Suicide Squeeze (Hardcover)

by Victor Gischler (Author) "Conner Samson bounced a check for a dollar draft in Salty's Saloon and decided it was time to get serious about looking for work..." (more)
Key Phrases: inflatable dinghy, utility belt, Conner Samson, Professor Dan, Teddy Folger (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The idea of the repo man as crime solver has been popular since Joe Gores's San Francisco series; Bill Eidson is a recent convert. Now Gischler, who earned an Edgar nomination for his debut, Gun Monkeys (2003), gets in on the act with his third novel, which features a down-at-the-heels repo man, Conner Samson, who's hired to take back a sloop, the Electric Jenny, from its defaulting owner, Teddy Folger. Folger has burned down his comic book and baseball card store in Pensacola, Fla., for the insurance, and now plans to sail away from his old life—and wife—on the craft. But what Conner soon discovers is that an almost priceless treasure, a baseball card signed in 1954 by both Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, is hidden on the Jenny—and that a Japanese collector with a team of deadly ninjas will kill anyone who gets in the way of his acquiring it. Gischler is a light and clever satirist who knows how to keep a narrative moving, and Conner, who has connections to the Southern art world and a foxy married ladyfriend named Tyranny Jones, is a character well worth another visit. Agent, Noah Lukeman at Lukeman Literary Management. (Apr. 5)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Rocking like a hammock in a hurricane, this ultra-breezy Florida crime romp follows ex-jock Conner Samson as he gets caught in a deadly rundown between aging comic-book geek Teddy Folger and an oddball Japanese gangster obsessed with Americana. Teddy's holding onto pop-culture perfection: a DiMaggio baseball card signed for him by Joltin' Joe, Marilyn Monroe, and Billy Wilder during filming of the skirt-blowing scene in The Seven Year Itch. After collecting a $100,000 insurance payout for the supposedly destroyed card, Teddy tries to get cute and sell it to the Japanese collector, too. Samson, a likable if extraordinarily unlucky lunkhead, stumbles onto the scam when he's sent to repossess Teddy's yacht. While every imaginable kind of chaos is busy ensuing, Gischler treats readers to an amusing cast of Elmore Leonard cast-offs that includes a pint-size Pensacola crime boss, a nympho girlfriend inexplicably named Tyranny Jones, and an ex-NSA agent who favors her late father's pearl-handled six-shooters in a fight. This is a fast, enjoyably silly read underpinned with a surprisingly humane world view. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Delacorte Press; 1st ed/1st printing edition (March 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385337256
• ISBN-13: 978-0385337250
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,083,061 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All the Bullets and Twice the Caffeine, March 7, 2006

By	Gary Griffiths (Los Altos Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

It's tough not to like a novel with Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe at the center of the plot. Even tougher when you've got characters like Fat Otis running around "turning strong, healthy men into little, mashed-up heaps of bone and flesh." And then there's bookie Rockie Big, an adulterous nympho girlfriend named Tyranny, a fat Japanese billionaire Yakuza boss, and a busted ex-NSA agent, all playing backup to our hero, the broken-down would-be ballplayer, hard luck gambler, sometimes repo-man and all times lovable Conner Samson.

If like me you'd never heard of Victor Gischler, fasten your seatbelt and lock in for the whacked-out spawn of the mating of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard, an in-your-face trip through Florida's panhandle while Samson tracks down a deadbeat's boat and a legendary baseball card. Gischler's prose literally rips across the pages, too fast for poetry, too lean for embellishment, bouncing from one-liner to six-shooter as thick with black humor as it is with fresh corpses. And give Gischler extra credit: nowhere in his cast of misfits and miscreants is there a single Russian mobster, the seemingly obligatory feature of every thriller written in the past couple of years.

If you're looking for an irreverent read straight from the hip, fast and furious with not an ounce of social redeeming value to distract you, Victor Gischler and "Suicide Squeeze" marks the end of your quest. "Just do it."

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Zany crime caper, August 15, 2005

By	Colin P. Lindsey (Manchester, NH) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In Gischler's third outing, Suicide Squeeze, we are treated to a Florida coast caper involving a baseball card autographed by three famous people, a Japanese billionaire who wants it, a down on his luck repo-man, Connor Samson, who finds it and an entire host of criminals, ex-wives, bar-flops, crazed yakuza, and comic book nerds who get caught up in the action.

