Book Review – The Pistol Poets

Author: Victor Gischler
Cover Artist: Jorge Martinez
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: January 2005

The Pistol Poets, is a Marx brothers sketch in crime novel form.

Victor Gischler’s books have the greatest titles ever. There I said it. I stand by it. I just needed to get that out of the way.

The Marx Brothers mastered the art of inspired lunacy in an anarchic setting. Like a balloon being blown up to its fullest capacity without popping, they would constantly add another crazy element to their sketches and just when it threatened to get out of control they would miraculously pull it off. Well, Gischler’s second novel, The Pistol Poets, is a Marx brothers sketch in crime novel form. It has so many crazy disparate elements that it shouldn’t work but it does thanks to his skill as a writer.

Most of the action unfolds on a college campus setting. Gischlers experience as a creative writing instructor at Rogers State University lends added weight to the elements of the story that satirize academic life and those people, students, teachers & and hangers on, that populate the campus.

The MacGuffin at the center of the story is a bag of stolen cocaine. Everybody who wants it has their own reasons, pride, resale value and the potential future that it represents. In the case of one independent contractor in the pharmaceutical industry whose neck might be red, just so the black guy doesn’t have it.

Some of the characters that we are introduced to include:
-A low level drug dealer who murders another kid from the neighborhood in a botched mugging. Instead of money in the kids’ pants he finds an acceptance letter to college. He decides to take the dead boys place.
-A visiting professor and struggling published poet who wakes up one morning and discovers the body of a dead student in his bed.
-The unlikely “student” who posseses the uncanny ability and resources to help the professor out of any situation. He serves as the deus es machina of the book.
-A PI who reeks of cliché but possesses the resolve to get himself out of at least one tight situation.
-A Nobel Prize winning poet who is afraid of life, smokes pot all day and lives in an abandoned floor of an old campus building.
-An over anxious cub reporter for the school paper.
-The aforementioned redneck drug dealer.
-A black drug dealer who uses aromatherapy and meditation to calm his nerves, but feels the need to talk and act “street” in order to for his people to respect him.

It’s the way in which these characters, and many others, interact that propels the story forward. From a classroom poetry workshop like no other to a botched drug deal to a demented road trip. The novel at times reads like a series of interrelated sketches but even the format just adds to the comic feel of the story. It never fails to entertain in its over the top, absurd and at times laugh out loud unique style.

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