Darryl PonicsanCritiques

Alternatively lighter and darker than the Jack Nicholson movie. The banter is lighter and they become friends in the book instead of just mentors as in the movie. The movie had a grainy wintery melancholy to it while the book was much more existential in its take. Like if hard, deal with it and laugh and get your jolly's while you can. The free use of the N word really dates the stories.

GOLDENGROVE (1971) is the story of Ernie Buddusky, younger brother of Billy "Badass" Buddusky, the cocky, brash hero of THE LAST DETAIL (1970), author Darryl Ponicsan's successful first novel (the film adaptation is now considered A classic). But Ernie is nothing like Billy. A mousy, meek, sad sack, Ernest Scott Buddusky (named for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, writers much admired by his father, a high school teacher in Andoshen, Pennsylvania) has followed in his dad's footsteps and become an English teacher. He's at his second teaching job when we meet him, at a modern new high school near Los Angeles. His wife, the "Amazon" or Big Betty, was his student at his first teaching job in Upstate NY, and is several years younger. They have a baby boy, and she is pregnant again. There is an unreliable used car. His salary is meager and barely covers the bills. Ernie hates his job, teaching spoiled children of the wealthy, and isn't entirely happy with his marriage either. There is a complementary cast of eccentric characters, most of them teachers or administrators. Ernie edges into a sad, unsatisfactory affair with the virginal, convent-raised math teacher. There are complications.

THE LAST DETAIL was based on Ponicsan's experiences in the Navy. GOLDENGROVE is obviously drawn from his several years of teaching in public schools, and he's got the types down pat. I found myself alternately chuckling and wincing, remembering my own teaching days. In fact I was still teaching when I first read this book, more than fifty years ago. In the interval, long out of print, it's lost none of its charm as a tragicomic tale of a sensitive, unhappy guy trapped in a job and a marriage, with no relief in sight. And the ending is still a shock, although, as our hapless hero himself comments, "That's about right."

One of Ponicsan's strengths as a writer is dialogue (indeed he spent nearly thirty years as a screenwriter in Hollywood) and it shines here, making GOLDENGROVE a perhaps less cerebral, snappy cousin of John Updike's THE CENTAUR (also about a put-upon high school teacher). GOLDENGROVE is a quick read, and a good one. I loved it all over again. Fifty years on, Ponicsan remains one of my favorite writers. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

Yeah, okay, I know - that title. But it IS an attention-getter, and it got mine, because this is definitely a guy book, and I'm a guy, and, like the author, Darryl Ponicsan, I'm old, and sometimes I feel bad about mine too. So, that outa the way, I'm just gonna call this one Darryl's DICK book, okay? 'Cause here's the thing, I've been reading Darryl Ponicsan since his first book, THE LAST DETAIL (1970), probably still his best-known work, which was adapted into a classic film. So that's what? Omigod, that's FIFTY YEARS I've been reading Ponicsan! And he's written a baker's dozen other novels since then, and I've read them all but one, THE RINGMASTER, and I hope to get around to that one before too long.

I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY DICK (and that's the last time I'll spell it out) is Ponicsan's first non-fiction book, and it's kinda the one I've been wanting to read for all of those fifty years. I think I mighta written to him once and said he oughta write a memoir. Or maybe that was some other writer. Anyway, this odd collection of essays and lists is actually kinda like a memoir, because we learn something about his childhood in a Pennsylvania coal town ("I lived in a congenial but risky neighborhood. The feel of caked blood in my hair was familiar to me."), his parents ("I never had more than a few serious conversations with either one of them, few and far between, and brief"), his college years ("My father's idea. I thought it would be a waste of money"). We hear but briefly of his hitch in the US Navy (so read THE LAST DETAIL and CINDERELLA LIBERTY), but do learn about his trip west afterwards in a junker TR-3 to seek his fortune. His turn as a high school teacher also gets short shrift (so read GOLDENGROVE), but we do hear about his year or so as a social worker in LA during the Watts riots, and his education as a blonde white guy in black neighborhoods. And then he tells of his sudden success as a writer with that first Navy novel, and his subsequent adventures in Hollywood (Ponicsan was script writer/doctor for over 25 years) where he meets Robert Redford ("I went all aflutter … I thought no man should be so handsome"). And meeting Hef at the Playboy mansion, where he talked with Bill Cosby ("long enough to discover that he was, sadly, an a**hole") and displayed his "pinball wizard" skills to Linda Lovelace. There is almost nothing about a failed first marriage and divorce (so read AN UNMARRIED MAN). We learn of his color-blindness (check out the author photo and the pink suit) and his kinky opinions on beards and muffs. Oh yeah, and murses. And, threaded throughout all of these essays, most of them hilarious, he also gives us tantalizing tidbits of a forty-year love affair with his Mexican-American wife, whom he calls E.W., for "Exotic Woman." He first met her on a Malibu beach. She was in a bikini. He was in love.

