of steam, especially after a dozen or so entries. We'd hope for a much better effort next outing, or else we'd recommend early retirement for our pal Archy.