George Baxt: A Parade of Cockeyed Creatures (USA 1986)

From the Publisher:
"It is hard to realize that only a year and a half ago fanciers of crime fiction never heard of George Baxt. In that brief time, he has published three novels, and become the very paradigm by which one measures that far-out reach of other novelists of the grotesque, the macabre, the absurd in crime... Here's a surprising switch in his third [novel]. It turns out that Mr. Baxt also loves people.

"One cannot fault him for inconsistency. I do not see how one can contemplate oneself and one's brothers without feeling both Swiftian rage and Saroyanesque affection. But it is surprising when Swift shifts into the voice of Saroyan. Certainly those who were revolted by early Baxt should try this new one. They will find the same unpredictably absurd invention, the same brilliant techniques in dialogue and narrative (plus some virtuouso cross-cutting), this time devoted to a warm and loving portrayal of people in all their improbable variety... If you have never suspected that the crime novel of the absurd could have charm, try this one."
Anthony Boucher, New York Times Book Review, September 24, 1967

George Baxt: A Parade of Cockeyed Creatures. Or, did someone murder our wandering boy? International Polygonics, ISBN: 0930330471 (December, 1986), 209 p., $4.95 (?).

George Baxt: A Parade of Cockeyed Creatures (UK 1968)

From the Publisher:
When Tippy Blaney, a seventeen-year-old with a taste for figurines and cranky company, disappears, his parents -- uncaring as they are -- call on Missing Persons in the shape of hand-some, cultured Detective Max Van Larsen to locate their wandering boy. Max, newly bereaved of unmourned wife and son, finds in his search for the youth the new emotion of love.

Is Tippy thief or poet, darling or delinquent, alive or dead? Max sorts through a circus of characters as bent and varied as a box of assorted screws to find the answers. There's Tippy's secretive seamstress godmother, highly strung and Christian Scientist; a teenage necrophile (the Prince of Darkness, or Whatsisname) ; the magnificent Madame Vilna, former star of the Yiddish Theatre; a ferrety sculptor with the Lolita syndrome; and, of course, henna'd homely Sylvia Plotkin, the schoolmistress who melts the icicle heart of Detective Van Larsen.

In this novel, as in the wickedly funny A Queer Kind of Death, the humour is elegantly bitchy and the thrills are of the kinky kind, George Baxt's parade of cockeyed creatures leads detective and reader on a mystery tour of the sicker suburbs of society which ends in revela- tion at a bacchanalian fiesta of freak- outs, free love and folk-song protest in Greenwich Village.

George Baxt: A Parade of Cockeyed Creatures. Or did someone murder our wandering boy? London: Jonathan Cape, 1968, 209 p., £?.??.