Pelikan

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Acclaimed author David Lozell Martin returns to the forefront of the crime field with his strongest novel since Cul-de-Sac. Here, he gives us the wonderfully bizarre PELIKAN, a mixture of humor and vice that is also a literary feast of eccentric characterization and a twining of illicit events that's bound to delight the reader and hold his attention to the final outlandish scene.

Thirty-something Charlie Curtis is summoned to his estranged father's deathbed and sent on one final "assignment" for his brazen old man: track down Charlie's uncle James Joseph, better known in New Orleans's French Quarter as Pelikan. Pelikan is a savvy hustler infamous for his outrageous schemes, philosophies, felonious activities, and his even more unusual troupe of street-folk followers. He is beloved by most but reviled by a few of the nastier denizens of the Quarter. Charlie, who during his teen years was raised by Pelikan amidst the bars, whores, and misdeeds of New Orleans, hasn't visited his uncle or the city since Pelikan stole the love of Charlie's life, Amanda, over a decade ago. Despite the time that's gone by, Charlie still harbors pain and resentment, but follows out his dying father's wishes.

Charlie has barely arrived in New Orleans when he witnesses the murder of one of Pelikan's cronies, Three Jacks on the Floor, committed by a naked woman who disappears beneath the waters of a dyed-green pool. Knowing he'll immediately be suspected, Charlie flees and tries to bury himself among the mayhem of the French Quarter, but it takes no time at all before former friend and police detective, Mean Gene Renfrone, shows up. Gene may or may not be working with Pelikan's nemesis Gallier, a one time accomplice who is now at odds with Pelikan over an upcoming heist that involves an ancient religious relic. Somebody has set Charlie up, but is it the roguish Pelikan who is about to betray his own blood, or the high-mannered Gallier who seeks to reclaim his lost inheritance of treasured paintings?

Written in alternating chapters, from Charlie's first-person account and an omniscient point of view, David Lozell Martin takes the reader on a journey that no single narrative voice could completely convey. In the character of Pelikan, Martin has skillfully captured the intensity and vast contradictions of a city known for its beauty, history, corruption, and depraved excesses. Pelikan is the living embodiment of a culture founded on piracy, refinement, and dishonorable family tradition.

Martin makes the microcosm of the French Quarter come to life while skirting all the clichéd pitfalls a place like New Orleans offers. You'll find no Cajun lingo, crawfish, or Anne Rice vampire wannabes here, but you will discover a unique mixture of uncommonly off-center characters, including nuns with guns, heartbroken clowns, a swamp dweller known as "Papa Gator" who makes peculiar use of snapping turtles, and plenty of thieves of every stripe.

Only the proficient David Lozell Martin could convincingly make use of the urban myth of a traveling salesman whose kidney is removed and harvested in a hotel room -- and utilize the heinous legend to benefit the unusual story line. The street grittiness of prostitution and street hustle crime is balanced with so much tenderness, poignant family bonding, and outrageous humor that the reader will be touched by flashes of whimsy even while horrified by the slow unveiling of grotesque circumstances. Pelikan is a rare and thrilling experience as intoxicating and breathtaking as the French Quarter itself.

--Tom Piccirilli

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A comic romp through the dark underbelly of New Orleans in Martin's latest (after Tap Tap) begins when protagonist Charlie Curtis is instructed by his dying father to check up on the "Pelikan," the French Quarter's notorious criminal kingpin who is also Charlie's uncle. Charlie's journey quickly turns him into a murder suspect when an "associate" of his uncle is murdered by a naked, tattooed young blonde who disappears from the crime scene, leaving Charlie literally holding the smoking gun. Charlie is quickly picked up and worked over by a strange police detective named Mean Gene Renfrone, who is actually working for one of the Pelikan's rivals, Philippe Gallier, a corrupt Creole, in an ongoing local underworld war. When the police put the squeeze on Charlie in the murder investigation, the Pelikan hires an attorney for him who turns out to be Amanda, the old flame Charlie never forgot, who jilted him 12 years ago to become the Pelikan's lover. As Charlie is bounced back and forth between the Pelikan, Gallier and the police, he learns that a pivotal element in the ongoing battle is a massive heist the Pelikan has planned at a New Orleans repository, a robbery that takes place sooner than expected, rescheduled to coincide with the convenient appearance of a hurricane that will keep police occupied elsewhere. The various story lines are mostly a setup for Lozell's humorous take on a bizarre New Orleans, where women wear fishhooks through their lower lips to discourage blow jobs and a rat eats out of a young punk's mouth. Though startling and fresh at first, the shocks dazzle less as the novel progresses and the plot loses steam, fizzling out entirely during an unsatisfying, anticlimactic final robbery scene. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Martin's many fans, accustomed to the bizarre characters, black humor, and absurd events in his recent novels e.g., Cul-de-Sac, will find he has outdone himself here. Summoned to New Orleans to help his uncle James Joseph Pelikan, a hapless Charlie Curtis finds himself enmeshed in a plot to burglarize a repository to recover a relic sacred to an order of nuns. At the same time, he must dodge a murder rap, a mysterious doctor, a sociopathic cop, and numerous clowns, hookers, and other low-lifes of the French Quarter. This comic thriller is the ninth book by a gifted writer with an eye, and an ear, for the unusual. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/99.]--Roland C. Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A deranged gumbo of a thriller that showcases the nasty-comic side of the versatile Martin, known for such creepy suspense tales as Tap Tap and Bring Me Children, as well as mainstream literary fiction (The Crying Heart Tattoo, The Beginning of Sorrow). The story's narrated, after a fashion, by 30ish Charlie Curtis, a dealer in "collectibles" who's sent to New Orleans by his dying father to locate Charlie's uncle James Joseph Pelikan, a nefarious crimelord who committed the further impropriety of stealing the (older) woman callow young Charlie loved, in the days when his uncle had raised him, among the Queen City's inviting saloons and whorehouses. Back in "New Awlins," Charlie rapidly disappears into the city's mean and humid underground, having unfortunately witnessed a murder committed by a naked, hairless woman—for which act he'll become the prime suspect (a setup arranged by Uncle J.J., as a means of involving Charlie in the complex heist he's planning). All pretense of sequential narrative and common sense is blithely abandoned, as Martin—writing in a farcical tough-guy vein that evokes Carl Hiassen and Elmore Leonard as much as Hammett and Chandler—populates his tale with a raffish parade of broadly drawn grotesques: in addition to the essentially opaque Pelikan ("a strange combination of vulnerability and mayhem,"one of his many women assures us), there are: a "nonpracticing" physician who, "urban myth" has it, illicitly harvests organs from living victims; a pair of 300-pound Bulgarian nuns; a street clown named Sad Bob; and a good-natured hooker, Diane "Knees" O'Rourke, whose artful performances echo this aggressively blue novel's increasingly tiresomepreoccupation with oral sex. The finale, which occurs during a dying hurricane and involves a really mean snapping turtle, is even more discordant and lax than all the garish hoo-hah that preceded it. Martin seems to be having a good time, but readers may not. This writer can do a lot better than Pelikan.