Vindaloo Vroom Vroom

5 million pounds. That's a whole lotta loot for anyone, let alone a low-slung slacker who's soft on dreams, short of opportunity, high on hash and - alas - hopelessly broke. But that's just what ne'er-do-much Josh King stands to inherit.

If he writes a book within the next 5 years.

If that book becomes a bestseller.

And if - & only if - said book stars dear dead Dad.

Really.

Paperback OriginalThus sets the premise of bright new (Union) jack William Rhode's catchy-cool Paperback Original (Riverhead Trade $14), a hardcase soft cover somewhat demurely billed as "a novel about writing a novel." Yeah Dad's dead, alright - euphoric suicide - but his lustful death - a river-drive-in of Viagra, E & speed - in no way diminished his lust for an afterlife here on earth. Before buckling-up and imbibing for that big drive to the sky, Pops willed his immortality to his shiftless, number-one-and-only son; the cash flash meant to light a fire under one very prodigal ass.

5 million flickers for being.

Josh could be your standard-bearer twentysomething lookin' for action and enlightenment, a poster boy for the paucity of advantage - wayward, desultory, itchy, a kinda kindling in need of a good spark. That he continually ditches the cold, dead-ends of merry middle class England in order to find himself in the white hot Indian subcontinent serves to heat-up the cliché. That he knows what he wants or seeks yet is in a place and a position to get both brings it - and him - to a matchless boil.

But this is the kinda cat that'd rather sleep through the heat, especially when it threatens to get oppressive, and for the most part it's all snooze and lose. Until, that is, a cool drink of water named Yasmin splashes him into consciousness. Seems there's a raid goin' on at The Green (Guesthouse) - that low-rent Delhi travelers' center of narco-swinging where Josh has wittingly unmade his bed - and the fuzz have taken away the good girl's big bad boyfriend. The fair maiden needs a place to hide; the struck stooge has no choice but to comply. And why not? There's nothin' like a soon-to-be single damsel in distress to get a flaky fella movin'.

And move he does. In a completely uncharacteristic display of mock-shock bravado - slightly soiled by a bit of pants wetting - Josh fast talks his - and her - way outta the cops' impending clinch and kicks off the life he's been lookin' for all along. That is, one with a hot chick in the lead. And so what if he's gotta write the script as he goes along; at least he'll be writing.

Yasmin, of course, is a more prescient penwoman, meaning she's got an uncanny knack for casting out the lines that Josh reels in to call his own. A liberal sprinkling of "we" and "us" further ensures that Josh loses his head over her high heels. Three hot winks and a manipulative kiss later, Josh is convinced the only way to get their asses outta the morass is to track down and swindle a man named Baba, the elusive enigma of the Indian drug underworld.

It's a plan fetched from the farthest imaginings - quick-switching money, jewels, and drugs with mobsters on the Paki/Indian border - and it'll take more than a little peg-legwork. Yasmin returns to her Dutch second-homeland to brush-up on gemology and secure a cache of counterfeit currency and fake diamonds, while Josh hits the high life of Bollywood, where a childhood friend (Sanjay, nee Quentin) promises to put him on to the scene's major player - the reductively large Faizad, who either is, knows, or can get to Baba.

Faizad, Bombay's most scenic powder pusher, takes a perverse if inexplicable pleasure in welcoming this hapless representative of a former colonial power and quickly finds for him a place in his lounge act. What a player sees in the would-be, wanna-be, gotta-be hero is everyone's guess. Perhaps it's the "L" on his forehead, the strange courage of his self-pity, the slouch to his gaze, or the sad-sap lie of a Hindu Week disguise. Whatever it is, Josh becomes the man's main man - and only so-called friend. So good does Josh get at the hustler's own hustle, that he soon rates an audience with his mentor's ultra-paranoid partner, Ajay, a high-risen lowlife media celeb of dubious stability. The meeting goes unwell, someone gets dead, the standing start running - fast- then things really pick-up speed.

Snap! The bloodbath in Bombay. Snap! The eunuch bed-sit hideout. Snap! The stares and squares and vicious circles of the shanty towns. Snap! The low rumble of a rural wasteland. Snap! The brainstem at an endless railroad crossing. Snap! A showdown at Jaisalmer. (A showdown worthy of early John Woo.) Ricochet, rat-a-tat-tat, reflex and roil roll into a spicy reel of vindaloo vroom vroom.

In fact the whole of Paperback Original reads like a kinda mad motion picture book of fast forward dimension. Think Snatch as a dime store spiritual quest. ("You must know fiction's all about film rights these days.") But seeing one's characters live and breathe and think and die is a gift not a theft; being able to vividly - heatedly - describe their life and breath and thought and death is a blessing not a curse. Rhode never for one split second lets his 21st Century screen frenzy get in the way of the telling of the tall tale. With the whip-smart Swiftiness of a Gulliver in Bollywood, Rhode cleanly, keenly, deftly narrates a way through a pageantry of hallucination and delusion and cleverly comes-up with one tactile read. There's sweat here, and humor and pathos; more, there's the story, the story of a life foretold, in a beautiful blindside. In other words, a hard-boiled egghead full of head-on you never see coming and can't wait to get. Got it?

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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