Customer Reviews

The Prisoner of Vandam Street

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

 

 

While drinking at the Corner Bistro with his friend McGovern, Kinky Friedman starts shaking, mumbling and goes from hot to cold in an instant. He blacks out and comes to in a hospital. At first Kinky thinks McGovern slipped him a Mickey, but the symptoms continue. The Kinkster knows he is sick but it takes the doctor a while to figure out what is wrong with him. He suffers from a virulent form of malaria picked up when Kinky worked for the Peace Corps in Borneo.

His friends, the Village Irregulars offer to nursemaid him so the doctor discharges him with the provision that he stays in his apartment for six weeks. During one of his moments of lucidity, Kinky looks out the window and sees a man beating a woman until she starts bleeding. When he calls 911and the police go over to investigate they find an empty and unused warehouse and nobody on the second and fourth floor heard anything. Kinky is determined to prove that he is right and he uses the Village Irregulars as his eyes and ears with some very hilarious results.

Kinky Friedman is irreverent and witty as usual, insulting everyone and everything using blue humor so he doesn't sound like a racist (which he isn't). It's touching to see Kinky's misfits and society's rejects gather round in his hour of need and no one can doubt them for not believing Kinky since half the time he is hallucinating. The real star of THE PRISONER OF VANDAM STREET is the cat whose displeasure at the invasion of his territory by an occupying force is shown in a very definite way.

Harriet Klausner

Reading Prisoner of Vandam Street wasn't just something to read when I couln't sleep, it was an excuse to be awake to keep reading!As often true with Kinky Friedman books, I experienced edge-of-the-chair suspence while laughing at Kinky's unique humor and both edgy and polished use of language.Being hard-of-hearing, McGovern's misunderstandings are what people get frustrated by when I make similar mistakes. Had Kinky been well, would he have noticed the battering across the street?Had Kinky been well, and had he noticed the battering across the street, and had been able to investigate without the Village Irregulars + 3, would he have been able to protect the battered?

This is the first book I'd read by this author and I enjoyed his kinky sense of humor. If you're feeling down, read this book and you'll feel better quickly.

Apparently, between being lauded by the President, courted by Hollywood, and encouraged by Molly Ivins to run for Texas Guv, Kinky Friedman decided that taking the care and hours necessary to write a decent book would be too much of a drain on his otherwise star filled schedule. I enjoyed his earlier works, and have been a fan of Kinky's personality ever since I first became aware of its existence. His earlier works were masterful and created a world into which I longed to escape, as most good fiction does.

Regretfully, this work not only doesn't do justice to the creative force that I understood to be Kinky Friedman, it seems to indicate that Kinky has begun, for better or worse, to believe his own bull***t. Instead of creating something new, or nuanced, he gives us a rehashing of the twenty things that we know to be "Kinky", presenting them one per ten pages, secure that mere nuggets of recycled humor, absent societal obervation and commentary, interspersed with more navel gazing than Sylvia Plath aged fourteen, will satieate his masses of followers. Regretfully, though he does compare himself to Jesus in the book, there is no way to take the crumbs of Vandam Street and feed anyone, much less a multitude.

Private investigator Kinky Friedman suffers a bout of malaria and begins seeing the world in a whole new way. Part of it is visions and delusions created by the disease, but part of it may actually be a new clarity caused by the sickness, or by being shut up in his apartment with half a dozen strange men (his friends) who insist on taking care of him but who can hardly take care of themselves. When Kinky sees a woman being beaten in her apartment across the street, he's sure that this isn't a vision. When the cops respond to his 911 call and discover that the building doesn't have a third floor where the beating is supposed to have occured, Kinky isn't disuaded, but his friends begin to wonder whether this sighting is about as real as some of the other strange things he's seen.

More to humor Kinky than because they believe he actually saw anything, his friends start to watch the window where Kinky thought he saw the beating. But only Kinky spots the next incident--where the violence escalates. Somehow he's got to figure out how to rescue this woman who might not exist, but he's got to do it from his own apartment because his malaria leaves him to weak to move.

