Spanking Watson (Kinky Friedman Novels (Paperback))

The same bizarre mixture of ingredients that has turned Kinky Friedman from a country musician into a popular mystery writer and hero of his own series continues in this exercise oddity, which, true to form, seems to contain something to offend virtually everyone. "If you spend a little time with lesbians and nuns, you begin to see the effect love or the absence of it can have on a human life," muses the Kinkster at one point. This comes after a campaign by Friedman to terrorize his upstairs neighbor, Winnie Katz, whose lesbian dance classes have caused the ceiling of his Greenwich Village loft to collapse. But Kinky's amateur terrorism pales by comparison to the mysterious person who wants to do some real damage to Winnie, so Friedman and his Village Irregulars turn from aggressors to protectors. Surrounded by Italian gangsters with names like Linguini and Gepetto, they plan a weird revenge scheme that involves such horrors as chainsaws and Friedman in a red wig.

The title--usually the best thing about a Kinkster book--has to do with which particular member of his motley crew will be officially chosen to play Watson to his Sherlock. But even here there are no clear answers: as Friedman says, "President Clinton is Watson. The Chinese dwarf who paints pastels on Mott Street is Watson. The world is Watson. Only Sherlock Holmes stands achingly alone on the weather-beaten, worm-eaten cross of rational thought. Sherlock Holmes, you see, is the thinking man's Jesus Christ."

--Dick Adler