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Buffalo Medicine Books
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The Immortal Game
Mark Coggins, through a small independent in Berkeley called Poltroon Press, brings us another offbeat winner. On the one hand the book is about the cutting edge of computer technology and a virtual reality chess game that plays like a live battle. On the other, private eye August Riordan is as old fashioned as his name, harking back to the classic gumshoes of yesteryear, walking Chandler's mean streets. He's even working Hammett's old turf, San Francisco.
Coggins makes me wish the computer game really existed. I haven't played chess in many years, but playing with a virtual reality setup where the pawns wave their swords and jeer at the opposing army, where queens have sex appeal and knights appear to actually cut each other down in battle sounds like the ultimate thrill.
Computer game inventor Edwin Bishop, whose incredible chess program Riordan is hired to find, knows a thing or two about thrills. He ex-girlfriend and prime suspect in the game's theft is a dominatrix of serious kinkiness. Bishop may be a genius at electronics, but he's a sucker in the game of love. The reader hates the supercilious Bishop from word one.
In the course of running the purloined game to earth, so to speak, Riordan goes from one kinky character to another, one sleazy address to the next. An unusual feature of the book is that the author presents photos of the scene at the beginning of each chapter. At first I thought it was disconcerting, mixing the real world with the fictional. Eventually I decided the photos gave the wild tale something of an anchor in the real world. Too bad there are no snaps of Terri McCulloch in her working garb.
Bishop's bikini bunnies Jodie and Lisa sound like they would be pretty photogenic too.
The mix of high tech and low down kept my interest. Riordan gets knocked out more times than Wile E. Coyote and we all known now that that kind of activity leads to serious brain damage. Blows to the head are as politically incorrect these days as racial slurs and detectives who smoke or are into substance abuse. Riordan is a dinosaur among gumshoes.
Then again, the retro peeper is a big part of the fun of The Immortal Game. He talks and acts like the classic snoop from the pulp age. I expected him to start using words like gat, and gasper, frail and rod. Which game does the title refer to anyway-chess or the detective story? Undoubtedly both.
Coggins manages to keep the story line taut and twisted as August works his way from clue to clue, one sleazy locale to the next. There is the obligatory tough cop to roust him every two or three chapters. Lots of kinky sex. But the good stuff is when Riordan sits in with the occasional jazz group hugging his upright base fiddle. The jazz material is first rate and original.
I wasn't blown away by the solution to the crime but I had a lot of fun getting there. And I still want to play chess with animated pieces.
Click here to purchase a
signed copy of The Immortal Game by Mark Coggins ($25.00 )
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