Author Kinky Friedman offers up a strange but insightful story of cat defecation, malarial visions, spousal abuse, and friendships in today's New York. THE PRISONER OF VANDAM STREET is a strange book with largely unlikable and certainly unlikely characters. But Friedman's ironic sensibilities are in full swing. I found myself reading along, chuckling at some of Friedman's thoughts on cats--only to be struck by a nugget of insight into the human condition that set me back hard on my heels.

Although there is humor in PRISONER, this isn't a funny book--quite the contrary. But it is the kind of book that hits you hard and sticks with you for a long time. It's Kinky Friedman at his best. Highly recommended.

I think Kinky Friedman (the writer, the character, the detective, the politician, the musician) is a love-him or hate-him proposition. I've always loved him. The secret is not taking him too seriously. Friedman's an equal opportunity offender, whether you're white, black, Jewish, gay, a New Yorker, a Brit, an Aussie, a cat lover, Asian...the list goes on and on. So if you are easily offended, you'd best stay away. If, on the other hand, you enjoy stand-up comedians who have no qualm with getting a laugh out of stereotypes, then you're probably a candidate for Kinky.

THE PRISONER OF VANDAM STREET finds the usually peripatetic Kinky confined to his Greenwich Village apartment, suffering from the sudden onset of malaria. In a Rear Window-style plot, the delirious and perhaps delusional Kinky sees a man beating up a woman. None of his friends believe him, so he has to call on the assistance of a detective friend from L.A., who shows up to do the investigation. In the meantime, there's the usual Kinky running commentary on life, love, and cat anuses.

Friedman's books are always fast and fun, and this one is no exception. That said, the plot is awfully thin, almost nonexistent, with almost zero detection and a chapter that comes out of thin air, with no relevance to the rest of the book. So, if you're looking to enjoy some time with a skilled raconteur, this may be the book for you. If you like a really good mystery, though, you might want to try one of Kinky's early books, like ELVIS, JESUS, AND COCA-COLA. In the meantime, this one is worth it just for some of the one liners, none of which I can really quote in this review!

Confined to his New York apartment at 199B Vandam Street for six weeks after contracting malaria--the "only truly deadly strain" of the disease--private detective Kinky Friedman (not to be confused with his creator, author, country singer, and potential future governor of Texas Kinky Friedman) happens to see, Rear Window-style, a woman brutally beaten in an apartment across the street. The problem is, feverish and delirious as he's been, Kinky does not make the most convincing of witnesses, and neither the police he summons nor his gang of variously accented, frequently inebriated cronies--the so-called "Village Irregulars," the collective Grace Kelly to his laid up Jimmy Stewart--believe him. When further investigation suggests Kinky wasn't imagining things, the game, as he and Sherlock like to say, is afoot.

But the mystery in The Prisoner of Vandam Street is in a sense beside the point, entertaining though it is, for Kinky Friedman's novel is a departure from standard mystery fare. The author's prose is bursting with word play and Conan Doyleisms and pop culture references and irreverent philosophical musings. If at times it borders on the cloying, his writing is far more often downright funny:

"Now, I'm not making light of people who are deaf or losing their hearing. I am not mocking a disability that afflicts millions of Americans as they grow older, effectively cutting them off to varying degrees from the hearing world. All I'm saying, and I'll try to speak loudly and slowly and enunciate clearly, is that they should get medical help or a hearing aid or a large, metal ear-horn like the kind that was used in medieval times, and stop constantly blaming hapless, sensitive friends like myself for mumbling."

Friedman also has a serious side, evidenced in the book's closing parable and in the sweetly moving, brief chapter on his--Kinky the character's as well as Kinky the man's--continued sense of loss after the death of his parents.

