Customer Reviews

The Pistol Poets

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Mixing poetry with drugs, sex, and murder would not be the first thing to come to mind if you were thinking about writing crime fiction. And unless you're Victor Gischler, the results of such an abominable coupling would likely be a bad as it sounds. But if Gischler isn't the most talented new crime writer to hit the pages in the last few years, he is certainly the most bizarre. Of his three novels - five stars everyone - "The Pistol Poets" is the most blackly humorous - think a more evil Carl Hiaasen - certainly the most imaginative, and probably the best of the bunch.

Harold Jenks is a low-level drug dealer in the East St. Louis slums, a dead-ender with a long prison sentence the best outcome of his miserable life. When he and his partner kill a graduate student in a mugging gone bad, Jenks decides to swap identities, moving to a backwater east-Oklahoma University playing the role of budding poet Sherman Ellis. It is there he crosses paths with the pathetic Jay Morgan, a visiting professor of poetry at the fictitious East Oklahoma University, the cold and rainy redneck paradise providing an unusually whacky setting for Gischler's very own brand of graphic violence and raw sex told with tongue firmly implanted-in-cheek. Morgan is a slacker of summa cum laude caliber, a gypsy professor of poetry with perpetual writer's block, a connoisseur of undergraduate sex and hard alcohol. But a cranky department head and a cantankerous would-be poet are the least of Morgan's worries when a co-ed he was bedding turns up dead in his apartment. Convoluted for sure, but merely the underpinnings of a non-stop rush of manic academia as gory as it is zany. This may have the Fireside Poets doing synchronized rolls in their graves, but it sure is bloody good fun. Get educated - get Gischler.

I grabbed this book when I was deep in the midst of a crime novel binge. It was a very interesting contrast to the Chandler, LaSalle and Hammett books I'd been reading. The characters hold some twisted motivations and some of the more macabre elements seem to not phase them. It was a terrific change of pace to read a contemporary novel with some obvious influence of great past works that wasn't overburdened with "wink, wink" references. Good book from a great writer. Well worth the time. Noir without being shackled by the demands of the genre. I also liked the academic connection of the school, made for a nice addition to the flavor of the characters.

Loved the Gun Monkeys, this one was harder to stay interested in, it was crazy hectic

Several years ago I believed Crime fiction should have a serious tone. Serious carnage, serious people conducting serious business with serious outcomes. Sure, every now and then the hero or heroine could make a pithy comment or two, and occasionally you had a comic relief character whose sole purpose was to lighten the mood. But never, I thought, should Crime fiction be comedic and serious in equal measure, and it should DEFINITELY not be more comical than grave. Alas, the Old Me never read Pistol Poets. It would have blown all my rigid assumptions to smithereens.

Pistol Poets traces the dual stories of a discontented poetry professor and an exiled inner-city gangbanger as they adapt to small-town college life in amusing and wildly different ways. Drugs get involved, then guns, sex, lies, dead bodies, money, sleazy profs, gangsters and poetry. Poetry? Yes, Gischler manages to tell a story packed to the hilt with everything you want in a Crime novel (six bodies within the first 60 pages, if that gives you a clue) plus extra heaping gobs of comedy. Furthermore, he paints great visuals in every scene and weaves a strong plot filled throughout with suspense. His characters are expertly drawn and feel real, so much so that we have very little trouble believing the crazy things they do. Overall, he has both the mechanics AND the storytelling skills to make Poets a great read.

Now I'm not a poetry guy, but it does play a prominent part of these hilarious and messed-up characters' lives and yet Gischler makes it interesting enough that I wanted to keep reading. And read I did, finishing the book in only a few days. If you don't think Crime fiction can be funny, and if you don't think Poetry majors and backwoods towns can make you laugh, then you need to pick up Pistol Poets. If you already like your crime weighted with laughs, you'll get a fun time out of this book, too. Buy it ASAP.

"The Pistol Poets" is one of those books I've had sitting around for a long time and just never got around to reading (similar to what Stephen King calls his "Someday Books"). I finally read it -- and it wasn't quite worth the wait.

"Poets" is like a three-headed monster made up of the college setting and academic backbiting/camaraderie/craziness of Richard Russo's "Straight Man," the thugs-with-greater-aspirations characters of Elmore Leonard, and a multithreaded plot that brings a disparate group of people together and has them slowly find each other, with bodies and violence littering their path (Bill Fitzhugh does this rather well).

The novel revolves around a midsized college in Oklahoma. A boozing, nomad poetry professor, Morgan, finds a student he was sleeping with dead next to him when he awakes one morning. A young black drug dealer, Jenks, steals the identity of someone whose murder he was involved in and tries to "better himself" by taking the man's courses at the school. A old ex-mobster in the witness protection program comes to Morgan for advice on his poems. A very Leonardesque kingpin arrives in town to get back his drugs, which Jenks took with him when he relocated. A shady private detective enters the mix, looking for the girl who ended up dead next to Morgan.

These characters make their way through the plot and end up in the finale in fairly predictable ways.

Gischler's comedy is often too broad to be funny. I laughed once -- when Jenks hilariously starts rapping in the poetry class. Otherwise, this verges into slapstick, and there's too much of an exertion to make things offbeat (the dean crossdressing, one professor nearly killing another by tossing a Joyce novel into the spokes of his bike, etc.).

The crime/violence elements don't fit neatly in with the comedy, and this starts to edge more toward the latter as the novel progresses. There are too many scenes where these normal, everyday people act like action heroes -- including one college student turning into the Terminator and killing a guy while naked on a motorcycle.

I wish Gischler had stuck with the comedy more. The crime plot becomes more than a little numbing after a while. Though I didn't think the comedy was all that effective, it certainly beats someone trying to imitate Elmore Leonard.

The sharpest bit of satire in this novel deals with Jenks. The school has a very small minority class, especially African-Americans. So even though Jenks is a horrendous student, the dean caters to him and demands that he be a visible representative of the school (simply to gain brownie points for having a black student). This could have really led to some funny commentary on the issue of race in academia, but Gischler unfortunately lets it slip away.

The biggest flaw in the plot is, of course, the poor student who ODs and ends up dead next to Morgan in his bed. The cops may be incompetent, sure, but if someone is seen with someone the night before she disappears, something tells me he will at least be questioned. When pretty young college students go missing from midsized colleges, it's national news -- her death is treated like a mere distraction.

Gischler's prose is oddly screenplay-like. He likes to break up his sentences (as in "It looked nice, long and black, tinted windows. Expensive"), which can become irritating. The writing tends to be simple, with simplistic and cliche composition, but it is a fast read, and the finale does build genuine momentum.

A decent plot with the potential of something funny is wasted with too many bullets and bodies.

I enjoyed Gischler's "Suicide Squeeze" -- gave it five stars, in fact, but this one was a stinker. I didn't even get past page 75. Totally unrealistic. Characters are no better than comic book characters. The premise of the plot was wildly unrealistic. I understand that this is supposed to be a dark comedy book, and that the reader should just go along with the zaniness but there's gotta be some connection with reality. For instance, there are two deaths early in the book and the reaction of the other characters is totally unrealistic. Goodbye Gischler.