Yes, hilarious. I found myself chuckling, chortling and breaking into guffaws, belly laughs and tears of laughter as I made my way through this little book. (I tried to read slowly, 'cause I wanted it to last.) But, as he tells us in the intro, where he explains that his DICK book is meant to be a guy kinda answer to Nora Ephron's I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK book -

"As Nora's book at times veers into some serious territory, there is a risk that this one will too, but it will all come out okay in the end."

And Ponicsan does indeed veer into some darker stuff in the final chapter, about the inevitability of death, the aches, pains, failings and indignities of old age (the author passed 80 a year or two back). And the "twelve surgeries over fourteen years, the same place for the same reason" he has endured, along with the "dress rehearsal for death and the void of general anesthesia." But there's also that "okay in the end" part, where he tells us, in a postscript, that things have taken a "dramatic turn for the better," and I am so glad to know that.

Bottom line: this is definitely a guy book. I laughed and laughed, and sometimes winced in recognition too. But when I tried to read some of the funniest parts to my wife, she didn't laugh. Her reactions were more of the wrinkled nose, "ee-ew" variety. But Darryl's DICK book is - most of the time - just plain laugh-out-loud hilarious. I loved it. Thanks for sharing, DP. This should be part of every old guy's library. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

This story about unexpected friendship and dealing with consequences will leave you laughing and crying. I felt like that I knew the three main characters very well when I finished the last page.

It’s been forty years since the initial publication of The Accomplice, so I was pleased to see this handsome new edition from Stairway Press, which adds a foreword from the author which provides not only a look at this book’s origins, but also a revealing glimpse into Ponicsan’s life in general, reflecting on his early successes in writing, most notably with the novelsThe Last Detail and Cinderella Liberty (both adapted for film). In all Ponicsan published eight books in a ten year period, but his screenplay for Cinderella Liberty earned him a solid place in that profession for over twenty-five years.

I read almost all of Ponicsan’s books back in the seventies, before he disappeared into that other field and for years I often wondered what happened to him. Now I know - all those years churning out screenplays, then, more recently four PI novels under the pen name of Anne Argula, as well as painting and sculpting.

The Accomplice is a book certainly deserving of another go-around. Thirty-ish Harold “Beef” Buddusky, is a very different kind of hero. Described as “a dumb drifter looking for a home,” he washes up in Colorado Springs. Originally from the Pennsylvania coal-mining region, he’s served a hitch in the military, left behind a wife and a small son (named Nelson - shades of Rabbit, Run), done some time in the slammer (“behind Old Crossbars”), and hitchhiked and drunk himself across America, picking up odd jobs here and there along the way. In the Springs, our ‘hero’ finds what seems like a home, spending his days with Ginny Wynn, a seemingly generous and warm-hearted woman, and her ‘sidekick,’ Mrs. Lister, an absent-minded octogenarian.

The plot thickens - and darkens - when Beef learns of Ginny’s obsessive attachment to her adult son, Gordie, a young policeman, who attempts to break this bond by secretly marrying and impregnating Maria, a beautiful young Hispanic woman. Ginny wants Maria dead, but Beef, who falls impossibly in love with the beautiful Maria on sight, wants no part of it. A couple of clumsy hired killers join the cast, and what started out comically takes a deeply dark and tragic turn. Terrified, Beef runs, but in the end, he is unable to stay away.

In this surprisingly complex tale of crime and punishment, Ponicsan draws from a deep and murky well of influences. Yes, count Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in there. And, with the characters of Gordie and “Ginnie Mom,” and the intimations of an ‘unnatural’ mother-son relationship, you might also recall Earl Thompson’s gritty underground classic of Depression-era Kansas,A Garden of Sand.

A minor character, sheriff’s deputy Ronnie Fischer, will raise the antennae of dedicated Ponicsan fans. Described as an “ex-Navy signalman” whose military career was scuttled by “causing $2000 worth of damage in a Honolulu bar and sending two Marines to the hospital with serious jaw fractures,” Fischer's character is a not-so-subtle nod to Billy “Bad-Ass” Buddusky, hero of The Last Detail. (Can a writer be influenced by his own work? Apparently so.)