In short, mystery lovers with a taste for off-color jokes and pun-punctuated prose will get a kick out of Kinky.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

I was hesitant to express my opinion on this latest of Kinky's novels, feeling perhaps it was my own failure to "get it" that made me dislike this horrid drivel so intensely, but after realizing the majority of reviewers found "The Prisoner of Vandam Street" so repugnant, I felt somewhat better (I guess) that I am not alone in my disappointment in this novel. I like Kinky, I am a fan of Kinky's earlier novels so this is not easy to say. This novel is just plain B.A.D. I can only hope this is just a phase the Kinkster is going through and is not what we can look forward to. Judging from his other recent novels ("Kill Two Birds" immdiately comes to mind), sadly this seems not to be true. Kinky has lost his touch. His fiction/mystery efforts are lazy, boring, repetitive, and devoid of plot and interesting characters. I'm not taking another chance on buying these doorstops new from now on. I'll just wait until they land on the 10 cent pile at the Salvation Army.

Sigh. And he was one of my favorites.

Anyone who has read Kinky's books knows how magical the first few were. The books were rich in detail and he obviously took his time writing them. He seemed to care about his writing. Plots weren't strong but they were fun to read. Then as he became aware that he had a following with a name that could sell his books, he started coasting. Prisoner of Van Dam Street is where he stops coasting and starts phoning it in. This book is crap. It was obviously cranked out with little thought. There is no plot, unless you consider a ripoff of Rear Window that doesn't add up to much a plot. The book covers the same ground over and over and there's nothing endearing or funny about this book like his earlier works. The Village Irregulars insult Kinky and he them. Over and over again. That, of course, is when Kinky is not comparing himself to Jesus Christ. Maybe because he knows the quality of his work has been forsaken. Then halfway through the book Kinky imports a private eye from L.A. to solve the case and to prove Kinky is as wonderful as Kinky says he is. Chapter three is the biggest waste of trees for any chapter ever written in any book ever. Talk about filler. And what's up with chapter 22? It's the best part of the book, although it has nothing to do with the story, but it's also a reprint from Texas Monthly magazine. Aren't novels supposed to be original? Kinky has become lazy, smug and complacent with his writing. If he could only spend a fraction of the time he does chasing attention to keep a spotlight on himself, or sucking up to famous people so that he can drop their names and appear cool, he might come up with something decent again. Then maybe when I bought his books, hoping they'd be good, I wouldn't feel like I'd been suckered, again. I noticed while putting this review in that Kinky has a second new book out. The Case of the Missing Puppethead appeared right on the heels of Prisoner. No wonder Prisoner comes off as such a rush job. Double the book output, double the financial reward for Kinky, double the ripoff for his readers. How annoying and disappointing! If the books were good, it'd be great. But Kinky's flooding the book market with diarrhea and it stinks.

Once again, Kinky Friedman gives us a much needed respite from the tedious news we could do without. This time he does it in a unique and entertaining manner that has Kinky flat on his back, more delirious than usual, and dependent upon that wonderful group of unconventional wanna be sleuths that we have come to know and love.

I love Kinky's work so much, and his terrific, if unconventional slant on life, that I could find a cook book by him entertaining and completely enchanting. I am well aware that behind that Texas wardrobe beats the heart of a poet, and the soul of a lovable and caring mystic. Genius is an overused word, but I don't think in Kinky's case you can avoid it. His interests are eclectic, and his knowledge varied. Don't let his demeanor fool you; this guy can do just about any damn thing he puts his mind to....and do it damn well

If you enjoy Kinky's work, please don't let the "intelectual elite" label you as a member of some mindless cult who follows some lemming-like troop over the cliff of mediocrity. He is so much more substantial, and it is a terrible shame that the boneheaded literati prefer the boring conventional over bright, inventive, and thought provoking.

Keep it up, Kinky, you are appreciated enormously by those of us who can tell the difference between assembly line drivel and the thought provoking gems you provide us. You make the mundane tolerable, and we love you for it.