By JOHN McCALLUM
Editor
Take traditional hard-boiled detectives like Sam Spade and Johnny Dollar, mix in idiosyncratic types like Nero Wolfe add a pinch of Columbo and blend with movies like “Airplane,” and the “Naked Gun” series and what do you get?
You get one Lance Loomis, the chief protagonist in Cheney author John Soennichsen's latest novel, “The Fat Detective: A Gruesome Tale of Murder, Mayhem and Bad Puns from the Crime-Ridden Streets of Spokane, Washington.” It's Soennichsen's fifth book and second fiction novel, one catering to something he believes every writer has inside.
“You can be a greeting card writer and you still have a fiction book in you,” he said.
“The Fat Detective” actually began life as a screenplay Soennichsen wrote several years ago, but realized that location – he's over 1,000 miles from Los Angeles – likely precluded from ever making the silver screen. Being a fan of the hard-boiled detective novels and the comedic seriousness of the Zucker Brother movies, Soennichsen said he talked to his agent and local literary friends and decided to self-publish “The Fat Detective.”
In the book, Loomis tries to solve two seemingly unrelated murders, interviewing a variety of colorful characters ranging from an egotistical talk show host, “the white man's Oprah,” to an elderly janitor who attends New German Social Club meetings. The Norwegian Mafia marks Loomis for death as he trolls the streets of Spokane squeezed into his 1978 Renault Le Car, assisted by a street hood named Vinny and having befriended a captivating dish named Jill Morgan, who contacts Loomis at his office “vacuum-packed in a little black dress” talking of murder.
“I can still remember the instant I first saw her,” mumbled Loomis. “I also recall thinking that the gun aisle was one hell of a place to meet a woman of this caliber.”
It's dialogue very much in the style of Naked Gun's fictional detective Frank Drebin. The late Leslie Nielsen's memorable character was hamstrung, and sometimes aided, by his haplessness, and Soennichsen provides Loomis with a similar comedic vehicle – food.
“Loomis knew it would only take a few subtle questions now for Manning's storyline to be crushed like a can of Nalley's chili under a steel-belted radial,” he writes.
“He's very arrogant, and he thinks he's solving it but everyone else is doing the work for him,” Soennichsen said in an interview last Friday, adding that despite the setting, it's all fiction. “There are no characters based on real people. They're kind of a composite.”
Since the story is set locally Soennichsen said he made sure there was a sense of reality, driving around to the various locations in the story to make sure the action or the setting could truly happen. It's a technique used in several of his earlier, non-fiction works.
Soennichsen's first book, 2005's “Live from Death Valley: Dispatches from America's Low Point” skillfully blended vignettes on the valley's discovery and history with family trips made while growing up in Los Angeles and later excursions as a college student at Cal-State Fullerton and the University of Oregon.
Trips around Eastern Washington to learn about the area for personal knowledge and as part of a travel book eventually led Soennichsen to uncover more about geologist J. Harlan Bretz, who first proposed that a massive flood had carved out the area known today as the Channeled Scablands. When it became obvious to Soennichsen and his agent that little was known about the man, 2009's “Bretz Flood: The Remarkable Story of a Rebel Geologist and the World's Greatest Flood” was born.
Soennichsen's first fiction work, “Westward Journey: The Incredible Story of an American Boy” was published in 2008 originally as an online-book “Valley of the Shadow.” He recently completed a reference work “The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882” and is finalizing “Washington's Channeled Scablands,” the travel book that launched “Bretz's Flood” for release sometime in 2012.
When it comes to writing fiction or non-fiction, the former writer and editor of Eastern Washington Univeristy's almumi magazine, “Perspectives” (now “Eastern” magazine) said there are advantages to both. Non-fiction sells better and therefore pays, while fiction is easier and provides more opportunities.
“You can create the whole universe with fiction,” Soennichsen said. “But, it's harder to publish.”
So far “The Fat Detective” has proven popular. At a recent reading at Auntie's in Spokane for “Bretz's Flood” Soennichsen said he was able to sneak in a couple of chapters about Loomis and the audience loved it.
Nationally known humor writer Pat McManus wrote in a review that Loomis “is so hilariously incompetent he makes Jacques Clouseau of “The Pink Panther” seem positively brilliant,” and the Spokesman-Review called the book “a comic detective novel that Spokane readers will find particularly entertaining.”
Soennichsen said a reading is tentatively planned for Auntie's on Oct. 7. He also has other fiction works planned along with another potential non-fiction piece on the board.
“The Fat Detective” is available at Auntie's and Rae's Book Exchange on 6512 N. Division in Spokane.
John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].
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