No longer “the slow-witted Salvation Army day worker become roofing man,” Beef Buddusky undergoes a gradual and irreversible transformation as he tries desperately to understand how everything went so tragically wrong, and seeks forgiveness by reinventing himself as a person who tries to help others. A radical reversal reminiscent of another character, Frank Alpine, in Malamud’s tragic tale of suffering and redemption,The Assistant.

I finished reading this book nearly a week ago, but I’m still thinking about it. It’s that kind of book, and highly deserving of a brand new audience. Very highly recommended.

What do you get when you mix together a mitigation investigator doggedly trying to stamp out the death penalty, an ex-cop fighting off constant hot flashes, a barely legitimate business owner who calls his employees Arnie's Angels, and a beautiful young woman in the prime of her youth? Answer: the basic ingredients to Anne Argula's excellent PI novel, Walla Walla Suite (A Room with No View).

The plot starts off as a simple missing person's case. Eileen, one of Arnie's Angels, goes missing, and Arnie hires Quinn, a fledgling private investigator, to track her down. But when Eileen turns up dead, the narrative really gets cooking, and the whole book morphs into a rather thoughtful and funny--funny ha-ha and funny sad--commentary on crime and punishment, capital punishment in particular. The only real "action" takes place in the last ten pages of the novel, so if you crave a lot of car chases and fistfights and gun play this isn't the book for you. However, there are two other factors that make this book more than worthy of a read.

Quinn, a newly-divorced ex-cop struggling to establish herself as a PI, is half of what makes Walla Walla Suite so enjoyable, so fresh. Tougher than a two-dollar steak, and every bit as sardonic as James Crumley's C.W. Sughrue, she is, by her own admission, a second or even third-rate investigator. But, ironically, this is also part of what I think makes her so dynamic as a character: she is real. Many detective characters are simply too heroic, too perfect, and Quinn is severely flawed, but in a good way. She is both sarcastic and self-effacing; she is indifferent and persistent, competent and bumbling. Not to mention she has some fantastically funny one-liners, mostly about hot flashes and the incurable human condition. Plus, in the end, she does manage to save the day, more or less, and the ending in no way feels forced or contrived. Best of all, the (tragic?) ending affects her not a wit, which I appreciate as it is realistic. Face it, many of us just never learn our lesson, no matter what the scenario, no matter what the outcome.

To the other half of what makes this a good novel: the setting. Full disclosure: I tend to fetishize what I consider cool and/or exotic locations, and Seattle, the setting of Walla Walla Suite, falls under that category. The descriptions of the dreary weather, the buildings and streets, the waterfronts: all of it is expertly rendered and adds a satisfying layer to the narrative. It made me want to visit the city, which is a testament to the author's abilities.

Bottom line, I find Quinn to be a welcome addition to the PI genre, and not just because she is a middle-aged woman. But because the character is a living, breathing being, one capable of great comedy and tragedy. Quinn, it seems, has a nose for trouble, and I, for one, would love to be around when she finds it.

There is still, even forty years later, that same sense of immediacy and "now-ness" about the present tense narration that carries the stories of THE LAST DETAIL and CINDERELLA LIBERTY so briskly and compellingly forward, that keeps the reader eagerly turning pages, wondering what will happen next. Re-reading these brief but powerful novels of the absurdities and injustices of military life in the sixties was like stepping back into my thirty year-old skin, remembering the excitement and delight I felt the first time I read them, not long after my own military discharge - dialogue laced with the casual insults and obscenities that have filled the conversations of sailors - and soldiers - probably since time immemorial.

Ponicsan, who spent close to twenty-five years writing screenplays, is an acknowledged master of dialogue. That skill showed up in every one of his nine novels. The fact is, this time through, reading these two US Navy novels, I suddenly realized that many of the narrative segments between the lines of dialogue read very much like the stage directions you might find between lines on a script. And the present tense used in both books underscores that likeness even more.

A brief summary of the two books. THE LAST DETAIL presents you with two career sailors - Billy "Bad-Ass" Buddusky and "Mule" Mulhall - escorting a court-martialed yound Seaman, Larry Meadows, from Norfolk Naval Base to a miliary prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with stopoffs along the way in Washington and New York. The kid's been screwed by the military justice system and his "chasers" Billy and Mule know it, try to ignore it, and fail. Therein lies the story and it takes you along for the ride, by bus, train and taxi, as the two uneasy 'guards' try to show the convicted kid a good time before he goes to prison. A gritty look at the underside of the big cities through the eyes of the three sailors emerges, as well as an examination of the injustices and inequities of not just the military, but of America itself in the sixties. And, reading it again today, you realize that not much has changed. Views on racism and class figure prominently. The Vietnam war is mentioned only briefly, but it lurks in the background.