Reading a Gischler book is kind of like watching pachinko, the Japanese game with all the ball bearings. His characters, just like the ball-bearings in the game, zoom around all over the place in a zany, mad-cap pace and outrageously bounce against each other causing all sorts of laughs and deviltry. On the surface Gischler's writing is simple, direct, and funny and the character's he tends to populate his novels with are generally broke, lower class, confused, and socially challenged. This is somewhat of a pleasant relief from all the novels who use hyper-intelligent, daring, perfect physical specimens as their protagonists. Not so here. These characters get drunk, puke, have hangovers, get lost, write bad checks, and do lots of things they shouldn't morally.....and these are just the good guys. These characters can be pretty funny as they bumble their inept way through the story.

On the other hand, while his books on the surface read as comedies, by the end of them you realize you have read a tragedy of Shakespearean scope....because nearly everyone is dead. This odd blend of less then perfect characters, white trash comic relief, small hopes and selfish viewpoints, neuroses, poverty, spite, cosmic bad luck, and high body counts work for Gischler in this book and I enjoyed the read. I truly like his first novel, Gun Monkeys, but didn't much care for his second, Pistol Poets. This book fell somewhere in between but I still recommend it because I really did like it. My reservation with Gischler is that, in using anti-heroes as protagonists, sometimes they are so unlikable that you can't enjoy the read. Books go down smoother if there is a character that you can identify with and like. Gischler does a better job in this novel of achieving that than he did in his last.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fast, fun read from an author who keeps getting better, April 16, 2005

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

People kill each other over the dumbest things. You might think that the reason for the carnage in SUICIDE SQUEEZE, Victor Gischler's third and latest novel, is absurd. The motivation behind everything (well, almost everything) that takes place here is the acquisition of...a baseball card. It's not just any baseball card, though. It's a 1954 Joe DiMaggio card, autographed by Mr. Coffee himself, and the actress he was married to at the time, a starlet named Marilyn Monroe. Oh, by the way, there is a third signature on the card, that belonging to movie director Billy Wilder. There may have been a lot of Joltin' Joe DiMaggio cards printed, but one having those three signatures on it is truly one of a kind. Would people kill for a card like that? Yes. They would.

As you might expect, such a card is well beyond the reach of your average trading card fan, the kid with the dirty t-shirt and the dirty five-dollar bill who refuses to change either one. In SUICIDE SQUEEZE, however, the card has attracted the attention of Ahira Kurisaka, an unscrupulous and extremely wealthy businessman who wants the card and is willing to pay any price, and do anything, to get it. The owner of the prized possession is Teddy Folger, who used the valuable card as part of an insurance scam to fly the coup on his obligations to his ex-wife and everyone else within grabbing distance of him. Folger claimed that the card was destroyed in a fire, collected on his insurance policy, and got out of Dodge, sailing on a leased yacht on which he has no intentions of making payments. He of course still has the card and is looking to clandestinely sell it to the highest bidder.

Enter Conner Samson, a down-on-his-luck repo man who is retained by the rightful owner of the boat for the express purpose of getting it back. Samson gets to Folger about the same time that Kurisaka's representatives do, only he's a step or three behind. Samson gets the yacht, and Kurisaka's hirelings think he also has the card. Throw one of Samson's past due gambling debts, and a polite but firm collector, into the mix, and you have a "suicide squeeze."

Although Gischler is only three books into a brilliant career, he has thoroughly mastered the ability, as demonstrated in this novel, to present a complex plot without losing the reader in the narrative. Gischler's characters are quirky but believable, and his sense of humor keeps the plot afloat rather than miring it in absurdity. One quick example is a scene wherein Samson attends a science fiction convention. Gischler nails everything --- the generic hotel, the merch dealers, and most importantly, the crowd --- with just a few sentences that will leave you howling and at the same time humbled.

Incidentally, Gischler knows his stuff as well (I have my first Byrne X-Men issue under lock and key, too!) and as a result you can't read SUICIDE SQUEEZE without picking up a nugget or two of arcane knowledge along the way. Best of all, it is a fast, fun read. You can't ask for much more than that.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub