Reviews

Dead White Males

Patty Osborne

David Dennings, the narrator of Ann Diamond’s new novel, Dead White Males (Livres DC Books), is a wacky hairdresser much like the one I visit every couple of months. But whereas my stylist is a filmmaker, Diamond’s is trying to be a hard-boiled private detective, and he’s been hired by a troubled millionaire to track down a dead woman who is stalking him. Dennings has met his client, Nick Maggot, before. Ten years earlier Maggot visited Dennings’ salon for a wash and a blow-dry. “What was I back then?” Dennings muses. “Someone trained to hold a mirror to people’s faces and show them their best selves.” Fortunately Dennings has another talent: he was born with the gift of second sight. Which makes him the perfect detective to find the dead stalker. The reader also meets Professor Ned Bone of the creative writing department, whose memory is not what it should be due to “a surplus of pot in his pre-tenure days”; the wannabee literary critic Sergeant-Detective Gaston Plouffe; and a Haitian psychic who claims to have seen the missing dead woman getting into a car owned by Orville Goner, our greatest living poet. The plot moves quickly between Canada and South America and between reality and whatever else is out there, so that the only thing the reader can do is let go and be taken along, laughing all the way.

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