Customer Reviews

The Pistol Poets

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I bought Mr. Gischler's debut effort, Gun Monkeys, on Amazon last month and enjoyed it so much I immediately went back and purchased his next two books, the first of which is Pistol Poets. I was extremely disappointed.

Yes, Mr. Gischler writes simple, choppy, hard-edged prose that is appealing and he is also pretty funny too, reminiscent of Elmore Leonard and Kinky Friedman, and Pistol Poets features both qualities but.........none of the characters were in the least sympathetic. Every last character was self-absorbed, amoral and made me slightly naseous. I could not identify with any of the novel's characters, much less like them, with the possible exception of one very minor character, but of course Gischler kills him, while the disgusting main characters walk scot-free. For me this turned what could have been another fun and funny read into a dismal experience.

My advice: if you don't need sympathetic protagonists then get this book because you will probably enjoy it. If you are like me and want someone you can identify with, or even like, you'll do better staying away from this book. The whole experience reminded me of having to read Kate Chopan's "The Awakening" in college, another depressing treatment of neurotics without any socially redeeming qualiites. Ugh.

A few years ago I started reading mysteries on the internet. I found sites like Plots With Guns, The Thrilling Detective, and Judas. This is where I first heard of Victor Gischler. At that time he was writing a column for Plots With Guns called Hardboiled Dixie. And he had short stories all over the place.
Gun Monkeys was his first novel and worth the price of admission for the first paragraph alone. It was a wild ride and I couldn't wait for his next.
Last month The Pistol Poets was published. Was it worth the wait? HELL YES. Gischler has outdone himself.
What's the book about? Glad you asked.
Money
Drugs
Lust
Sex
Murder
And that's all in the first chapter.

Professor Jay Morgan: A "gypsy" on the academic circuit he teaches on a different campus from year to year. After finding a girl dead in his bed things go from bad to worse.

Harold Jenks: A drug dealer from St. Louis who wants a new life and after stealing a dead mans identity he might just get his wish.

Timothy Lancaster and Wayne DelPrego: Two poetry students who get caught up Jenks life and drug deal.

Ginny Conrad: A student reporter who gets more than she bargained for.

Fred Jones: Mysterious university benefactor who wants to be a poet.

And

Dele Stubbs: The craziest private eye you've ever read about.

There are parts of the novel that made me laugh out loud and other parts that left me sick with grief. In all honesty I hated to finish this book but couldn't put it down. Why? Because I knew that once finished I was going to have a long wait until the next Gischler novel is published.

Run to the bookstore and get this one Gischler is a genius, you won't be disappointed.

Maybe I was unfair with my high expectations for this book. If I had never read Gun Monkeys, I would have been pleasantly amused by the Pistol Poets, and might have looked for more from Victor Gischler, (but, frankly, not with a real effort). So, maybe I set myself up for failure because Gun Monkeys was so good. (It really is a great book!) So, I expected a book of at least the humor and "pathos" of GM. What I got was something that seemed more a "kooky kopy" of Dave Barry/Kinky Friedman/Carl Hiaasen, etc. Good writers, but they do the wacky mystery novel better than this - much better. I was disappointed.

Most characters are one dimensional, and fairly uninteresting, (with the exception of "Jones", the amatuer poet/mob boss). They have implausable and unbelievable things happen to them, not as a consequence of a believable chain of events, but just to keep the "kookiness" at a high level. About halfway through the novel I lost interest, and put it aside for about two weeks, which I almost never do with a book. Even Professor Jay Morgan, the protagonist, lost my sympathy towards the end. The book had great potential, and I suspect was the victim of editing rewrites - at least I hope that that was the case. I look forward to the next Gischler novel, but if it is no better than the Pistol Poets, it'll be my last. Well, at least in hardback :)

Here is a wonderful example of black humour as the unlikely mixture of poetry and gangland violence are brought together in a hugely enjoyable story. It's wildly entertaining, managing to go from laugh out loud funny to viciously violent in the blink of an eye.

Harold Jenks is a lieutenant to a St Louis drug lord who sees his only opportunity for escape from the life lies in assuming the identity of a scholarship-winning poetry student. Stealing the name Sherman Ellis along with a bag full of his boss's drugs he heads for Eastern Oklahoma University and a new life of academia.

Jay Morgan is the poetry professor who doesn't quite know what to make of Jenks / Ellis, but points out to his fellow professors that Ellis' poetry is just as awful as his fellow students. Anyway, Morgan has his mind on more important matters, not the least of which is working out what to do with the body of the dead girl in his bed.

Finally, there's the enigmatic Fred Jones, an inspired character giving a refreshing injection of the unusual to the story. Jones is a rich old man who has promised to donate a large sum of money to the university with the understanding that someone (Jay Morgan) agrees to help him to get his poetry published. Not surprising to us, but very surprising to Morgan, the poetry is very, very good. But it's Jones' other talents that Morgan finds he has a more immediate use for.