CINDERELLA LIBERTY is a Job-like parable of suffering and change, the story of USN yeoman John Baggs, stranded in limbo when his records are lost while he is a patient at a Naval hospital. Since, without his records, he does not technically exist, he can only be granted "Cinderella liberty," i.e. he can go on shore leave after duty hours, but must return to the hospital by midnight every night. During his nightly rambles he meets a Norfolk hooker on welfare with three children, and ends up marrying her in spite of his circumstances - no pay, no money, no hope. Even with his boils and other trials, Baggs is an ex-divinity student who, like Job, steadfastly refuses to blame God. In fact, unlike most sailors, he does not curse, and never fails to remonstrate those who do with an automatic "Watch your mouth." His wife Maggie is a fascinating character too.

In THE LAST DETAIL, Billy "never met the stereotype whore with the heart of gold." Well, you get the sense, at least for a time, that Baggs has, in Maggie, who recognizes the goodness and kindness in John Baggs and the way he resolves to care for her children.

While I'm at it, since I've already mentioned that John Baggs's story might be compared to the Book of Job, I may as well mention that one could also draw some interesting parallels between Billy Buddusky's story and Melville's BILLY BUDD. Ponicsan likes to slip some literary allusions into his books as a rule - Billy Bad-Ass is a reader, for example, who reads Camus, Updike, and Stephen Crane. Baggs, who of course reads the Bible, also reads Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The new Stairway Press Collected Edition of these two novels offers a new Foreword from Ponicsan himself, who did his own time in the Navy, and began writing stories during those years. The Foreword gives you some great info about the origins of these two novels (as well as their very successful film versions) and also some valuable insight about how autobiographical certain elements are. Ponicsan begins his Foreword with this line: "Came a day when it hurt to sit." CINDERELLA LIBERTY BEGINS thusly: "John Baggs, yeoman second class, is a sailor with a very sore ass."

You get the idea, I'm sure. I'm glad Stairway Press has seen fit to reissue these two now-classic novels in one handsome volume. Years ago a Cosmopolitan magazine reviewer placed THE LAST DETAIL at "the top of the tough-tender school of writing." The same could be said of THE LAST DETAIL. This is still simply damn good story-telling. Highly entertaining and very highly recommended.

THE OTHER ROMANIAN is Anne Argula's fourth book in a series featuring menopausal Seattle-based private investigator, Quinn. Filled with cinematic-style dialogue - as well as wryly wise and ruminative monologues - it is a quick and compelling read at just over a couple hundred pages. The story-line takes up where the last book (KRAPP'S LAST CASSETTE) left off, with Quinn on the long-cold trail of screenwriter Alex Krapp, who had disappeared on his Harley two years previously. At the same time she is unwillingly drawn into the police investigation of a recent John Doe murder, finding continuing and curious connections to her search for Krapp, a journey that takes her south along the coast to the Big Sur wilderness. Argula has concocted a whodunit which somehow manages to combine Adolph Hitler, Zen Buddhism, body piercings, soap operas, Bob Dylan and various famous Hollywood names. If all this sounds kinda improbable, you have to remember that much of the tale does take place in California, or, as a childhood friend once called that state, "the land of fruits and nuts."

I have read all of Argula's books and loved 'em, and ditto for this newest entry. And it's the Hollywood angle here that I find the most intriguing. And I gotta come clean here. I'm not usually one who reads mysteries or thrillers, with a few rare exceptions. (Frederick Busch and John Smolens come to mind as favorite practitioners of the most literary sort of mystery-thrillers.) But Anne Argula is not just any writer of PI novels. No, Argula is a pen name used by Darryl Ponicsan, who wrote several well-received novels back in the 70s, most notably THE LAST DETAIL and CINDERELLA LIBERTY. When those two books made successful transitions to the big screen, Ponicsan was lured away to the trade of Hollywood screenwriting, a pit where he labored in semi-obscurity for the next twenty-five years or more. Which explains why the character of Alex Krapp and his obsessive taped musings on the trade seem so genuine and knowledgeable, and more than a bit bitter in tone.

