Ten Little New Yorkers

In the wake of a series of Greenwich Village murders, Kinky Friedman finds himself targeted by police as the likely suspect and must identify the true killer from among the people who are closest to him.

Kinky Friedman has always proven himself to be a master of the offbeat and irreverent, and still manages to pull off a helluva whodunit in the process. Now the Kinkster may have met his match in this superbly crafted, fiendishly clever tale of a murderer who's methodically killing off unsuspecting Manhattan men. Gallingly, all clues point toward Kinky.

Greenwich Village is the setting for Ten Little New Yorkers, a tale of murder and mayhem as only Friedman can warble it and featuring his usual suspects, including Ratso -- Dr. Watson to Kinky's singular Sherlock Holmes. As the clues and bodies pile up and the cops strong-arm Kinky as their man, he has to jump through hoops to find the real killer, all the while maintaining his outrage and, of course, his innocence. The murderer may be someone close to Kinky, which leads to a shocker of an ending that will surely take Kinky devotees completely by surprise.

With a wink and a nod to Dame Agatha (as in Christie), after which all resemblance to those classic mysteries fades, this is one of Friedman's most complex and irresistible page-turners yet. Cunningly tentous issues of life, death, guilt, innocence, love, loss, and the danger of false confessions, this is Kinky Friedman at his wily, suspenseful, and sacrilegious best.

Auteur

Kinky Friedman lives in a little green trailer somewhere in the hills of Texas. He has five dogs, one armadillo, and one Smith-Corona typewriter. By the time you are reading this, Mr. Friedman may either be celebrating becoming the next governor of Texas or he may have retired in a petulant snit.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter One

The cat had been gone and the lesbian dance had been silent for some time now. It had been a fairly rough patch for the Kinkster. Ratso was really starting to irritate me as well. "Starting," I suppose, would be the wrong word to use. Ratso had been doing a pretty thorough job of getting up my sleeve ever since the first day I'd met him. Maybe it was part of his charm. Maybe I never used to let it get to me. Maybe with the cat gone and no one around to really talk to, the full brunt of Ratso's personality was finally weighing down upon me. But Ratso was a guy you just couldn't hate, so you might as well love him. And when I think of all the shit the two of us have been through together, I see him as a natural and inevitable part of my own existence. The cat never liked him, of course, and that would be putting it mildly. The truth was the cat fucking hated him, and I believe you should never mistrust the instincts of a cat. But what the hell, the cat by now was no doubt safely across the rainbow bridge and I was standing at my window, waiting for Ratso, and watching the rain.

It was a hard rain, as Bob Dylan might say, but I didn't mind. In fact, I didn't really give a damn if the whole city floated away. Well, maybe it'd be nice to keep Chinatown. When it's raining cats and dogs I miss the animals and people I've loved in my life and I feel closer to them and farther away from today. Today is just a garbageman in his yellow raincoat. Today is the wet woman with the wild hair walking willfully into the white wall. Today's a goddamn vase without any flowers. Hell, give me a passably decent tomorrow, I said. Give me a handful of scrappy yesterdays. Give me liberty or give me death or give me life on the Mississippi.

Since my cat had disappeared I found I was talking to myself a great deal, and myself, unfortunately, had never taken the time or effort to bother developing her listening skills. Without the cat I was a starfish on the sand. A lesbian dance class without the music. A Japanese tourist wandering the world without a camera. I was lost in a swirling gray fog of grief and self-pity. What the hell, I thought. Being alone provides an opportunity few of us ever have in life, the opportunity to get to know ourselves. I mean you might as well get to know yourself. You're going to have to live together.

I watched the rain some more. It felt like it was raining all over the world. Everywhere but Georgia. I heard some rumbling sounds from upstairs. Lesbian thunder no doubt. Then from further upstairs I heard the rumbling sounds of just plain thunder. After listening for a while it was hard to tell which was which. Ask me if I cared. Large dogs often seem to be afraid of thunder, but small dogs usually remain unfazed by it. What does this tell us? Not too much. These are the kinds of fragmented thoughts that quite commonly pop into the heads of private investigators who've gone too long with nothing to investigate. If this situation persists for a while, said investigators may even lose their powers of observation. When this occurs, about all they can do is watch the rain.

"If I'm not mistaken," I said to the cat who wasn't there, "I hear the call of a blue-buttocked tropical loon."

It is not uncommon, psychologists say, for a person to speak to a loved one after the loved one has passed away. The force of habit is often stronger than the force of gravity. The force of wishful thinking, I would submit, may even be stronger than the other two. Psychologists probably wouldn't agree with me. Like that red-bearded baboon who got me deselected from the Peace Corps. Because I was honest with him I never got to meet a blonde driving a jeep in Africa and make her the future ex-Mrs. Kinky Friedman. I had to wander the country aimlessly for many moons, retrain in Hawaii, then go to Borneo where I helped people who'd been farming successfully for over two thousand years. It was during my stint in Borneo that my penis sloughed off in the jungle. I didn't blame God. I didn't blame the psychologist. I didn't even blame the naked little brown children who laughed and pointed to my penis lying there on the jungle floor and shouted Pisang! Pisang means "banana" in Malay. No, I don't blame any of these people. I just blame my editor for leaving this shit out of the book.

The blue-buttocked tropical loon called out again, giving forth with what sounded like another, somewhat more impassioned, mating call. What, I wondered, was a blue-buttocked tropical loon doing in the middle of a rainstorm in the West Village? The blue-buttocked tropical loon belonged in a rain forest, not a rainstorm. Of course I could understand it making an occasional appearance in the East Village, but it was highly unusual for this rare bird to migrate to the more civilized West Village. Another unsettling irregularity was that it was the middle of winter, certainly not the normal mating season for the blue-buttocked tropical loon. Possibly, like everybody else in the world, the loon was merely out to fuck me. I opened the kitchen window ever so slightly. I looked down into a monolithic gray wall of rain but could see nothing. Then I heard the strange sound again.

"Kinkstah!" it seemed to say. "Kinkstah, I'm fucking drowning out here!"

I walked over to the roaring fireplace and picked up the little black puppethead from off the mantel. The key to the building was still wedged firmly in its smiling mouth. It seemed it was the only secure thing I had in the world these days. The puppethead had been lost, but now it was found, and it held the key, I felt, to my last remaining chance for happiness in life. If you're happy, of course, this probably won't make much sense to you. If you're not, you probably already realize how the world turns on a dime. Or a key. Or a memory.

I opened the window a little further and threw poor Yorick out into the cold curtain of rain. Somewhere below that curtain stood either Ratso or an extremely articulate blue-buttocked tropical loon. Moments later al…