“CURSE OF THE SPELLMANS.” Lisa Lutz. 2008. Pocket Books. Paperback. 500 pages. $7.99.
Just who are the Spellmans? A family of private detectives, where spying on each other is considered normal, being arrested is an occupational hazard, and picking locks is learned at a young age; in fact, the younger the better. And no one is above blackmail and extortion a means of regular family negotiations and communication with fellow family members.
Just like every family, mom and dad have their own little secrets, as does smart-aleck 16-year-old Rae.
Izzy’s problem is that she’s just been arrested for the fourth time in three months, and Mom and Dad, i.e. her bosses, refuse to bail her out. Her license is at risk.
What’s a girl to do? Call her lawyer, of course.
Her current assignment is to figure out who is running a series of copycat vandalism attacks on Mrs. Chandler, her former high school art teacher. Why Izzy? It’s her teenage vandalism that’s being copied. Besides her assignment, she’s also obsessing over her parents’ new next-door neighbor, who is obviously more than he seems. She just can’t stop herself from trying to prove that he’s the son of the Devil, or just plain evil.
The question is, how did Izzy wind up being arrested four times in three months? The story unfolds as she explains everything to her octogenarian lawyer, Morty. Which explains why she begins the story in the middle.
I can’t quite decide if what follows is a comic novel with a mystery, or a mystery that has comedy.
When I want funny with my mysteries, or mysteries in my comedy, the late Gregory McDonald’s “Fletch” is where I return again and again. (If you want to email me, I’ll give you a rundown on my favorite Gregory McDonald novels.) The same can be said of Robert B. Parker’s “Spenser” novels, and there it’s a definite mystery, with comedy and wit sprinkled liberally throughout.
It took a while for the story to grow on me. I kept reading mainly because I wanted to figure out why a woman in her thirties would be doing stupidly obsessive things that kept risking her career. This part of the story really frustrated me. I kept feeling like Lutz was trying to recreate in print something like the old screwball comedies of Hollywood, but it didn’t quite come together that way for me. (Screwball comedies rely on keeping you running from one thing to another so fast that you rarely get time to think, and in print, I always have too much time to think.) As I got further in, I came to understand and enjoy the family dynamic Lutz is working with here, because although Izzy is the narrator and protagonist, the family is equally important, along with their major satellites — Inspector Henry Stone of the San Francisco Police, and Morty.
The dialogue is fast and smart, and Lutz keeps the action going. The footnotes she employs, as if writing an actual investigative report, provide some of the funniest bits in the book. In the end, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but I didn’t find it nearly as funny as the cover blurbs promised. Maybe it was a sophomore slump, or maybe people have forgotten what good comedy can be.