At one point, Krapp lets slip he has considered writing a memoir, but decided it would be a bad idea. THE OTHER ROMANIAN is probably about as close as Darryl Ponicsan will ever come to writing about his life in the screenwriting salt mines - well-paid salt mines, but still ... Through the character of Krapp, he skewers directors, producers, and a number of actors. A young Tom Cruise, for example, is remembered for an early role [in TAPS] when co-stars Tim Hutton and Sean Penn "would go through elaborate ruses to ditch Tom on their day off because he always soured their action with the local girls." Harrison Ford too is skewered for his acting skills in the original version of BLADE RUNNER (the one with the voice-over), when Krapp says:"Remember that time, years after, when I met Harrison Ford for the first time and he told me he hated the narration and deliberately gave it his least, which is very little indeed ..."

But it is screenwriting that really comes under close examination, as in when Krapp explains to his Buddhist host -

"The thing you have to realize, Roshi, about screenwriting, what makes it what it is, is that in every other kind of writing the writer knows, deep down, if the work is any good. When a screenwriter submits his script, he's equally prepared to told his work is 'the best draft I've ever read,' or 'this is a piece of s**t.' The game is to keep the screenwriter alive but in a constant state of impending humiliation. A delicate balance of praise and contempt is always in play."

Krapp calls a director "at best ... no more than a strong and sincere father to a large dysfunctional family. At worst, he's an inept father, an abusive father." But as the screenwriter, Krapp says, "In the family that makes a movie, I'm the son they hide in the attic." There's that bitterness I mentioned earlier.

Investigator Quinn is telling the story here, of course, as she did in the first three books, but this time it seems she is more than just an aging girl gumshoe, she's also a writer, whose first book, KRAPP'S LAST CASSETTE, will soon be released. This threw me a bit at first, but then I reasoned, 'Well, why not? She was telling that story too, ain't?' ('Ain't' and 'arfy-darfy' are just a couple of those coal-country idioms transplanted from Quinn's - Argula's, Ponicsan's? - native Pennsylvania that crop up in dialogue in all of the Quinn books.) But Alex Krapp, with his obsessive taping of his own thoughts and conversations with others, comes across as a kind of co-narrator, and is a character every bit as intriguing as Quinn.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, there are layers upon layers of identities to consider here. And the plot itself is filled with false and mistaken identities, odd connections and clues, not to mention a few red herrings. Interestingly, as murder mysteries go, there is a remarkable restraint shown in regard to violence. That which does happen is always 'off stage.'

Once again, no spoilers from me, but bottom line: this is a helluva fun read. Did I say I loved it? Ponicsan may have ditched screenwriting, but his wry sense of humor and his unerring skills for dialogue and setting up a scene still shine through as brightly as ever.

I love these mysteries featuring Quinn. In the first book, she's still a cop in a small town in rural Washington. In this one, she's been a private investigator in Seattle for a while. Some of the appeal for me is the location, some is that the character is an older woman, but a lot is just that they're well written. Suspense, crackling dialogue, quirky characters. It did bother me a bit that the plot of this one resembles Armistead Maupin's 'The Night Listener'.

This is the second novel featuring Quinn. The setting appears to be a mutated Lummi Island. It is called 'Salish Island', a name which doesn't seem to exist. The fictional island is near Bellingham, reached by a small car ferry. It has an Indian reservation on it, as if Argula combined the Lummi peninsula with Lummi Island.I read Argula's second book first - Walla Walla Suite (A Room With No View) - awhile ago. I recall liking the Quinn character. In the first book she's still a cop. In the second, she's left the police, and her husband, moved to Seattle and starting working as a private detective. I don't recall anything paranormal in the second book.In this first book, there's a whole lotta paranormal going on. She and her partner are sent from Spokane to pick up a fugitive arrested on Salish Island. On the island, her partner starts having odd flashes of memory, and they end up investigating a murder that happened shortly before he was born. On the one hand, you've got past life memories. On the other, you've got the very mundane of cars breaking down, paperwork, and those damn hot flashes. I liked Quinn, and the quirky characters.'Anne Argula' is a pen name for Darryl Ponicsan.

