Product Description

A novel featuring the foul-mouthed Kinky Friedman, ace private eye. When mysteriously summoned to a friend's funeral, he can't help noticing that the body in the coffin is a perfect stranger. The story was first published in the 1989 anthology, "More Kinky Friedman".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6005568 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A country singer turned amateur detective stumbles upon a case of mistaken identity and finds himself the target of a band of Nazis. "The style is marked by constant wisecracks, strained metaphors and decidedly offbeat slang," PW reported. "All is eventually resolved (sort of), but nothing is quite as funny as intended."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Series narrator Kinky Friedman--eccentric, cigar-smoking, not noticeably employed--returns as a Greenwich Village amateur investigator ( When the Cat's Away ). While attending a former co-worker's funeral, Kinky cannot help but notice that the casket inhabitant is not Peace Corps buddy John. Back in New York, Kinky and vaguely disreputable friends (Rambam, Ratso, et al.) rescue John's fiancee from neo-Nazis, scuffle with skinheads, and unravel the puzzle connecting Borneo with Austrian Nazis. Jaunty style, lively wit, and many diversions complete this amusing exercise.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Friedman, country-music-singer-turned-detective-hero of Greenwich Killing Time, A Case for Lone Star, and When the Cat's Away, takes on neo-Nazis - in another tale whose breezy stream of ethnic slurs and in-jokes will confirm the lowest prejudices of Gotham-bashers everywhere. Called to the funeral of his old Peace Corps friend John Morgan in Cleveland, sharp-eyed Kinky observes that the stiff isn't Morgan at all, a fact nobody else seems to notice. What happened to the John Morgan that Kinky knew in the jungles of Borneo? His disappearance from Argentina sends his friend Carmen Cohen, a hot Latin whose nipples are "harder than Japanese arithmetic," to find Kinky in New York, but Carmen is kidnapped from the Pierre Hotel by a pair of large blond boys. Even after recovering Carmen and finding the blond boys decapitated in a Bayonne warehouse, Kinky, together with his friends McGovern the reporter and Ratso the National Lampoon editor, takes a hundred pages to connect her abductors to Morgan; demonic old Nazi Wilhelm Stengal; Carmen's missing father; and the five skinheads who attack the Kinkster - all of them spoiling his reveries of "the golden days of innocence and truth when Mike would vomit on the head of the woman at the next table and I would threaten to stick my fork in the waitress's eye." The writing outparodies S.J. Perelman at his wildest except when Friedman slips up - "Could this increasingly grotesque puzzle reach back almost fifty years in time and across the length and breadth of three continents?" - and takes his plot seriously. A concluding note credits the title to the author's five-year-old niece. She may have had a hand in the plotting and writing as well. (Kirkus Reviews)

Kinky Friedman, ex-country singer turned amateur detective and eponymous hero of his own stories, attends the funeral of a friend he has not seen since they were both in the Peace Corps in Borneo. The body in the open casket is not that of Tom Baker: whose is it? And where is 'the Bakerman'? Friedman, armed with a cat and a cast of Manhattan misfits, sets out to find the truth and finds himself embroiled instead in a welter of confusion. Snappy chapters build to a succession of frequently amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud one-liners. Friedman belts out a plot littered with clues and red herrings; the action sometimes takes a back seat to the jokes but the set pieces are very funny and, coupled with some surprisingly trenchant observations on the nature of friendship and memory, they make for an enjoyable read. The characters are well drawn and lively and the atmosphere of a Greenwich Village Manhattan fills the pages on which they move. Friedman's jaundiced eye surveys the world like a Sam Spade had his poison been cocaine and not whisky; strong language and references to drug use pepper the text - in the world Friedman has created they add a piquancy rather than a sour taste. The conclusion of the mystery, in true Sherlockian style, is obvious once you know the answer: the conclusion of the novel, with its startling tenderness and poetry, is something else again and raises Frequent Flyer above the standard for previous Friedman novels. For the rest, laughter carries the day; but ultimately, this is not so much a novel as a song written to the memory of a dead friend. (Kirkus UK)

Customer Reviews

Kinky vs. the Nazis
Frequent Flyer, Kinky Friedman's fourth novel starring himself and his outlandish New York crew, takes as its subject matter the time he spent in Borneo as a member of the peace corp as well as the lingering remnants of Nazis tucked away in jungles around the globe. Kinky has always drawn heavily from his experiences as a cat-loving country singer, but Frequent Flyer is appropriately dark and personal as it sifts through the hatred that's uncovered on each page.

Kinky receives a mysterious call to inform him that an old buddy from the peace corp days has passed away, but the open-casket funeral belies the first ominous clue in a string of them...he's never seen the corpse before in his life. Thus begins the task of finding out where the switcharoo took place and what his friend had stumbled onto before disappearing without a trace. Not to mention all of the old Nazis that keep popping up.

I didn't enjoy this addition to the Kinky saga as much as his first two (Greenwich Killing Time and A Case Of Lone Star), but it's notable for its intriguing subject matter. Plot has never been the key to a Friedman novel, anyway, as long as our hero keeps popping off life lessons like shots from his bull horn full of Jameson's. Eavesdropping on his internal dialogue regarding his past is worth the price of admission, and there are many nostalgic passages about his younger days that reveal more about the author than ever before.

It's a short book, but unfortunately it's even shorter on character development. The emphasis here is on the past and Kinky's own thoughts (he even goes to a psychiatrist!). This was probably a necessary stop along the path to developing what's become one of my favorite sleuths, but it wasn't the most enjoyable by a long shot. With all of the ruminating going on, there's not much room for developing the storyline, and I was left feeling a little underwhelmed.

Classic Kinky
This is one of Kinky's best early novels. It is not quite as good as the books from the God Bless John Wayne era, but it is very good. Get this one after ...John Wayne and The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, but be sure to get it.

An espresso, an Epicure and Kinky - life is life
Kinky Friedman was recommended to me by a fellow at a cigar lounge. He had just discovered Freidman and had devoured all his books. So as one cigar smoking Jew recommended to another cigar smoking Jew a book by a cigar smoking Jew, I bought Elvis, Jesus and Coca Cola.

The next day, I bought Frequent Flyer. Now I will buy the rest.

This story is interesting on its own - a dead man who is not, a beating and Nazis. But the key to its impact is the series of references and philosophies that intermingle within the context of the story. The world is both complex and simple - often at the same time. Kinky's stories bring this forth.

I liked Elvis, Jesus and Coca-Cola better. But I enjoyed Frequent Flyer a lot.