Book Review of Daniel Friedman's Don't Ever Get Old

Don't Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman

"In retrospect, it would have been better if my wife had let me stay home to see Meet the Press instead of making me schlep across town to watch Jim Wallace die." [Buck Schatz, narrator of Don't Ever Get Old.]

Yep. But Jim was afraid of dying and going to hell for the bad things he'd done. He wanted to confess and gain Buck's forgiveness. Jim was an MP, manning a road block between East and West after WWII, when up drove a disguised Heinrich Ziegler, the SS officer in charge of the POW camp where Jim and Buck were stuck in 1944. Ziegler was assumed to be dead. The trunk of his Mercedes was full of gold bars; in exchange for one, Jim let Ziegler go.

Buck is outraged, but he has no desire to hunt down Ziegler. Even if he had, Ziegler could be on any continent. When Buck retired from the Memphis Police Department in 1973, his detecting skills were state-of-the-art. That was 35 years ago, and Buck is now 87. He's never used a computer and doesn't know how to begin searching for a Nazi fugitive. He may not even be capable physically or mentally. His strength is diminishing, he's on a blood thinner, and his memory isn't what it was. Buck's grandson Tequila (William Tecumseh Friedman joined a fraternity and gained a nickname) argues that if he doesn't look for Ziegler, he's as guilty as Jim. Plus, there's that trunkload of Nazi gold to discover.  When Buck gets no help from Det. Randall Jennings, Tequila announces he will use his break from law school at NYU to help Buck look.

Despite Tequila's deficiencies in dress and physical fitness, Buck "disliked him less than most other people," maybe because he's family. Anyway, Buck has time to kill before Fox News Sunday, so he agrees to Tequila's plan. Unfortunately, as Buck and Tequila soon find out, Jim told other people about Ziegler and his missing gold bars. These folks expect Buck to take up the search, and they're scrambling to form advantageous alliances while thwarting the competition. The colorful competitors include Jim's daughter Emily and her unappetizing husband Norris; Jim's troubled minister, Dr. William Kind; T. Addleford Pratt, a debt collector from the Silver Gulch Saloon; and Yitzchak Steinblatt, who arrives in Memphis claiming to be from the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs, but who looks like an ex-KGB assassin. Speaking of assassins, someone doesn't like the idea of divvying up the treasure among so many claimants. Homicide Detective Jennings stays very busy as the search continues.

Memphis, Tennessee, is on the Mississippi River, and it's the author's hometown

Buck is the perfect protagonist for a read in the shade. He's a cantankerous and smart man, with a sardonic sense of humor. Buck was a legendary lawman; people used to say he was the leading cause of death among Memphis scumbags from 1957 to 1962, but Buck claims he was only fourth (tied with car accidents, but behind other scumbags, drug overdoses, and other cops). For 30 years on the job, Buck thought that he was a bulwark against social breakdown and that he made a difference. Now, Det. Jennings claims the city is setting new records in violent crime. Cops keep arresting criminals, and a Guatemalan cuts Buck's grass. Life goes on without him.

Currently, Buck copes with a shrinking world. He can't drive too far without getting lost. Buck says he leads the life of an old person: "going to the same places all the time, over and over, and attending a lot of funerals." He and his wife, Rose, must be careful; a simple fall could mean disaster. At the suggestion of his physician, Buck is keeping a notebook of things he doesn't want to forget, and he shares it with the reader. One thing he wants to remember is how a professor explained the dearth of elderly movie characters. There isn't much drama to their lives. They live lives of routine. But their stories can involve powerful themes about continuity, passing along knowledge to someone younger, and death. This applies to a book's characters, as well.

Daniel Friedman

Hercule Poirot grows old and dies. Miss Marple, Maud Silver, and Mrs. Bradley are grey-haired. Today's crime fiction could use more elderly protagonists. Colin Cotterill's Siri Paiboun, Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder, and James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux are in their 70s. Burke's Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland is around 80. I can't think of a series protagonist older than Buck, and I hope he sticks around. He has a unique voice. Buck and Tequila's quest to find Ziegler and his gold is an arduous task that leaves them scarred, but they gain a better understanding of themselves and each other. They also thoroughly entertained me. Don't Ever Get Old is a terrific debut. More please, Daniel Friedman.

Note: I received a free review copy of Don't Ever Get Old. It was published by Minotaur Books in May 2012. In his acknowledgments, author Friedman thanks his two sets of grandparents and his great-aunt Rose for their stories that inspired Buck and the other characters. I thank them, too.

A Mystery Appears in Your Future

Fate is my friend. She likes to help when I have trouble making a decision. Go out with Joe or stay home and work on my taxes? I toss a coin. If it's heads (Joe), and I'm chagrined it's not tails (taxes), I stay home and work on my taxes. If I'm thrilled it's heads, I go out with Joe. See, fate is my friend!

Fate also helps with my reading, but this time she doesn't appear in the guise of a coin. She appears as a fortune cookie fortune. I save my fortunes in a zip-lock bag and keep the bag in a drawer of my desk. This makes it very handy for those times when I'm restless with the desire, no, the need to read, but unable to settle on a particular book. Out comes the bag. I close my eyes and pick a fortune at random. Indecision evaporates; I'm ruled by fate. The book must match my fortune.

I'd like to tell you about some books fate found for me.

Fortune: "You could prosper in the field of wacky inventions"

I saw "wacky," and my mind was all over Florida. Tim Dorsey. Carl Hiaasen. Craig Rice wrote a fantastic screwball series with John J. Malone, the "little lawyer," set in Chicago, and an even more farcical series with photographers Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak. Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum gets wild. Joan Hess's Maggody series takes a few loops on its way around the block. But before I started thinking about single books or had a chance to leave the U.S., I saw the word "inventions," and that meant William Marshall's Sci Fi, a book in his Yellowthread Street series set in the fictional Hong Bay district of Hong Kong.

