My W Author

Everybody's Favorite Duck by Gahan Wilson

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


"The celebrated cartoonist/comic novelist Gahan Wilson presents a thundering and uproarious adventure -- with literature's nastiest bad guys and most heroic good guys battling to the death in today's New York."

"When the Professor (the fiendishly brilliant British Napoleon of Crime), the Mandarin (the cruelly diabolical Chinest mastermind), and Spectrobert (the blackheartedly crafty French rogue) are spotted lunching together at Manhattan's posh Le Rond-Point, the police department is baffled, the FBI is bewildered, the CIA is entirely up a tree. What deviltry are they plotting? Whose fate hangs in the balance? How can the forces of justice stymie their plans? Above all, what is their connection with famed cartoonist Art Waldo's universally adored creation, Quacky the Lucky Duck?

"Aid to the Force of Good comes in the form of the formidably brilliant Enoch Bone (who bears more than a passing resemblance to one of fiction's greatest sleuths) and his irrepressibly hard-boiled sidekick John Weston (ditto). But the wily villains do not underestimate their opponents: Bone and Weston are in short order subjected to Spectrobert's demonically booby-trapped kitchen, the Mandarin's mutation-laden torture tunnels, and the Professor's Flying Purple Cloud of Destruction.

"Will the combination of Bone's laser-sharp mind and Weston's quick trigger-finger be enough to undo the evil-doers? A breathtakingly riotous climax at New Jersey theme part Waldo World holds the answer."
~~front & back flaps

What a great title! I got the book because that title promised great things. Unfortunately, for me, the book never managed to achieve the stature promised by the title.

I got it that the main characters were all spoofs of famous detectives or famous villains. The Professor was easy to figure out, but I never managed to identify the other two. I don't read that sort of mystery, and so I missed the clever puns, the charming allusions to other stories, other triumphs, etc. Lacking those resonances, the whole thing was unutterably disjointed, nonsensical, and not very entertaining. With the one exception of when someone (inevitably) asked "Where's Waldo?"