Kaleidoscope

by Darryl Wimberley

Jack Romaine's addiction to speakeasles and cards has landed him in a tight spot - one which he can't use his good looks to get out of. With debts to dangerous men piling up, he becomes an unwilling... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592642446
• ISBN13: 9781592642441
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Toby Press
• Length: 267 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

A Richly Disturbing Mystery

Darryl Wimberley is the rare author who can tell just about any story from the point of view of the most-or least- interesting character in the story. (I've heard him perform that very stunt, and it's mesmerizing.) Even if he weren't a friend of very long standing, I would stand in line to buy his novels. His protagonist in this book is removed in time and place from his earlier novels, but is as flawed and as human as any in modern fiction. Here is a widowed war veteran, wounded in spirit, who is trying to raise his son as best he can in the Midwest in the Roaring 20s, who runs afoul of a local gangster and is forced to solve a mysterious runaway while avoiding a truly monstrous character who would make Cormac McCarthy's Anton Chigurgh tremble. Darryl's talent is to take this era, this place, and enable us to see it through his characters' eyes, feel it through their emotions, and discover its riches through our own emotions. Since this is a mystery, I wish only to tantalize you enough to pick it up and read the first few paragraphs, because I know that you will continue to read with a growing delight and urgency, and each word will continue to weave the web until you can no longer keep your eyes open but must finish one more paragraph, then another. Finally, the last page is turned, and you understand that you have been granted an audience with a master, and you don't want it to ever end.

A novel in the league of classic film noir

Kaleidoscope by Darryl Wimberley is great film noir genre, and as I read it, I kept saying to myself, "This would make a great film script!" And indeed, Kaleidoscope was originally written as an award-winning film script. The story begins in 1929 Cincinnati and moves to the fictional community of Kaleidoscope, Florida, a winter base for a carnival freak show. Our antihero is one Jack Romaine, a dissipated, slightly alcoholic World War I veteran who is (to use a 1920s expression) on the lam from his gambling debts to the Chicago mob. As might be expected, his troubles keep multiplying until he finds himself forced by the Cincinnati mob into playing the private eye rôle of tracking down missing mob money. His leads bring him to central Florida where he meets up with a truly bizarre crowd of carnival freaks. It is here that Jack Romaine, a physically normal person, becomes the bizarre standout amongst the community of Siamese twins, fat ladies, dwarfs, alligator men, blue-skinned women, and you-name-its. And yes, such curios of nature as within this close-knit community of freaks did and do exist. Kaleidoscope leaves you with the realization that these freaks after all possess the basic human qualities of love, loyalty, revenge, despair, greed, and altruism as the rest of us. This is the world of the carneys who have their own special dialect and their own unofficial code of ethics. This book has plenty of good guys and bad guys, only -- as with any decent mystery -- Wimberley keeps us guessing who is on which side right to the end. Guessing, that is, except for one evil character named Arno Becker, a sadist every bit as lacking in conscience as Javier Bardem's chilling portrayal of a psychopath in the recent film No Country for Old Men. What makes Kaleidoscope even more intriguing is the way Wimberley has painted his word pictures of the era. He has laboriously researched the local history, the clothing, the landscape, the buildings, the dialogue, the habits, and even the smells of that generation. It's evident the author has visited the geographical settings of his novel. For example, the book gave me flashbacks to my own familiarity with the 1950s Cincinnati street cars, hills, and peddlers' pushcarts. (This detailed attention to historical accuracy is a nice touch which I always admired in Louis L'Amour's novels.) As for his characters' dialogues, I noted Wimberley avoids the universal Americanism "OK," for as late as the 1920s that slang term had not yet come into common usage. His characters are copasetic. (Look that one up in The Dictionary of American Slang.) Everybody cusses. Everybody sweats. Everybody smokes. (Chesterfield, anyone?) Kaleidoscope's plot is never boring. In the tradition of classic film noir, Wimberley serves up a plentiful diet of cigarettes, gin, passion, and knuckle-sandwiches. And it all climaxes with a few twists-within-twists. Naturally, I wouldn't want to spoil the ending for you.