Sorry Brown, I was too busy with the Hardy Boys.

Just read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?” by Gary Wolf (either he’s really prolific or my brain just recognises how “Gary Wolf” is so quintessentially a mystery writer name) done in 1981.

Mysteries developed steeped in pop culture, formulaic and churned out by the dozens- a successful mystery novel has the limited suspect list (it won’t have been a random mugging, there’s no satisfaction in that… that butler looks mighty shady though) a juicy crime (sorry Encyclopaedia Brown, I’m not too concerned with the money little Tommy stole from Suzie’s lemonade stand. FINE, I haven’t read any Encyclopaedia Brown’s in a jillion years), AND, if you’re me, a mystery opens my eyes a little wider as I re-read that last paragraph. Because there’s no way I’m not going to solve this thing before it gets spelled out for me.

Of course that rarely works out because often there’ll be some clues that weren’t ever shared with us- Curse you Hound of the Baskervilles! If Watson got to stick with Holmes like we wanted, maybe we could have solved that one too. But no, Holmes was all “Trust me, I’ve got a plan- catch you later dude.” His exact words.

Roger Rabbit is pretty bad about giving us all the details, because the narrator/detective is busy using classic gumshoe speak to describe something, and it just ends up hyperbolic and we just have to accept that that wasn’t really an important detail. But what if it was?!? I feel cheated when that happens.
Let me just turn to a random page and grab one example, they’re all over the place:
"Dominick lowered his voice and became as coy as a debutante sidling up to a bowl of spiked punch." That’s a weak example but what can I do? I promised a random page… Ah, it’s not such a bad example; it just needs a little love.

Anyway, not only am I bogged down with gumshoe speak, but there’s also the necessary diversions in explaining the crazy world the story takes place in. I’ve kind of been down on science fiction/fantasy for the last while because of all the time spent on explaining the rules (of course when you already know the rules, with no extra explanation given or asked for, that’s a different story- I’m looking at you comics) well the rules for “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?” include that all ‘toons have word bubbles that pop over their heads as they speak, which have various effects and actually take a while to disintegrate (making a ‘toons last words physical evidence in a murder case)- except for the ‘toons that suppress it somehow, that isn’t explained. And a sufficiently thick or emotive world balloon can fall down with enough force to create its own physical sound effect caption.

Then there’s the ‘toon ability to create a mental doppelganger for dangerous stunts. That seems pretty crazy to me. Or it did, until we find out the murder was done by an irate genie that got tired of granting wishes.

It’s really no wonder they changed the story for the movie.

Actually, there were two murders at the start of this book- guess who did the first one? Roger Rabbit.
That’s it, I’m disillusioned!