I've been reading Darryl Ponicsan from the beginning, from The Last Detail, Goldengrove, Andoshen PA, and Cinderella Liberty. In fact, An Unmarried Man was the only one of his books I had not read. First published nearly thirty years ago and long out of print, it is, in many ways an artifact of the 70s and 80s in many of its descriptions and references, particularly in regard to basic things like income and real estate prices in California. In regard to its subject, however - the battle between the sexes, love, marriage, and especially divorce - things have probably not changed all that much. Divorce is always a heartbreaker, for everyone involved. The unhappiness and soul-searching is here, but much of it is overridden by erotic sexual imagery of a torrid affair almost immediately embarked on by the narrator-protagonist, Ben Naumann, a successful artist whose medium is wood. The name Ponicsan chose for his hero/anti-hero is probably significant in that it could be interpreted as either "no man" (the tragic reduction of self divorce inevitably causes) or "new man" (the hope and new life after divorce embodied in the character of Lupe, Ben's new love). Some readers might be put off by the near-pornographic descriptions which abound throughout the novel. But in the end it works. Ben comes across as a sensitive man, trying to be a good father, but often a slave to his sexual urges, and perhaps not quite as likeable as he might be. The first person point of view and the dialogue are classic Ponicsan, whose metier, for most of the next twenty-five years, was script writing. He knows how to turn a phrase, so to speak, and beacause of this skill his characters always come alive. It was good to read him again.

Billy "Bad-Ass" Buddusky is back! The time is December 2003. He's sixty-something now and is packing a metal plate in his head and an extra thirty pounds, but none of these things have softened his stance on stupidity or damaged his bullsh-- detector.
The tone of the book is set early on. Instead of becoming excited when he hears that Saddam Hussein has just been found, cowering and filthy in a spider hole, Billy simply snorts, saying, "The dude's a punk. Everybody else is supposed to fight to the death. If it was reversed, our guy'd be the same way, hidin' in some hole. ... The risk always goes to somebody else. the sacrifice is always somebody else's, and somebody else's child."
If you're a film buff or a reader, and of a certain age, you will remember Buddusky as the irrepressible anti-hero of the Vietnam era film, The Last Detail, which was adapted from Darryl Ponicsan's 1970 novel of the same name. Since its 1973 release, the gritty anti-war film has assumed the status of cult classic and become a regular part of the curriculum at many film schools.
Detail was Ponicsan's first novel, and he turned out seven more excellent books over the next ten years, and then seemed to just vanish - at least from the literary landscape. This was an enormous disappointment to me. I was teaching college English in the seventies and incorporated Detail into my Intro to Lit courses, to be studied in tandem with Melville's Billy Budd. Invariably, my students preferred Ponicsan to Melville, which came as no surprise - or disappointment - to me. At least they were reading - and enjoying it.
I read all eight of Ponicsan's novels and for years I kept looking for a new one, but there just weren't any, until now.
Last Flag Flying is the totally unexpected sequel to The Last Detail. "Unexpected" for reasons obvious to anyone who read the book or saw the film, but I won't try to explain that here. The fact is, however, this book is every bit as relevant today as Detail was in its own time. In the first story, Buddusky and "Mule" Mulhall were career-type Navy Petty Officers between ships who were detailed as "chasers" to escort Meadows, a young kleptomaniac sailor, from Norfolk to the Naval prison in Portsmouth. New Hampshire, where he'd been sentenced to eight years hard time for stealing forty bucks from a polio fund collection can in the PX. Knowing the kid had been shafted, the two men take pity on their prisoner and try to show him a good time en route to his jail cell. In the process, the lives of all three men are irrevocably changed.
Last Flag Flying brings the same three men together again, 34 years later. Billy now owns a seedy Norfolk bar-and-grill, Mule is a crippled country preacher, and Meadows has a menial job in, of all places, the Portsmouth PX. They are faced this time with a task as grim and tragic as their first. Meadows' son has been killed in Iraq, and he enlists the other two men's aid in bringing the body home. In doing so, the three aging men retrace their path from three decades before - by car, rental truck, taxi and train. Nearly all things shameful, ridiculous and controversial about today's society are skewered along the way: the dishonesty of the current administration, the ineptness of Homeland Security officials, CEO greed and corporate "bottom lines," those elusive weapons of mass destruction, the continued commercialization of Christmas, and even the ubiquitous cell phone culture. Prostate problems, old bowels and diminished sexual powers are also bemoaned and cursed.
There are a number of passages here that will move the reader from chuckles to tears to outright guffaws, sometimes all on the same page.
One of Darryl Ponicsan's greatest assets as a writer has always been his uncanny ear for dialogue. Last Flag Flying is proof that he still has it. I wasn't really too surprised then, when I learned that Ponicsan has been writing film scripts for the past twenty-five years, and making a good living at it too. I am very pleased, however, to find him back between book covers again, and I sincerely hope he keeps on writing.
But here's a tantalizing possibility for you film afficianados. Wouldn't it be great if Hollywood noticed the new book and someone persuaded Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid to reprise their Detail roles of Billy and Meadows? Sadly, Otis Young, who played Mule, is deceased now, but maybe Morgan Freeman, or Danny Glover, say, could be drafted for that part. Pay attention, Tinseltown. Here are some "grumpy old men" who have something important to say. How about a film for adults for a change?

