LENNIE LOWER – Here’s Luck. First published in Australia in 1930. Reprinted several times and still in print. Online at Gutenberg Australia.

   I don’t really have anything insightful to say about this one, but it is just so damn funny I feel compelled to draw your interest to it.

   I’ll award a shiny new quarter to anyone who’s ever heard of this. If you’ve actually read it, I’ll give a Dollar. (See Steve for payment.) But if you have yet to read Here’s Luck, there’s a delicious experience awaiting you because this book is a triumph of hopeless hilarity and richly-textured writing.

   In his brief day (before he drank himself to an early grave) Lennie Lower was considered Australia’s prime humorist, and this, his only novel, has been compared with Tom Sawyer and The Pickwick Papers, but to my mind it’s what Under the Volcano and Ulysses would be if they were done as comedies. And yes, I know there’s a lot of humor in Ulysses, but I still maintain that the reader in search of a good laugh will find Here’s Luck much more rewarding.

   The story deals with hard-drinking, middle-aged Jack Gudgeon — the author day-dreaming in the 1st-person? — whose wife gets fed up with him and runs home to Mother, leaving Jack and his grown-up son Stanley, who reads like Australia’s equivalent of Dobie Gillis, to stroll leisurely amok through Sydney, not actually looking for trouble, but somehow attracting it to them as flies draw honey (think about it).

   We are treated in quick succession to encounters with predatory ladies, race-track touts, vengeful gangsters, thwarted love, motorcycle chases and Jack’s brother-in-law George, just in from the Outback and awed by the great city. Or as Jack puts it. “There was something I liked about him. An open honesty and trusting innocence. I hoped he had money.”

   Along the way we get some genuine suspense and pre-Chandleresque prose, as in the scene where Jack sand Stanley hide in a closet, waiting for the detectives his wife has put on him to encounter the gangsters on his tail:

   or

   Or, describing a small town:

   Lower can write like that when he’s not being simply hilarious. And Hilarious is what this book is all about. The sort of thing Sartre used to call a “Laff Riot” and one well worth seeking out.