If Yellowthread isn't the most unusual police procedural series in mysterydom, I'd like to hear what is. Marshall is a one-man band of off-the-wall humor; writing full of italics, capitalizations, and word repetitions; and plots you won't believe. As The Washington Post Book World says, "Marshall has the rare gift of juggling scary suspense with wild humor and making them both work." We'll explore this series later, but for now, look at Sci Fi. Here's how it begins:

"The Martians had landed.

"And, with them, the Venusians, the Saturnians, the Moon-People, Gill-Man, the entire complement of Star Wars extra-terrestrials, Chest-burster, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, The Hulk, The Alien, The Contagion, and, for the joy of antique and nostalgic older souls, several variations of Oriental Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and--particularly popular among the more diminutive--Peter Lorre and The incredible Shrinking Man.

"The second day of the All-Asia Science Fiction and Horror Movie Congress was in full swing in Hong Bay and so far there had been so many outside invasions of the place by sea and by land that if Paul Revere had been resurrected to take on the task of announcing them to the Colonials he would have retired from the scene with terminal laryngitis after the first fifteen aircraft-fuls."

This is not great literature, but it is great fun. I never miss the chance fate hands me to visit Marshall's exotic world. If you have an appreciation for the off-beat and the wild, I invite you to join me there. This series is not for everyone, but it is for me. And maybe for you, too.

The fortune: "Don't let unexpected situations 'throw' you"

My eyes raced to that word "throw," and my heart did a cha cha cha. I deeply love baseball, and now I had an excuse to indulge a passion. Up to bat came Harvey Blissberg, narrator of Richard Rosen's Strike Three, You're Dead. Blissberg's lead-off words: "It's when you're going good that they throw at your head." He was center fielder for the Boston Red Sox, but now he's been traded to a not-so-stellar expansion team, the Providence Jewels. Blissberg is not a happy man, but he's a good man and a team player, so when his closest friend on the Jewels, star reliever Rudy Furth, is found murdered in the locker room whirlpool, Blissberg wants to know why. With the help of his beautiful TV sportscaster girlfriend and his brother, he fields an investigation.

Vikram Chandra's
928-page Sacred Games

You don't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate Strike Three, You're Dead, although that makes the read more special and gives you an edge in the detection. Rosen is a skilled writer, and his tale moves with the effortlessness of an All Star third baseman. Artful plotting, good characterization, and knowledgeable sports writing.  The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association selected it as one of their 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century. You can go into extra innings with the rest of the Harvey Blissberg series, in which he's retired from baseball to become a private eye. All in all, this series is a solid hit.

Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone

Fortune: "Life is a game of complex strategies"

I gazed at the books on my shelf. I'm saving a book recommended by a friend, The Shadow of the Shadow by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, for a vacation. It's a book involving four friends who meet nightly in 1922 at a Mexico City hotel bar to play dominos. Have you read it?

Another game, chess, has plenty of complex strategies, but I'd already read Joanne Harris's Gentlemen and Players and Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Flanders Panel, and I didn't want to read them again.

Cameron McCabe's The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

I eventually picked two books to match this fortune. The first is Ignacio Padilla's Shadow Without a Name, a complicated and compelling book involving identity and Nazi history. A 1916 chess game on a train traveling to the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Eastern Front determines the fate of two men. The winner will assume the identity of Viktor Kretzschmar, a railway pointsman on the Munich-Salzburg line; the loser, Thadeus Dreyer, a newly conscripted soldier bound for the Front. Life will become an extremely complex game for these men. I want to talk more about this interesting book at another time.

The second is an old friend whom I hadn't seen in years, Michael Gilbert's Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens, a 1982 collection of short stories told in an inimitable clipped yet dramatic way. Calder and Behrens are top British espionage agents who have been working together so long they can anticipate each other's moves. They are now working undercover for the Joint Services Standing Committee, ready to be whisked anywhere their special skills are needed. When they're not putting England's enemies in check, they are merely old friends and neighbors who play chess in Calder's study with the Persian wolfhound Rasselas at their feet. (Gilbert was famous for his love of dogs, and Rasselas, a skilled operative himself, is a terrific character.)

Charlotte Jay's Beat Not the Bones

I could go on, telling you about the books I matched to my fortunes, but I'm going to stop now because I'm curious. I'd love to hear which book you'd choose, if fate handed you a fortune. (I've listed some fortunes below.) I bet you'd like to hear what your fellow blog readers would choose, too. You can answer either here with a comment, or better yet, let's take this discussion to our 3rd Degree page.

Remember, the idea is to choose a book you haven't read, but might like to read, to match the fortune. That's the purpose of this fortune cookie quotation procedure, to help you select a book when you can't decide what to read. Make your book match the fortune based on any book criteria you want: title, topic, characters, cover, page length, what you know about the author, what you've heard about the book. You can pick a book you've read to match the fortune only if you love the book and would actually like to read it again.

Here are some fortunes that need a matching book:

Agatha Christie's Death Comes at the End

"Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise."
"A cheerful greeting is on its way."
"Don't look back, always look ahead."
"Your most memorable dream will come true."
"In youth and beauty, wisdom is rare."
"You will take a pleasant journey to a faraway place."
"Enjoy the spotlight."
"Many opportunities are open to you, seek them out."

Okay. What fortune did fate hand you, what book did you select, and why?

One more question.

If you don't use fortunes to help you when you can't decide what to read, how do you finally decide?