In Walla Walla Suite, Quinn was much more believably burned-out and cynical. Her partner, Odd Gunderson, becomes possessed by the soul of a dead person, and wants to solve the murder. That part I get. What I disliked was that he often "just knew" he had to do something. Lazy writing. Better told were his occasional visions and recollections of his previous life as the victim.

(Full review at my blog)

Intense book, plot revolves around a depressed screenwriter's obsession with a dying boy with a long history of abuse. The narrative is done by a tough and funny female PI prone to hot flashes, her one-liners make the grim subject matter a bit easier to bear. The book is not a mystery, nor horror, nor whodunit either, will probably leave you asking questions about our notions of reality and fantasy.

Since the Argula pen name is out of the bag anyway, I'm gonna talk about the real deal here, Darryl Ponicsan (aka Anne Argula), because he has been a favorite author of mine since the early 70s. Ponicsan's greatest strength in his writing has always been dialogue, a skill that served him well as a screenwriter in Hollywood for 25 years or more. (Look him up; all those stars he name-dropped in this book were people he actually worked with.) That skill was evident in his first novel, The Last Detail, which resulted in the much-praised Jack Nicholson film of the same name. Another novel, Cinderella Liberty, enjoyed similar success both in print and on the big screen. There is a continuity in Ponicsan's early novels. Perhaps my favorite was Goldengrove, the sad tale of Ernie Buddusky, who was the brother of Billy "Badass" Buddusky of The Last Detail. And there was another, Beef Buddusky, in The Accomplice. There is also a real facility demonstrated with the regional dialect and slang of the Pennsylvania coal-mining country that gave us Ponicsan and his many colorful characters, which now includes PI Quinn of the Argula novels.

Thirty-some years ago I wrote a review of Tom Mix Died for Your Sins, Ponicsan's sixth novel. In it I pointed out how the author followed a rather fascinating pattern of rewriting earlier classic works of literature. The Last Detail was a modern version of Melville's Billy Budd; Andoshen, PA mirrored Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio; Goldengrove paralleled Updike's The Centaur; Cinderella Liberty was a navy tale of The Book of Job; The Accomplice - Bernard Malamud's The Assistant; and the Tom Mix book was a beautifully crafted fictional memoir that made you remember Twain's Tom and Huck books. I was careful to point out in my review, published in the now-defunct BestSellers magazine, that this observation was in no way meant to detract from Ponicsan's considerable talent. Quite the contrary. Darryl Ponicsan can write like nobody's business! Back in the early 70s I was teaching freshman English in a small college, and I used The Last Detail and Billy Budd in tandem for a couple of years in class. Ponicsan beat out Melville in popularity every semester. Students loved Billy Buddusky more than Billy Budd, which was probably predictable, given the contemporary nature of the book and its Vietnam era setting.

Here's the thing. If Ponicsan used this device of rewriting the classics, both ancient and modern, in his 70s novels - and they were all excellent - then odds are probably pretty good that his female alter ego, "Anne Argula", may be doing the same thing. I must admit I did not explore that possibility in the first two Quinn books, but I may have to go back and reread them now. Because Krapp's Last Cassette is not an arbitrarily chosen title. Take a look at the book's epigraph, a quote from playwright Samuel Beckett. I think I may have read something by Beckett back in college, but I have, perhaps mercifully, forgotten whatever it was. But one of Beckett's many plays is one called Krapp's Last Tape, which is, incidentally, referred to towards the end of this Quinn book. If the Beckett play is one about a man in his late sixties listening to tapes he has made at earlier stages of his life - reflecting somewhat sardonically on that life - then think about what's going on in this latest Argula book. Alex Krapp is a man who spent twenty-some years in Hollywood after having written several novels - a man who is now reflecting on all those years. Think Darryl Ponicsan, gentle readers.

I know I have said very little about the ingenious and creepily compelling plot and characters of Krapp's Last Cassette here, not to mention all that great dialogue, "ain't"? If you've already read the book, then I don't need to tell you how good it is. And if you haven't read it, here's a hint: it is damn good! No, what I wanted to tell all you really serious readers out there is this: if, after reading only two or three Anne Argula books you find yourself a fan, then do yourself a favor. Find the Ponicsan novels and read them. They are great too. Sadly, most are now out of print and can only be found used. But if you like Quinn, then you will like the Buddusky clan too - and John Baggs and Tom Mix and Kid Bandera and all the other colorful and memorable characters Darryl Ponicsan created so many years ago. I for one look will look forward to the next book, whether the spine reads Ponicsan or Argula, because this is a writer who will grab you on page one and not let go til the last page.

