A review by P.E. Logan
Read more about GalleyCat Reviews
Halloween is the new Thanksgiving when it comes to kicking off holiday book sales. Before the pumpkins are carved, Christmas-themed books start popping up on national best-seller lists.
Any title firmly parked there at turkey time should garner brisk sales all through the gift-giving season. The marketing proof of this is in the eating of the first figgy pudding.
One book looking to join the race for under the tree is The Fat Man: A Tale of North Pole Noir, a first novel by Ken Harmon. Mr. Harmon has written a Dashiell Hammett meets It’s A Wonderful Life story, sprinkled with a dash of Merry Melodies.
It is the tale of an elf named Gumdrop Coal who lives in Kringle Town, a burg in the North Pole. In true noir fashion, poor Gumdrop is framed for a crime he did not commit. He is being dogged by Rosebud Jubilee, a gal, elf reporter for The Marshmallow World Gazette, who believes in his innocence. Gumdrop has a loving sidekick, Dingleberry Fizz, a gentler-than-thou soul who takes all his direction in life from a comic book series featuring the glob-trotting George Bailey, the everyman hero of Frank Capra’s beloved holiday movie.
The three elves are convinced Santa will be snuffed out by evil elfin forces that have seized control over toy production in the Pole and believe ala Gordon Gekko in the dictum: “He who has the most toys wins.” If there is a toy shortage and if Santa takes a walk in sooty cement boots, well, there will be no Christmas. What’s an elf to do? As in any noir story, the perp’s number will come due, the hero will get the dame and, specific to a North Pole noir told by an elf, peace and harmony will be restored to happy boys and girls everywhere. (You didn’t think the plot was otherwise, did you?)
Mr. Harmon went overboard – to many sugar plums at the keyboard – with his character’s names and the nonstop puns that race down the page. He has liberally sprinkled many baby boomer era touchstones throughout the story that will be missed by an audience under 30.
The millennial generation may not readily “grok” the references to the Lone Ranger’s signature send off, “Hi Ho Silver”; the old Loretta Young holiday film, The Bishop’s Wife; or the phrase perpetually uttered by Perry White on Superman, “Great Caesar’s ghost!” The pun on the character named Charles “Candy” Cane will fly right over a younger reader’s head like reindeer past your rooftop unless the younger reader is a student of film. Same goes for Rosebud. Boomers, however, will pick up on all these comedic winks and double entendres to classic holiday literature, movies, poems and songs.
The author runs the bases of the Christmas canon with a wide-range pulling snippets from A Christmas Carol, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street, The Twelve Days of Christmas, and The Christmas Song, among others, plus old TV shows from the 60s, some not necessarily related to Christmas. It’s a struggle at times to decode if Fat Man is a book for a young adult or an adult reader. The writing is the former, but the wit is the latter. A phrase like “according to Hoyle” may be another missed punchline for readers under a certain age, especially if they have never looked up the rules of cards.
The tongue-in-cheek banter between characters does capture the staccato of the noir genre, reminding me of the old “Nick Danger” routines by the comedy troupe Firesign Theatre. There are some quality one-off lines too, such as “…that stuck to me like a cold on a Cratchit,” “Elves are naturally nostalgic” and “Munchkins are elitists.”
It is clear Harmon has a steel-trap mind for Christmas trivia, and you can only imagine that as a kid he longed for his very own Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model BB Gun with a compass in the stock. The chapter titles are also very funny, ranging from “I’m Telling You Why” to “Oh, Tannenbomb.” For the moralists, the story ends tied up in a nice bow with a message of peace and love. All the more reason to read this at bedtime to a youngster while you giggle away when the elves stroll into the Blue Christmas bar where elf Elvis is the nog jockey.
There should have been a stronger editorial tether on Mr. Harmon. With more time devoted to the process, this story could have worked on all levels and not just as kitsch. This is a first entry in holiday writing from Harmon and perhaps if he plugs away and trims down his jokiness we will hear more from him next Christmas and in holidays to come. Fat Man is for adults to buy and then read to tucked-in tykes. But please, wait at least ‘til December to open. The pumpkins are still on the front porch.
Also witness the early October arrival of Promise Me, the latest snowflake-and-miracles tale from Richard Paul Evans, author of The Christmas Box, an early snow saga that was a mega seller and widened the opening to today’s conga line of books involving angelic visitations, life-lessons from misplaced but much-loved knitted items and holiday cooking fiction with the family glögg recipe. The retail strategy must work, otherwise, what sane person would come within 50 paces of Christmas – that tinseled gorilla in the corner – before the turkey leftovers are gone, much less the trick-or-treat candy dispensed?
P.E. Logan is a communications and marketing professional and a writer in New York. She worked at various adult trade publishing houses including Random House, Putnam, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster for almost three decades. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and in other periodicals.