The Runniest Yoke In a Hard-Boiled Field

In one way, Kinky Friedman’s mystery novels are unlike anybody else’s--witty parodies of the genre in which we’re always a little surprised that characters do get kidnapped or murdered and that Kinky Friedman (the author’s detective alter ego) is able to solve the case. He’s a humanist, an animal lover, given to bawdy wisecracks and poetic musings--the runniest yolk in a hard-boiled field.

As a series, however, the Friedman mysteries--15 of them now--bank on being cozily familiar. Just as the reader of a new Sherlock Holmes story used to anticipate the violin playing and cocaine, Dr. Watson’s earnest denseness and Holmes’ cry of “The game’s afoot!,” so Kinky’s readers depend on having midnight called “Cinderella time,” noon “Gary Cooper time” and hanging up the phone “cradling the blower.” They await the sex jokes, the thunder of the lesbian dance class overhead on Vandam Street in Greenwich Village, the existential laments that Kinky addresses to his cat, who never replies.

Fans may be relieved that spoiled, beautiful Stephanie, who played a major role in the last Friedman mystery, “Steppin’ on a Rainbow,” is absent from “Meanwhile Back at the Ranch.” Her sexual put-downs of Kinky were more unpleasant than funny. But otherwise, the new novel follows the common script. The detective is amply supplied with cigars, espresso, Irish whiskey and rue, and other Village Irregulars help out: McGovern, Ratso and, most important, P.I. Steve Rambam, trained as both a rabbi and a cop.

Kinky is juggling two cases at once. Well, actually three, but the third is merely a prop that allows Rambam to code-name them Moe, Larry and Curly, after the Three Stooges. And this, in turn, allows Friedman to confide the sort of faux arcana that give his novels their loopy charm: “Most people today don’t know this, but all four of them [including Shemp] were Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn. Their real name was the Fine Brothers and they were all general building contractors.... It’s still a very prestigious thing in Brooklyn to live in a Three Stooges-built home.”

In New York, Kinky is asked to find a 10-year-old autistic boy, Dylan Weinberg, who has vanished. Dylan is a stock-market wizard but can utter only one word: “Shnay.” Meanwhile, back at the ranch of the title--the Utopia Rescue Ranch for animals in the Texas Hill Country, run by Kinky’s Cousin Nancy (no relation) and apparently a real place--the mascot and guiding spirit, a three-legged cat named Lucky, is likewise missing.

Kinky lets Rambam look for Dylan while he high-tails it to Texas to soothe Nancy, who is convinced, thanks to late-night radio talk shows, that anyone from neo-Nazis to space aliens might have had it in for Lucky. It seems to be a hopeless search. As Kinky tells Ratso, “It’s hard to find a little cat in a big state.” Rambam, whose rabbinical education has given him “an extremely well-developed sense of right and wrong, which occasionally he wielded like a hammer,” is outraged that Kinky considers a missing cat as important as a missing kid.

On the other hand, Rambam’s growing involvement with Dylan’s sexy older sister, Julia, leads Kinky to fear that Rambam isn’t concentrating on the case. She “may be my future ex-wife,” Rambam says. “[A]ll I have to do is find out if she likes to be spanked.”

Despite its brevity, a Friedman novel devotes the first half of its pages to touching all the familiar bases, setting the scene and persuading us that a) the mystery can’t be solved and b) Kinky is the last person on Earth who could solve it. Then, in an offhand way, he makes the necessary deductions. The answers seem to arise in spite of him, almost involuntarily, like hiccups.

This has never been more true than in “Meanwhile Back at the Ranch,” in which the story is so secondary to the atmospherics that it’s hard not to wonder whether Friedman’s inspiration is running thin.

The climax, such as it is, leads Kinky and Rambam from a Manhattan murder site to an orphanage in Schenectady, N.Y., which is Dickensian indeed, if not in the way we expect.