Night of the Avenging Blowfish

by John Welter

My bundle of books from Nick is drawing to a close with this penultimate offering from John Welter - another name new to me, and someone that Joseph Heller reckons is one of the wittiest American novelists writing today. Anyway, the title refers to the name of a baseball team formed by the Secret Service (you know, the ones that would take a bullet for the President) for a covert game against the CIA (you know, the ones who ran drugs out of Laos during the Vietnam conflict) which will be played at night at a secret location unknown to both teams. Since this is a bit of a two-page joke, Mr. Welter needed to fill the rest of the book up somehow and so resorts to a very large selection of one-liners, a sub-plot about an animal activist that the hero's partner falls in love with, and the hero's ongoing infatuation with the wife of a colleague.

The book reads well enough, but you get the feeling that Mr. Welter was sitting at his word processor trying desperately to think of a punchline every five minutes, and there doesn't appear to be all that much of a point to it. I'll have a look out for his other book, "Begin to Exit here", and I'll read that too, but I don't hold out much hope that John Welter will prove to be the comic genius that some of the media propose him to be.

Ben gives it:

Price: Dunno, but it costs $10.95 in the States
Published by: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (!) (ISBN 1-56512-050-7)

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last updated: 7th October 1996