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Fender Benders

Name: Fender Benders
Author: Bill Fitzhugh
ISBN: 9780380977574

by Bill Fitzhugh

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Overview

"Depending on your point of view, Fender Benders is either a skewed look at the country music industry or a clear-eyed view of a damn screwy business. It's a Grand Old Opera complete with murder, treachery, greed, drugs, twangy music, a love triangle, and the best fried swimps you'll ever put in your mouth." "First off, some folks down South have taken to dropping like flies. One minute they have a headache, the next they have a date at the funeral home. Seems some lunatic is tampering with boxes of headache powder, lacing them with sodium fluoroacetate. It's a nasty death, but at least it's quick, and it makes you forget you had a headache." "Second off, Eddie Long wants to move to Nashville and become a country music star, but right now he's stuck in Hinchcliff, Mississippi. Eddie's big break comes with a contract to tour the Mississippi casino circuit. While he's on the road, his wife dies, the victim of an apparent serial killer. The emotional turmoil of his wife's death causes Eddie to write the best song of his life. He takes it to Nashville, hooks up with a hoary management company, and launches his career." "Meanwhile, Jimmy Rogers is a freelance writer covering the Mississippi music scene. He loves writing and a girl named Megan. Jimmy decides early on that he is going to write Eddie's biography. But as he's researching Eddie's wife's murder, Jimmy comes to a surprising conclusion. He can't prove it, but publishing it might make his own career." "Megan is a smart, talented, and popular radio personality in a tiny market. But she wants a faster way to Easy Street. So she turns to Eddie In Nashville." Before it's all over, everybody's planning to make a killing one way or another - including the kind that has nothing to do with money. But, as frequently happens on Music Row, things don't always turn out as planned.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Fitzhugh (Cross Dressing; Pest Control) moves into Clyde Edgerton and Barry Hannah territory and acquits himself with aplomb in this witty romp through the country music industry. Aspiring country music star Eddie Long has served a hard apprenticeship in honky-tonks across the South, and just as he gets a promising gig in a Mississippi casino, his young wife dies under mysterious circumstances. The cause is actually food poisoning, but before the police get there her lover tries to make it look like a suicide, while her father tries to pass it off as murder. In his grief, Eddie writes a magnificent country song, "It Wasn't Supposed to End That Way," that tops the charts and makes him a superstar. He involuntarily becomes embroiled in the seamy side of the music business, associating with rapacious agents, producers, DJs and a carnivorous groupie, Megan, who avariciously eyes Eddie's millions while plying him with drugs. A would-be biographer named Jimmy Rogers, who is also the jealous, discarded boyfriend of the greedy groupie, takes the advice of an unscrupulous literary agent and writes an unauthorized biography, which hints that Eddie had something to do with his wife's death and might even be a serial killer. The action and punch lines come at a furious pace, and Fitzhugh tosses in references to Nashville and Bob Roberts, two of the best country music movies. All in all, this is sharp, sassy, read-in-one-sitting, laugh-out-loud literature. (Dec. 1) Forecast: Movie rights for Pest Control and Cross Dressing have been sold to Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures respectively. If a movie ever results, Fitzhugh's stock will instantly rise, but even if it doesn't, he should collect a fewmore readers with each hilarious outing. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Good songs, a great smile, and a fabulous p.r. campaign put a hard-working country singer on the top of the Nashville charts, easing the pain of his late wife's departure. Fitzhugh (Cross Dressing, 2001, etc.) applies his school-of-Carl-Hiaasen technique to the capital of country music, dragging in enough characters to fill the stage at the Ryman Auditorium. Handsome young Eddie Long has been working the dives and frat parties at the bottom levels of the country-music food chain long enough to cultivate a real good stage presence and some not bad songs, and he's itching to move up in the world. His purty young wife Tammy, daughter of the local Dollar Store owner, itched for something else while Eddie was singing out of town, but she's dead now, the latest victim in a string of adulterated headache-powder deaths. Eddie turns his widower's grief into a whale of a song that gets him an audience with Big Bill Herron and Franklin Peavy, a couple of downwardly mobile music producers who set their mutual loathing aside for what looks to be a boy with a future. They've met their match, though. Eddie's not only talented, but he can read a contract. And he has his own ideas about how to turn that real sad song into a chart buster using the power of the Internet. Watching and chronicling Eddie's moves is his Boswell, freelance music reviewer Jimmy Rogers, who will lose his Country deejay girlfriend Megan to Eddie as Eddie's self-designed, Internet-based publicity campaign takes him to the top of the charts. Heartbroken and pretty damned bitter about being dumped, Jimmy starts turning Eddie's biography into a police procedural, checking into that awfully convenient removal of Tammy from the careerpath. Singing backup in this Music City Saga are Otis and Estella, shrimp restaurateurs with big grudges against Big Bill, talented but totally un-savvy singer Whitney Rankin and his long-lost daddy, and a few law enforcement types. Fitfully funny send-up of sitting ducks.