Celestial Dogs by Jay Russell

[cromagnonman]

No one can ever accuse Cromagnonman of having his finger on the pulse of popular culture. (Case in point: if anyone is able to advise him just what it is that this Taylor Swift person actually does to justify her permanent residence in his daily newspaper he'd greatly appreciate it).

Its not that I'm allergic or anything to whatever is hot or current but what with there being just so many old books to read, and so many dead neglected authors to discover, I just can't be asked to scrutinise what's new as well.

This being the case, for me to read a book like CELESTIAL DOGS, which as well as being a mere twenty years old has an author who can still be counted amongst the living, is tantamount to plucking a book off the recently published shelf down at the local Waterstones.

I only discovered ex-pat American author Jay Russell and his cynical PI character Marty Burns (are fictional PIs ever anything other than cynical?) very recently when I picked up the paperback reissue of Steve Jones's DARK DETECTIVES. I've owned up previously to a fondness for psychic detective fiction and bought this ostensibly to complete my RCH Fred & Francis collection. But I found myself quite taken with the Russell story it contains and intrigued enough by SJ's customarily informative introduction to go to the effort of tracking down two of the three Marty Burns novels.

The first of these books, CELESTIAL DOGS, turned out to be an unstable alloy of PI fiction and Japanese fantasy. Think The Rockford Files as directed by Kurosawa.

It begins fantastically well with a terrific battle between demons and samurai in medieval Japan. Even as the demon lord Shuten Doji is dispatched back to the netherworld from which he came I found myself thinking that I could quite happily immerse myself in another 200 pages of so of this kind of thing. But then the action switches jarringly to 1990's Los Angeles and we are in a first person narrative delivered by the laconic Burns who, in a fit of scarcely credible sentimentality, allows himself to be hired by a loathesome pimp called Long John to find a missing hooker. Burns never succeeds in acquiting himself as a particularly capable detective. All he ever manages to accomplish is to reinforce the impression of himself as an alcoholic slob. The crawl along the rotten underbelly of LA, with the attendant compliment of violence, sleeze and gruesome murder symptomatic of such stories, does eventually lead him to a sub rosa production company called Celestial Dog and an apparant link between Hollywood mogul Jack Rippen and the shooting of snuff movies. Hopelessly out of his depth even at this level Burns is not equipped to appreciate that what he has really stumbled into is a conspiracy designed to summon the demon lord Shuten Doji back to earth.

In all honesty I can't say that I particularly enjoyed the book's wallowing in the cesspool of LA streetlife. What I did like though was Burns's candid reflections and reminiscences along the way upon his former life as a child star of 60s Hollywood when he found fleeting fame on a schmaltzy sitcom called Salt & Pepper. Russell recreates wonderfully well the sort of canned laughter half hour horror that those of us of a certain age remember from the morning tv schedules of half term holidays. Particularly amusing is his inability to escape the catchphrase which he was forced to utter every episode, "hot enough for you", which comes back to haunt him at increasingly inappropriate moments. This back story compensates somewhat for Burns's general ineptitude and paucity of laudable qualities.

The book only really captivates in its last eighty pages or so when it once again morphs into an overt fantasy and introduces a militant sect of Japanese demon fighters called the Kakure, lead by Pat Morita and Toshiro Mifune in all but name. Maybe I'm wrong but it seemed to me as if the majority of the characters in the book Russell had drawn from central casting. The book then culminates in the sort of bloodbath Tarantino would delight in orchestrating.

Its not a great book by any means. Burns is simply too inept a hero not to need the less than unobtrusive help of a benevolent author. There are also yawning plot holes, of which the most glaring is the discrepency and disparity between the 240 pages it needs to summon up Shuten Doji and the three pages necessary to conjure up his nemesis Shoki. But its certainly readable, is intermittently funny and its use of unconventional Japanese mythology never less than fascinating.

The next novel transplants the action to London and Liverpool. I can't say that this one has left me uninterested about seeing my own country through Burns's jaundiced eyes.       

[dem]

Twenty years! Never did get a copy, but I well remember Robinson gave Celestial Dogs the big push on its release. Your review has finally decided me to try track it down. If you've not already done so, you might like to give Stephen Jones' Psychomania a try for it's recent Marty Burns adventure.

[andydecker]

I bought this back then, put it on the shelf and never read it. Never knew there were sequels. Maybe it is just the L.A. setting, but this sounds a bit like a forerunner of those urban fantasies like Sandman Slim by Kadrey and other hell is L.A. novels, which became so popular in countless paranormal romances.

[cromagnonman]

Oct 19, 2016 18:01:37 GMT dem said:

Twenty years! Never did get a copy, but I well remember Robinson gave Celestial Dogs the big push on its release. Your review has finally decided me to try track it down. If you've not already done so, you might like to give Stephen Jones' Psychomania a try for it's recent Marty Burns adventure.

Somehow I must have managed to miss all the hullabaloo when the book came out as both it and the author were previously unknown to me.

Thanks for sharing the publicity material which somehow manages to make the cover look more striking than it actually is. In reality its a piss poor effort which lends the impression that Burns has got a biro stuck up his nose.

I should say that even though it was the fantasy aspect of the novel that was far more in keeping with my taste than the PI procedural the Burns character seems far more suited to the latter than the former; however inept and shambolic a specimen of a private eye he might be. The third novel, GREED AND STUFF, contains no fantasy element apparantly and is instead concerned with the investigation of an old Hollywood scandal. I strongly suspect that it makes for a more successful and satisfying novel. I'll let you all know if I ever find a copy. It was the use of Hollywood mythology that was the main appeal for me of the DARK DETECTIVES story in the first place.