Thu 10 May 2018
Mystery Review: LAWRENCE BLOCK – The Topless Tulip Caper.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[11] Comments
LAWRENCE BLOCK – The Topless Tulip Caper. Chip Harrison #4. Signet, paperback, 1998. Previously published as by Chip Harrison: Gold Medal P3274, paperback original, 1975.
No Score (1970) and Chip Harrison Scores Again (1971), the first two books in Lawrence Block’s “Chip Harrison” series, all first published as by Chip Harrison, were largely sex farces with marginal criminous elements. In the first one, at least, a young lad named Chip Harrison who has never had sex does his best to change that situation.
In the next two books, Make Out with Murder (1974) and this one, Chip has teamed up à la Archie Goodwin with a Nero Wolfe wanna-be detective named Leo Haig. The emphasis is on the detective work, but as Chip explains as he goes along, his editor at Gold Medal wants plenty of sex scenes too. Sex sells, he is told.
The book is divided into three parts. Part one begins with Chip at a strip tease club where Haig’s latest client, Tulip Willing (not her real name), is working as a dancer. Well, strip tease is a misnomer as the dancers come out onto the stage totally nude to begin with, so there is no actual stripping involved.
Chip describes the scene so well that I think any male reader may well wish he was there. Block is at his comedic best in part one, with a smile on every page, if not an out and out loud guffaw. What Haig has been hired to do by his client, an out and out knockout of feminine pulchritude, is to find out who killed her tank full of tropical fish.
This has intrigued Haig because his particular obsession is not growing orchids but breeding tropical fish himself. But it is Tulip’s roommate, also a dancer (named Cherry Bounce) who is killed by curare (an unseen dart?) right as her act is coming to a close (while totally nude).
Part two consists of Chip Harrison doing his Archie Goodwin routine, questioning suspects and so on, dallying once or twice in detail that Archie never ever got into.
In part three Leo Haig takes over, playing Nero Wolfe to the hilt in front of a room full of all of the suspects as well as two grumpy representatives of the police department. I don’t think Lawrence Block does it as well as Rex Stout, but in its own way, part three works out in quite satisfactory fashion.
I don’t know how you feel about reading a Nero Wolfe book with sex scenes in it, but Block is never a bad writer, and that is what this is. I’ll have to leave that particular question for you to decide for yourself. Speaking of sex scenes, one interesting aspect to the book is the ending in which Haig twits Chip a bit for being an unreliable narrator. Regarding their client, for example, did he or didn’t he?
May 11th, 2018 at 6:52 am
I enjoyed the Leo Haig books quite a bit. Didn’t he live in Brooklyn? He was always hoping for an invitation to Wolfe’s brownstone on West 35th Street, as I remember.
May 11th, 2018 at 11:19 am
Haig seems like a Brooklyn kind of guy, all right, but his home and office is definitely in Manhattan. A quick browse through didn’t turn up a full address, but in one spot Chip mentions walking a few blocks from 23rd and Eighth (a subway stop?) to where Haig lives.
May 11th, 2018 at 7:35 am
I’ve alwys wanted to try these, mostly for the tawdry thrills, but also because Block had a lot of vigor in his writing and a fast smooth prose style in his other Gold Medals.
May 11th, 2018 at 11:30 am
Tawdry? Truth in advertising. More like raunchy at times, too.
May 11th, 2018 at 9:45 am
I enjoyed both of these, but I think TOPLESS TULIP CAPER is the better of Block’s two Wolfe homages. I wrote about both on my blog. One, however, is hidden in a post written in tandem with another book published in 1975. Best to search using “Leo Haig” in order to find both reviews.
May 11th, 2018 at 11:26 am
https://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2016/08/make-out-with-murder-chip-harrison.html
and
https://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2016/12/1975-books-sex-race-crime.html
May 11th, 2018 at 12:57 pm
I remembered afterwards that it was the Loren Estleman Wolfe wannabe who lives in Brooklyn.
May 11th, 2018 at 4:27 pm
That would be the book, a collection of short stories, called Nearly Nero: The Adventures of Claudius Lyon, the Man Who Would Be Wolfe. I bought it last year but haven’t gotten around to sampling it yet.
May 12th, 2018 at 2:35 am
Ken Crossen was another who did a pseudo Wolfe, but Block probably did it with the most wit and humor by taking a satirical eye to it, while not actually making fun of Stout or Archie, just these two trying to emulate them. Leo and Chip are a delightful pair and it is only a shame there were never more adventures since for me Block is always at his best with tongue in cheek.
May 21st, 2018 at 10:07 pm
In the earlier stuff, No Score and Chip Harrison Scores Again, wasn’t there also a third book called The Case of the Scoreless Thai, about a Siamese guy who couldn’t, uh, well you know.
May 21st, 2018 at 10:48 pm
If not, Peter, there should have been!