Serge A. Storms and Coleman are back in Tim Dorsey’s ‘The Big Bamboo’, his 8th novel, and this time they’re going Hollywood. It’s fun ride, but not one of his strongest (far preferred book 9, ‘Hurricane Punch’) mainly due to the plot structure.
Up until now, all of Tim’s books have been set almost exclusively in Florida, but with Bamboo he has the dynamic duo heading off to California to get into show business. Trouble is, he spends the first half of the book setting up why they go. This means we spend a lot of time in the company of Mark and Ford, a wannabe director and scriptwriter who get chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood system. It’s not that their story isn’t interesting (they hit more bars and parties in a week than Paris Hilton can manage in a month. When she’s out of prison that is. I’m not sure what kind of night time entertainment they have in the Lynwood’s Century Regional Detention Facility) but it does take the focus off Serge. And just when you find yourself getting used to this, he goes and switches back to Serge and you find yourself missing Mark and Ford.
There’s still the usual mix of sex, drugs, violence and imaginative murders (death by seal impersonation is a good one), but the whole thing feels less focused than usual. It’s still funny, but by choosing to parody a single target, namely the film industry, the book looses a lot of Serge’s free wheeling energy. There’s also the twist ending, which completely fails to work when you think about what happened before. I don’t want to give it away, but it falls into the usual trap of ‘people who know certain information behave as if they don’t even when in private, because otherwise the reader/viewer would know what was going on’. Yes, this could have been intentional, sending up the usual ‘Hollywood logic’, but the book deserves something cleverer than this.
Worth picking up if your already a fan of Serge, but if this is your first time I’d suggest getting Florida Roadkill or Torpedo Juice instead.
