If you feel you are trapped in a nightmare, may I suggest a little literary escapism? Something with a finely honed sense of the absurd, a far-flung setting, flashes of mayhem, and characters drawn with a rainbow of Sharpies? Then you might want to try Lou Berney’s Double Barrel Bluff, the third book in his Shake Bouchon series. Berney is a descendant of Elmore Leonard, but his sensibility and deadpan style are all his own.
Berney’s hero, Charles “Shake” Bouchon, is a former driver for the Armenian Mob in Southern California who’s gone straight after doing prison time. He’s happily settled down with his new wife in Bloomington, Indiana, where he’s put his automotive skills to good use teaching college kids how to drive.
But the brakes get slammed on this idyll when Shake is visited by a fearsome but dim-witted Armenian gangster named Dikran. Alexandra Ilandryan, the Mob’s powerful boss, has gone missing during a vacation in Cambodia, and Dikran, aware of his limitations, wants Shake to help him find her.
Saying no to the intimidating thug isn’t an option, so Shake joins him on a flight to Siem Reap. It doesn’t take them long to learn that Alexandra’s been kidnapped. Her abductors are another mismatched duo, a former English professor and a taciturn ex-con, who’ve been mistakenly tipped off that she’s just another wealthy tourist ripe for the picking. Oops. The underworlds of Siem Reap and Los Angeles collide in a constantly evolving stream of desperate improvisations and double crosses as all the players scramble to manage the disastrous situation.
The supporting cast includes a New Age–y Cambodian girl who can read auras like a map, and Bjorn, a half-Swedish criminal goofball who bops around slinging slang salads such as “Sup-sup, soul brothers? Are you ready to bring this biznuts home? We’re finna bring home the cheddar!”
Surrounded by characters like these, Shake is a beacon of sanity. But fortunately for the reader, he won’t be able to escape his past and the colorful trouble that goes with it anytime soon.
Lou Berney is a descendant of Elmore Leonard, but his sensibility and deadpan style in Double Barrel Bluff are all his own.
Berney shares an anything-goes attitude with the creators of the German crime comedy Where’s Wanda?, also about the disappearance of a feisty woman, though Wanda Klatt (Lea Drinda) is half Alexandra’s age. The German town where Wanda’s family lives isn’t as exotic as Siem Reap, but it has its own folk traditions and possibly even odder characters.
When teenage Wanda, looking like Little Red Riding Hood with her red scooter and matching cape, disappears on Nuppelwocken Night (an annual festival celebrating a horned monster), the local police are in over their heads, and her family becomes desperate as the days tick by.
After her mother, Carlotta (Heike Makatsch), has a magnificent meltdown during a cheesy televised appeal for information, she and her husband, Dedo (Axel Stein), take matters into their own amateurish hands and eventually hit on the idea of bugging every home in the town for clues. In their basement, converted to what looks like C.I.A. headquarters, with a roomful of monitors, Carlotta and Dedo witness some spicy goings-on in their neighbors’ homes that are unrelated to their daughter’s whereabouts but are useful comic relief.
As their investigation founders, Carlotta and Dedo’s relationship frays, but both get closer to their hearing-impaired son, whose obsessive gaming and tech savvy turn out to be a plus.
Be warned that Where’s Wanda? sometimes skirts the edge of hysteria and has an over-the-top look, from its tacky amalgam of suburban houses to the color-coordinated costume design, to its invented folklore, with a giant statue of the Nuppelwocken looming over the town.
It subverts the conventions of the ultra-somber “taken girl” genre to create something different that’s more a farcical exploration of the queasy underbelly of suburban life. It’s propelled by Makatsch’s wonderfully expressive performance, which has just the right amount of comic verve and energy, with the hapless Stein as her perfect foil. Like Wanda, Carlotta’s a doer, not a wallower—and she never gives up.
The German crime comedy Where’s Wanda? subverts the conventions of the ultra-somber “taken girl” genre.
Back in the real world, or something like it, is The Confidante, a French series inspired by the true story of a woman who exploited survivors of the Bataclan terrorist attacks, in Paris in 2015, by worming her way into a grief support group and falsely claiming financial benefits as a victim.
The fictional Christelle Blandin (there’s a disclaimer about her identity at the beginning) is an aging, unemployed rock chick who still lives with her mother. Following an abortive date on the night of the massacre, she gets swept up in a crowd of people running from the slaughter at the Bataclan.
She senses an opportunity and befriends a group of traumatized survivors, claiming to be close friends with an injured victim called Vincent. (Sneaking around in the hospital, Chris spots a conveniently comatose Bataclan casualty and makes him a stand-in for Vincent when questions arise.) From there, she becomes a stalwart of the group, empathizing with members, organizing events, and fighting the government for compensation.
Except she’s a convicted fraudster and a liar, as we learn when her mother kicks her out of the house after finding evidence of her daughter’s exploitation of the disaster. It would be easy to make Chris despicable, yet the writers maintain an intriguing level of ambiguity about their anti-heroine. We know she’s up to something right off when she stiffs a taxi driver for an expensive ride, and yet, as played by the ideally cast Laure Calamy (the frisky assistant Noémie in Call My Agent!), she’s not the cynical taker you’d expect. She’s bubbly, impulsive, and a little flashy, with her sparkly bomber jackets and tall tales about rock stars. It’s hard to believe this breathless fount of enthusiasm has a calculating bone in her body—which is her secret weapon because she definitely does.
The survivors want to believe in the kindness of others after experiencing the worst humanity has to offer, making Chris’s betrayal doubly cruel. But the show asks us to consider the possibility that her scam is as much about her pathological need for belonging as it is about the money, that she’s more to be pitied than censured. For her victims, that may be too big an ask.
Note: I’d like to make a special plea to everyone not to watch the dubbed versions of these shows. Watching actors’ lips move out of sync with the audio is distancing and artificial. I grew up watching swords-and-sandals epics dubbed from the original language and have found dubbing ridiculous ever since. An actor’s voice is one of their most precious tools, and it should be heard as intended, along with the language they’re speaking.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books for Air Mail. She lives in New York City
