Unless there are Toons involved (or hand-puppets, but that's beside the point).
Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit? (by Gary K. Wolf) is one of the best books I've read in, well, ever. But I'm entirely biased, and this is why:
- -It was available for my Kindle for a low, low sum of filthy lucre;
- -It's the same setting and characters as one of my favorite films;
- -I had just come off the first novel, the one that the film was "based on," (I literally finished reading Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (also by Wolf) five minutes before picking up Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?) and the difference was like swimming in a freezing pool, then putting on a pair of sweats that just came out of the dryer. A quick, sickening* plunge into the unfamiliar before returning to the most comforting thing.
*Note: Who Censored Roger Rabbit? was not actually sickening, and I will be reviewing both novels for reference.
Full disclosure: I never saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in the theater. I had two main sources of movies, and they were Mom and Grandma. Mom had better things to do than take me to see a movie (like the film, my baby brother had just premiered). My Aunt Verleen had taken one of her grandchildren to see the film, and didn't hesitate to tell everybody that it was terrible because there was a cigar-smoking baby, so Grandma was right out (and before you ask why, why, why: Look, I never went anywhere without anybody. There's a long, painful history wherein I was the poster child about girls being set up to fail from the earliest age possible. Don't give me none of that shit, or I will TMI you to death).
I can't remember the exact circumstances, but I have the suspicion that there was a free week of HBO about a year later and, "coincidentally," I was too sick to go to school when Who Framed Roger Rabbit? came on. I fell in love. Several years later, my kids watch it almost every week. I vaguely recall (as I have many times over the years) that there was a book that pre-dated my favorite film and thanks to the wonders of modern technology I can actually get my hands on a copy. Amazon also alerts me to a sequel to be electronically delivered. Life is good.
It took me about a week to get through Who Censored Roger Rabbit?. I don't know why, exactly, but I think it has something to do with the setting and the tone of the novel, as well as the backstory.
The Toons are comic Toons, speaking in word balloons, set in a more contemporary world than Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was. The Toons that have showbiz jobs are managed (or owned) by Syndicates, and the "artists" of toons are their photographers, their writers and directors.
"It's like Cool World meets Sin City," I texted my husband, while I was reading. He had better things to do than listen to my nonsense, probably, because he declined to share my indignation.
I didn't see a cell phone or a computer, but it definitely wasn't post-war Los Angeles. Women wore pants, can you imagine?
Another thing I didn't see was cursing. It could be that I'm completely immune to those things you don't say in front of your venerated old aunties, but for a hardboiled private-eye story, the language was positively tame.
Don't get me wrong here. It was a good story, very well plotted and put together almost seamlessly. It was just such a stark contrast from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? that I couldn't see a family resemblance at all, save for four characters and a throwaway line or two. In fact, if I had read this story before seeing the film, I probably would have been one of those people you see bitching whenever Disney gets hold of a franchise, how Disney will ruin it and soften it up and make it all Disneyfied. FEH!
The truth is that in this case, Disney (in this case meaning the writers and directors) roughed it up around the edges and made it a story that could light up a screen. Not to mention that Disney had the licensing power. How else would you get Daffy and Donald, or Bugs and Mickey onto a screen together?
Who Censored Roger Rabbit? was an entirely different animal than Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and I think the two animals were each uniquely adapted to their environments, despite having once shared an evolutionary branch. Both of them are excellent pieces of art, but the one a person will like better depends on the person's frame of reference. For me, the movie wins that match, at least on the first read.
Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit? is different still from either of its predecessors, having taken the best elements out of both. Some of the Toons revert back to their original roots, with word bubbles dropping off of their persons intermittently. Others engage in a little industrial espionage, like planting evidence on their friends and spreading rumors that their rivals are gay. In the late 40's, a tightly-locked closet was an actor's best friend.
While Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit? kept the same detective novel tropes, with its descriptions filled with (forgive me) overwrought similes and objectifying dialogue of every woman within the male gaze. But inside this were near-constant bursts of hilarity, thanks to the cast of Toons, and with our private-eye hero playing the straight man. This is what worked for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and it's what works for this book.
Name-dropping was at high levels, with Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and David O. Selznick in the cast. Schwab's famous drug store was a landmark in this version of L.A., as in many other great works about the decadence and destructive tendencies of Hollywood in its heyday. None of this seemed out of place in this half-gritty-detective-novel-half-cartoon world, where Gone With the Wind was originally written as a musical comedy.
This would not be one of my book reviews if I didn't nitpick a word, or a turn of phrase. In a novel where almost nary a word was out of place, there was only one that slapped me in the face, and that word was snabbed. Yes, I know. It's a real word, likely a portmanteau of snatched and grabbed, but to me it sounds like a farmer's blow (when you hold one nostril shut, blow hard through the open nostril and let your snot-rocket fly), as in "I snabbed on the hostess and she had me removed from her fancy dinner party." I believe the word appeared exactly once in each novel. It is probably a perfectly fine word, and I'm just being a horse's ass. I gotta be me.
In short: No rating for Who Censored Roger Rabbit? as I don't feel equipped and would like to re-read it.
Five stars for Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit? which I devoured in eight hours and would gladly do again.
Edited to add: There were formatting issues unique to the Kindle, which were absolutely not the fault of the author. There were the common transcription errors ("Ah" became "Ali") that happen when one uses a scanner and then a TWAIN translator to move the characters into text and then to e-reader format, and the occasional wonky paragraph breakage (which can lead to confusion as to who said what if your hardboiled detective novel is as sparse on the "saids" as it should be). I got over it, but I had to read carefully.
Edited further to add Amazon links. It's been ages since I've done this. Apologies.
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