I remember this book as being very enjoyable.. a lot of fact.. some surmised fact. A frank, funny story of the early days of motion pictures and Westerns in particular.

I read the author's "Goldengrove" a long time ago and remember liking it, but this one... not so much. It reminded me of Herbert Gold's "True Love" - divorced guy in CA facing midlife crisis. I couldn't stand the Gold book and this one--about a wood sculptor who divorces and finds new love--wasn't much better.

Seattle seems to be up and coming: G. M. Ford, J. A. Jance, Curt Colbert, and now Anne Argula. And Anne Argula is definitely a better writer than our most famous writer of Seattle-based mysteries, J. A. Jance. For one, Argula doesn’t stop to explain Seattle to non-natives every time something local comes up. Some times I feel like I’m reading a geography or culture lesson when reading Jance.

(Full review at my blog)½

"The Last Flag Flying" is a sequel to Ponicsan's book "The Last Detail." It brings the three characters from "Detail" back, and one of them back to life.

The book picks up 34 years after "Detail," bringing three former sailors back together for an awful purpose: to bury the son of one of the sailors who has been killed in the war in Iraq. "Detail" told the story of two seasoned sailors on chaser duty, bringing a misfit young sailor to the military prison in Portsmouth, NH in the early 1970s. Now, some three decades later, that misfit seeks out the two men who had once before helped him and showed him some kindness, and asks them to accompany him in burying his son, a Marine killed in Iraq.

While it is wonderful to revisit the boisterous Billy "Bad-Ass" Buddusky, the taciturn "Mule" Mulhall (now a preacher) and even the sad sack Larry, it's unfortunate the ends author Ponicsan had to go to in order to bring the narrative about. While the story is poignant and at times comical, the author may be letting a bit too much of himself come through in the characters.

Warts and all, though, it was almost like reading "The Last Detail" for the first time all over again, and that is a real treat.

Argula's menopausal heroine stands out in a crowded field of gumshoes with her tough exterior hiding a soft heart. When the newly-divorced P.I. stumbles upon a case of a missing office girl, she has to use all her wiles to separate the smoke screens from the real clues. Her complicated relationship with a mitigation investigator, Vincent, adds more drama to a confusing case, especially when the case seems to be solved too easily. Shocking ending.

I nearly gave up on this one after a few chapters. I didn't think I was going to care about John Baggs and his SNAFU. It had a Catch-22-without-the-humor feel to it. But it is a fairly fast read, so I was caught up in it before I got too impatient. The main character got more interesting, as did his life, and the ending is classic.
Briefly,Yeoman 2nd class John Baggs, almost-a-college-graduate, and almost-a-preacher before joining the Navy, ends up in a Naval hospital, where his records (his SERVICE records entire) get lost. In true military fashion, he can't be discharged and returned to duty, because he doesn't officially exist. He's given "Cinderella Liberty" while the bureaucracy tries, supposedly, to locate his records. This means he can leave the hospital and do as he pleases every day, but must return and check in by midnight. Under these circumstances, he manages to live a challenging life on the outside, grow as a person, and resolve an old grudge. Very satisfying ending.

This was a terrific book, which in some ways recalls "Catch-22". This book has less of the grand anti-war theme, and is more focused on the absurdity of service life. The book tells the story of John Baggs, a yeoman in the Navy, who enters the Navy hospital in Norfolk. While there, his records are lost, which places him in an official limbo; he can't return to his ship or go anywhere until his records are recovered. Officially, he doesn't exist. After a time, he is granted leave each day from 4:00pm until midnight - he must be back in the hospital by midnight, like Cinderella, hence the title. While on leave, he meets a part-time hooker and develops a relationship with her, eventually marrying her, but still forced to return to the base hospital each night. The story is engaging and funny, and though Baggs is an adult, reflects his "coming of age". He comes to love his new family (including Maggie's 3 children), longing for, and and developing his life outside the service. The story takes a turn with several heartbreaking developments for Baggs, further testing him, and ends with a final stab at organizational lunacy, and, with the final sentence, true poetic justice. This was a funny and at times, very moving story - highly recommended.½

Odd and Quinn, two policepersons, find themselves with a fugitive, a love-sick teenager, her mother and a 33 year old murder to solve.