Double Negative

I'm happy to have discovered a new detective story writer. 'Double Negative' by David Carkeet is quite good. It's a Felony & Mayhem paperback!

"Hoosier, n., etymology obscure and boring: a dumb white man with a fat white wife who eats greens, attaches his muffler to his car with a coat hanger, and leaves refrigerators in his yard for children to suffocate in." You know how reviewers rave about books that they "can't put down" once they pick them up? I always thought this was the absolute top praise you could heap on a tome. But then I read Double Negative by David Carkeet and realized that books can do one better: they can make you keep putting them down to marvel at the cleverness of a phrase, or to gasp for air amid fits of laughter. "Easily clutched" becomes penultimate praise by comparison. Double Negative was nominated for an Edgar for best mystery in 1980, and it is the first in a trilogy by David Carkeet featuring the title character, Jeremy Cook, a famous linguist (as far as a linguist can be, I suppose) and all-around swell guy. Jeremy works in a daycare center that doubles as a linguistics research facility. In exchange for discount toddler oversight, the staff is allowed to take copious notes about every utterance their tykes make as they learn to form words and sentences. A large part of the book's charm is that the characters all appreciate sentence structure, leading to some humor that only book geeks could appreciate. It is a wonderful premise that allows Carkeet to show off his verbiage with a built-in excuse for excess. The story he gets to tell with these skills reminded me a bit of the CLUE movie to which our site pays homage. When one of the linguists that works along with Jeremy is killed, the entire staff turns their eyes towards the mystery and each other. Everyone knows that one of them committed the murder, which leads to the hilarious snooping, traps, questions, suspicions, and misplaced trust that made the movie adaptation such a classic. Just as in the CLUE movie, the characters are vivid and unique. The book's detective is an intelligent and quirky fellow whose interplay with Jeremy is so good that many bouts of dialog begged to be enjoyed with multiple readings. And Jeremy is one of those rare book protagonists that you immediately fall in love with after only a few pages. By the end of the book he is a real person, completely fleshed out, and just as wonderful for his faults as for his charms. The plot is interesting enough, but it is Carkeet's ability to dizzy the reader with a turn of phrase that makes this an enticing read. Again and again I would damn the author for using up an analogy that I sure would have enjoyed coming up with on my own. My head is now filled with superior phrasings that make simple tasks, such as emailing my wife from the road, a depressing exercise in linguistic futility. I just want to send her excerpts from the book instead of the dull crap that spills out of my less-intelligent noggin. Understand ahead of time that this is not a mystery you are meant to solve along with the protagonist. It is a humerus s

The first title of a trilogy featuring the central character, Jeremy Cook, a linguist who in this mystery is employed in a research lab/day-care center where the scientists study the development of language in children. When one of the researchers is discovered dead in Cook's office he becomes the prime suspect. Eventually, however, the answer comes from the mouths of babes. This was Carkeet's first book, and his only straightforward mystery. Its quirky-but-likeable characters are well-suited to the form, but the two succeeding volumes ("The Full Catastrophe," 1990, and "The Error of Our Ways," 1997) were set in more conventional, albeit bizarre, situations. All three are concerned with the effect of speech (or lack of it) in interpersonal relationships. Carkeet is also the author of "The Greatest Slump of All Time," (1984), a superb novel about baseball players; "I Been There Before, (1985), about the resurrection of Mark Twain; "The Silent Treatment," (1988), a novel for young adults; and "Campus Sexpot," (2005), a memoir of his high-school days in Sonora, CA in the early 1960s and the effect on the town by the publication of a steamy roman-a-clef that was written by a former teacher.

Just picked this up and enjoyed it thoroughly! Unusual setting is a linguistics facility doubling as day care center. (They study the evolution of language in toddlers.) One of the linguists is run over at night and the mystery begins. It's intelligent, humorous, and human as our hero, Jeremy Cook, stumbles along being head smart, heart dumb, dealing with a quirky police lieutenant, a beautiful young graduate student, a napoleonic department head, and fellow academic linguists who like him more than he realizes. The plot twist is unusual but what really makes the book endearing is being inside Jeremy's head and hearing human concerns expressed through bookish terms in a warm and funny way. I've ordered the next two already.

I put David Carkeet in the same category as Patrick Dennis. He finds unlikely scenarios and populates them with likeable characters. He may be considered a young adult author because even his adult books are accessible (no strong language or graphic scenes). This is not a book to be agitated by but to be reassured by: good people survive when the inevitably unfortunate circumstances develop in the routine interactions of daily home and work, however unlikely the actual work may be.