Of course, all sorts of hell and mayhem are rained down upon the quiet university town of Fumbee, when Harold Jenks' former boss and his team of thugs come looking for his drugs. Between this mob and a rogue private investigator who becomes a one man crime wave, there's no shortage of action.

The cold violence displayed in the book appealed to the hardboiled reader in me, but it was mixed with plenty of humorous moments which managed to take the wicked edge off and put a smile on my face even as the bodies piled up. After reading this, the old gun lobby catch-cry may have to change to "Guns don't kill people - poets kill people".

I enjoy a madcap noir novel as much as anybody, and the premise of this one sounded fun.
Right out of the gate, it hit a pet peeve of mine (fact-checking isn't that hard), though. You'd think Ellis would know better than to promise not to come back to Missouri when his life is actually being threatened in Illinois. It was a small thing, but the sort of first-impression small thing that makes other small things you might never have noticed stand out. And there were other small things that bugged - slang that didn't fit the speaker, unnecessarily confusing wording here and there - nothing big, but there just the same.
I don't think I would've had trouble getting past those things, though, if Gischler had spent a little more time developing his characters and a little less time trying to storyboard a Tarantino movie.

Nearly every character was either a blank stereotype (that would include every character of color in the novel, including Jenks. Perhaps Gischler should look into that), or a vague sketch with an odd quirk standing in for a personality (cross-dressing Dean, eccentric academic Valentine, weird, childish Reams, amoral chubbette Ginny...), or just a self-absorbed unredeemed jerk (Morgan, principally).
I have to admit that Jones and DelPrego seemed almost human - DelPrego even being possibly the only character allowed an emotion beyond anger fear or horniness - but that only served to make it all the more frustrating how lazily drawn the other characters were. I felt like I could see the novel it could have been with some more ruthless editing. I could have done without the Stubbs plot entirely if we could have gotten a little bit of Jenks trying to be Ellis and fit into the academic world (the scene of rap posturing fiting too completely under the heading of Jenks as stereotype), or of Morgan doing something other than drinking and feeling sorry for himself. We're told at the veeeeery end that he did finally write another poem, and maybe actually developed something like feelings for a couple of people other than himself. Seems like maybe he could have shown us that, instead of telling, you know? Especially if that's all the growth you're main character's going to get in the course of a novel.

This book does call for considerable suspension of belief, but
fiction tends to call on us for that suspension; in this story,
the reader has to be ready to suspend a large amount of belief
and logic, but that said, this is a very entertaining and funny
book.
One point of the story is that we tend to expect the life of a
small-college professor, especially just a visiting prof., to
be rather one-dimensional and even dull. But this particular
prof. suddenly finds himself immersed in those famous trilogy
of high-living qualities, guns, drugs and sex.
He bounces from one problem to another, and along the way, his
friends and students get more and more involved, to the point
where they end up getting shot, beat up, robbed and generallly
knocked around, and the prof. himself seems only interested in
getting a little "action" with some women and in gaining some
employment.
It is difficult to describe crimes and violence and make it
seem funny, knowing as we do the horrible reality of it from
our reading and daily lives, but this author manages to do just
that. When you read some of these violent encounters, and meet
the vicious characters involved, it is hard to laugh, but laugh
we will.
With the multiple plots and characters moving along, the pace
is very good and fast, and the results are sometimes surprising.
Life in a small college town may not be like this, but this writer does make it all sound intriguing.
There are gangsters, drug dealers, college girls on the make,
professors who seem to have little interest in teaching, mysterious mobsters who are hiding out while writing poetry,
and more characters than we can almost keep track of, and they
are all interesting, and we can't help but want to keep reading
about them.
The author does a very nice job of maintaining a very high level
of interest, and most readers will keep wanting more.

It's tempting to give PISTOL POETS a quick-n-easy blurb description ("It's DEAD POETS SOCIETY as directed by Quentin Tarantino) but that wouldn't come close to describing the originality, humor and muscle of this excellent crime novel. I loved every page of it. And after enjoying this on the heels of GUN MONKEYS, it's official: I'm buying everything Victor Gischler writes.

Victor Gischler's "Gun Monkeys" was my favorite crime novel of 2002, and I'm pleased to report that "Pistol Poets" is even better. The satirical academic novel is a time-honored genre that's hard to pull off any more, but to my knowledge no one has ever tried to cross-breed it with hard-boiled pulp. Gischler succeeds brilliantly and breathes new life into both forms. Pick it up; you won't be sorry.

Victor Gischler's first novel was deserving of its Edgar nomination for BEST FIRST NOVEL. Had it been published by a major publisher rather than an small press, it probably would have won.

His second novel is a wonderful page turner full of humor, intriguing characters, violence, and a philosopical thought or two.

I won't go into any plot details. I just suggest you read this book.

Gischler is a pro at making violence funny, without losing suspense or tension.

His second effort is assured, exciting, and features some of the most memorable characters in recent crime fiction.

If you like Elmore Leonard, Dave Barry, Carl Hiaasen, James Crumley, Joe Lansdale, or Donald Westlake, then you must read Victor Gischler.